Your true self is your true nature and identity found at the deepest core of your being. Unlike your personality self or ego, your true self is not your conditioned personality self formed from childhood that you most commonly identify with because of its link with your physical body. Your true self is certainly not the roles, behaviour patterns, labels, or identities you create. And your true self is not the folk fiction of an ideal personality state that is creating some misinformation about the true self on the Internet. Your true self is very real, in fact the most real sense of self that is more fundamental to your identity than your makeshift personality self. Your true self can be thought of as your unconditioned self or your spiritual self.
In this post, I will share my insights on the true self and how it relates to your true nature, self-development, and authenticity, and will provide some tips for finding it. I encourage you to self-reflect, get clearer about your true identity, and to explore with enthusiasm the nature of your true self. By doing so, you can empower yourself to live with greater authenticity and fulfilment and release yourself from the disempowerment of automatised living, of limiting beliefs about your identity and potential, and of unconscious conformity to unfulfilling societal and cultural norms. The benefits of exploring and embracing your true self will extend not only to your personal wellbeing and fulfilment, but also to the world, which is deeply in need of the light of our liberated consciousness.
The True Self as Your Unconditioned Self
Your true self is your unconditioned self, meaning it hasn’t been formed and shaped in reaction to your environment and your patterns of thinking and behaving like your personality has. Prior to the formation of your conditioned personality self, you are just pure being. Your true self is not your thoughts and emotions and the patterns they form, or your reaction to them. Your true self is experienced as the centre of pure being that you can come back to in meditation when you disengage from the pull of your thoughts and emotions and focus on being.
When your personality starts to form in early life, it is new and highly impressionable. This can easily be seen with a young child. Over time, events and experiences shape and condition the child’s personality as it attempts to adjust and adapt to them. This highly formative time is the best time to begin integration with your true self, along with the practice of mindfulness, so that your personality is predominantly guided and shaped by the light of your true self and becomes a more rounded expression of it. But, without any integration with your true self, your personality forms in a largely reactive, adaptative way and becomes self-affirming. This is called conditioning and the self-affirming tendencies lead to what we think of as an ego self and its associated egocentricity bias, a form of self-preservation that can cause you to overestimate the accuracy of your limited and often distorted personality judgements and perceptions.
The True Self Can Reset Your Experience in the Best Way
Sometimes you can get too entangled in your thoughts and emotions or in your conditioned reality that you lose your true self. This is when you need to reset your experience. Coming back to the present moment with mindfulness helps to reset your experience in the moment, but being present in your true self while doing so is the ultimate reset because of the authenticity it brings.
Because your true self is free from conditioning, distortion, illusion, bias, reactivity, and ego-defence mechanisms, anchoring your presence there serves to keep you clear from these. From this clear state of presence, your true self can guide your authentic living so that you can embody your authentic values and live your authentic, true life purpose, while simultaneously disengaging from the inauthentic ways of living that cause you and others harm.
The Danger of Losing Your True Self
The danger of losing your true self is that you begin living a fake, illusory life. When you do this, you harm yourself and others for the following reasons:
- You repress your true self.
- You repress and neglect your true needs.
- You lose sight of your true life purpose and potential.
- You no longer shine the light of your spiritual self.
- You take on a reactive, conditioned life built upon your ego-defences, many of which can be maladaptive.
- You more easily adjust and conform to patterns of living that are dysfunctional and destructive.
- You become a negative role model for all of the above.
The above explains why so many people are stuck in addictions, compulsions, and distractions and why they are experiencing mental and physical health issues and are putting their lives in danger.
Adjusting and conforming to patterns of living that are dysfunctional and destructive is particularly dangerous. It harms your health and wellbeing and puts your life and the lives of others in danger. This adjustment and conformity is generally unconsciously motivated and produced by a largely unconscious ego-defence mechanism with an accompanying egocentricity bias and conformity bias that will blind you to the harm you are doing to yourself and others and cause you to live in denial. As studies in mindfulness show, even the most intelligent people lack mindfulness in this way. One of the reasons people adjust and conform in this way is for the payoff it brings in terms of living with a degree of comfort. Societal and cultural influences that encourage a limited or illusory perception of identity do not help either.
If you are in any doubt about what dysfunctional and destructive systems you might be conforming to, I’m referring to those that are responsible for the deaths of at least 37 million people in war since 1800, those that unleashed the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those that have resulted in at least 238,000 deaths in war in the year 2022 alone. And war is only one of the many destructive acts that are going on in such systems and are being justified with faulty, dehumanised, and destructive logic.
The True Self and the True Purpose of Life
Your true self came first. Your personality self has always been second to it, and is only really meant to serve as an interface between your true self and the physical world, with your mind serving as a means to integrate physical and spiritual awareness. The whole idea is to maintain contact with your true self and to integrate it into your personality self, so that your personality self grounds the light of your true self into material reality. My post Activating Your Light Body encapsulated this deep wisdom. The true purpose of life has always been about the realisation and expansion of truth in this way. It is how you master your spiritual lessons in life. Unfortunately, with a lack of mindfulness and spiritual awareness, it is so easy to become stuck in reactivity and the distortion of conditioned reality when your personality self forgets or does not know how to integrate with your true self.
The true purpose of life for everyone is to learn to master this integration of the true self with the personality self, and in the process to learn to release the conditioning and distortions of the ego that create limiting and maladaptive patterns, illusions, and suffering. The whole idea is to live with love, compassion, gratitude, and joy, and an expanded state of consciousness, but this can only be done effectively when we are aligned to and embodying our true spiritual self, are free from the entanglement of reactive living, and undo the suffering we have consciously or unconsciously created through our acts of commission and omission.
Being Your True Self Has a Collective Purpose
Being your true self is not just an individual lesson, but a collective one also. We are all in this together, influencing each other for better or worse, whether we like it or not. This is why communities of light are so important at this time as the stakes are raised by the advances in communications, technology, and artificial intelligence, as well as other challenging world events.
It is wise not only to practise being present in your true self and living life from there, but also to form spiritual communities of people who understand the wisdom of the true self and authentic living and who commit to the integration work and the activation of their own light body. As role models, we can serve as beacons of light and build the more authentic light-filled world that brings the true self and personality self into harmony. This is the most important transformational act of spiritual service that you can ever do. And it will make the world a better place.
Finding Your True Self
I discussed how to find your true self in my earlier post Finding Your True Self, and I gave two practical examples in its companion posts A Meditation to Find Your True Self and A Visualisation to Find Your True Self. In this later post, I will expand some more on the process, but I urge you to also book a free Guidance Session with me to learn more and ask questions, and you can work with me on the integration process should you choose.
The simplest and most direct way of finding your true self that I have found is through mindfulnessĀ andĀ meditation. Mindfulness helps you to find your true self by enabling you to come off autopilot, break out of your reactive conditioning, and build a metacognitive state in which to experience your multidimensional being with full presence. These moments of self-revelation, of realising you are not contained by your conditioned personality self, are powerfully awakening, liberating, and healing. They release you from a lifetime of conditioning and reactivity and enable you to start living an authentic life in which you experience true fulfilment, wellness, and happiness.
Interestingly, due to your egoās self-affirming tendencies and the fixation of your attention upon it due to survival needs, you can end up thinking of your ego or personality self as your familiar and therefore your true self, when in actuality you will have adopted a conditioned self. Your true self is actually at the heart of your being, waiting to be embodied in your moments of clear awakening and presence, but otherwise remaining forgotten by dissociation.
This dissociation is caused by the magnetism of the material world, your reactive physical survival mechanisms and associated stresses, and your general entanglement with thought and emotions. It is why you may not be living from your true self and why you may confuse authenticity with being true to your personality self. When you are not fully mindful and present as a multidimensional being, you dissociate from pure being to identify with your thoughts, emotions, roles and labelsāall of which can change and contradict each other at the drop of a hat. The contradictions, inner conflicts, and fragility of your personality self are why you might sometimes struggle to hold yourself together, especially at times of overwhelm or crisis. It is also why you search for greater meaning, because deep down inside you know you have a true self and are more than just the events that have shaped you.
Authentic self-development requires you to release yourself from your reactive mind, your entanglement in thoughts and false identities, and your habits of dissociation. In my postĀ What is Identity? I explained that our identity becomes arbitrary when it is based on how we and others see ourselves, rather than on the true self. If you see yourself as your job title, your identity becomes your role within the workplace. If you see yourself as an athlete, your identity becomes that role. If you see yourself as depressed, your identity becomes that of depression, which is why you would then say āI am depressedā. This is how your personality is formed when you are not mindful: in a state of reactivity rather than a state of mindfulness, purity, and integration with your true self.
Your personality can be shaped by your reactive mind to give you a reactive ego, or it can be shaped by the mindful experience of your true self to give you a personality that embodies your authentic values and holds the light of your true self. By committing to your authentic self-development and the practice of mindfulness and meditation, you can shape your personality to reflect your true self. Even with a reactive ego self (which most of us have), you can still reshape your personality with the practice of mindfulness. The result is a personality that becomes more and more authentic in the context of your true self. This is when you are being your true self and are living authentically.
In summary, to find your true self, first develop a mindfulness practice so you learn to control your attention, strengthen your centre, and build metacognitive states to facilitate being present to your true self. You can then work with meditation and visualisation as tools for finding and being present to your true self. However, it is ideal for you to also work on your self-development to release ego patterning and clear the way for embodying your true self and living with greater authenticity. To assist with your mindfulness-based self-development, book a one-on-oneĀ Guidance Call with me and we can begin the process together.
Integrating Your Personality with Your True Self
The integration of the personality with the true self is the essence of authentic living and is the core teaching of my work. As a key process of self-development, it begins when you learn to practise mindfulness and meditation to consciously direct your attention upon your experience in the present moment, without reactivity or judgement. This enables you to drop through the spaces between your thoughts so that you can find your true self waiting for you, which exists behind your thoughts, emotions, roles, and behaviour. To learn more about the process of doing this, I encourage you to read my post Finding Your True Self and to practise my Meditation to Find Your True Self and my Visualisation to Find Your True Self.
Once you have established a conscious centre of awareness aligned to your true self through the practice of mindfulness and meditation, that centre can then become the new centre of your personality to ground your authenticity. This means that your personality can begin to integrate with your true self by expressing your true self through it. You can do this by uncovering your authentic values as guiding principles for staying true to who you really are, and then honouring these by actively basing your decisions upon them. You can also use self-inquiryĀ to expose the reactive, inauthentic patterns of your mind, including your shadow aspects, andĀ transform these patterns within the greater perspective of your true self. By doing so, you gain the power to break free from the worldly things that trap you in reactivity, and release your conformity bias. For those more experienced with meditation, you can work on Activating Your Light Body. Most of all, the practice of simply staying present to your true self, and extending this presence into your personality, will provide a context to start transforming all of your personality experience into authenticity.
This integration of your personality with your true self is a lifelong process of evolution. You most likely have an extensive collection of unprocessed experience to work through, and at the same time, you are reborn in every moment, with new experience to process. However, when you are growing in authenticity through your commitment to honour your true self, you will become more and more your true self.
Your True Self and the Whole
Your true self is defined as much by its connections with all life as by its centre. This is because it enables you to experience the spiritual state of being one with life. For this reason, when you embrace your true self you are also embracing your spiritual self, which in a physical sense allows you to experience your physical interconnectedness and identity with all life on Earth in a sense of shared being (interbeing). As a result, I suspect that you, like me, will naturally want to honour the Earth and all life with compassion and gratitude. This is the ultimate form of sustainability and enabler of peace that reduces the need for regulations, laws, and religious and political ideologies that infantilise us and can so easily be exploited for other ends.
As a strong, authentic individual in alignment with your true self and informed by your spiritual identity with the greater whole, you can free yourself from toxic conformity while honouring all life from your heart. By integrating your personality self with your true self;Ā strengthening your authentic individuality in equal measure to your sense of wholeness with life; and exploring how the two can inform and enrich each other, you can maximise the potential for individual and collective self-realisation: you can truly be a light to the world.
Next step: book a Guidance Call with me to discuss how you can find your true self and begin the integration of it with your personality so that you can live with greater authenticity and live your true life purpose.
