[sweetmay73]

Strange question to ask on personalitycafe huh? :P
I was thinking about this question the other day when I was listening to an Alan Watts' video. He defined personality as an illusion that the ego creates.
Personally, I have no idea what to believe. What are everyone's opinions on this?

[Nintaku]

Isn't your personality a combination of your personas, as they use the Self as an intermediary with the Shadow and the Anima/Animus?

Basically, you are a combination of several elements in your mind.

[Raichan]

Ego is only one part of personality.

[Luke]

I don't believe in trying to attain these unnatural states of mind, such as egoless states, etc. I think as human beings, we are creatures with egos and personalities and they are important to us and they exist for a reason. They are adaptive, they help us to cope with things and they help us to survive. The personality is flilled with important coping mechanisms and highly intelligent ways of interpreting reality. We shouldn't try to fight against our nature.

I have met people who have attained these kind of states through serious drug use, but I have never met anyone who has attained it through meditation or anything like that. The lead singer of Pink Floyd, Syd Barret, went insane trying to attain these states through the use of LSD and he is not the only one who has fallen into that trap and been permanently damaged by it. Which I think shows the dangers of trying to alter your state of being. I'm not sure how these states of being work, but I do know that in this lifetime we have been given the gift of being a human being with an identity and a personality and it is a precious thing.

[mushr00m]

Too much of anything is a bad thing in that too much ego stroking is considered negative by society but it is actually damaging to how people treat others. No ego would mean we would not have survival reflexes, we would have no wish to protect ourselves - end of humanity. We actually depend on having an ego in a way and but what happens so often is the ego gets out of control and so tips the scales in the other direction.

[Sily]

Personality is very very important.

Very, very.

Especially when I'm trying to determine if I'm going to like a person, or sock 'em in their face.

[Nintaku]

Personality is very very important.

Very, very.

Especially when I'm trying to determine if I'm going to like a person, or sock 'em in their face.

^^ She's violent.
*hides*

[Ready2fly]

MBTI theory and Personality Dimensions both assert that your personality is inborn. Id an ego are constructs of Freud who was a wee bit creepy for me. But you can see personality preferences very early on in life and anyone who has siblings can tell you - same parents totally different people. So I don't think it is something your subconscious construsts but is a part of you like your eye colour or hair colour.

[Tincan]

[Alyosha]

Our personality is an abstraction of all our actions, and is in other words a way for us to relate to ourselves.

Our ego, on the other hand, is the idea of something in our mind that keeps the peace between our needs and our concience. It's part of a very abstract, larger idea of our mind as split into different parts with different purposes that struggle with each other, and which I'm very sure is more about giving us the words to discuss the human mind than something that is physically actually going on. I'm pretty certain we don't actually have an iceberg in our heads.

So our personality is the product of our ego, if you're into that kind of thinking, but our ego is just as much the product of our personality. After all, the consideration of the concept is an action, and thus a part of what makes our personality. Now, not knowing the context, "personality is an illusion of the ego" sounds as if someone is about to try to sell me something.