You cannot enter a new reality with the same personality that created the old one. Many people want new relationships while reacting in the same ways, higher income while thinking in the same patterns, a different social circle while carrying the same internal narratives. We attempt to rearrange circumstances without transforming the interpreter of those circumstances. Yet reality is never neutral or objective in the way we imagine. It is always personal. Two individuals can stand in the same room, experience the same conversation, and walk away with entirely different worlds constructed in their minds. One perceives rejection, another hears feedback. One sees opportunity, another sees threat. What changes is not the event, but the structure through which it is interpreted.

Reality functions as a linguistic phenomenon. We distinguish only what we have language and internal concepts for. You perceive your reality to the extent that you can articulate it. If there are no words for something, it often does not register as meaningful experience at all. The mind filters perception through available categories, and what cannot be named frequently remains unseen. The brain is not designed to display everything, it selects, organizes, and prioritizes based on what it already knows how to interpret. If there is no concept, no linguistic hook to attach experience to, perception simply moves past it as background noise.

If someone has no inner distinction between intensity and intimacy, they may call emotional volatility love. If they lack a distinction between control and care, they may mistake restriction for protection. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein suggested that the limits of language define the limits of one’s world. Psychologically, this becomes deeply practical: the limits of your distinctions define the limits of your lived experience. When new distinctions emerge, new realities become visible. Without them, vast portions of life remain an undifferentiated background, like colors some tribes cannot see because they have no words for them!

This is why transformation cannot be reduced to positive thinking or motivational effort. To change life, one must change the personality that perceives life. Personality is not merely temperament or preferences, it is a stable system of interpretations, beliefs, and automatic reactions. Carl Jung observed that until we make the unconscious (shadows) conscious, it will direct our lives and we will call it fate. And I work with shadows on a very deep level now! The personality operates through accumulated conclusions about who we are and how the world works. If you lost all the memory about yourself (aka what you did in the past etc.) - how would you describe yourself? you see? you have stories about yourself! So, if someone carries the belief “I am not enough,” achievements will feel fragile and temporary, while criticism will feel definitive. The world will continuously confirm what the personality already assumes.

Transformation is difficult because personality resists dissolution. The ego, often misunderstood as something negative, serves an essential function: survival. It organizes memory, predicts threat, and conserves energy. The brain is designed to prefer familiar patterns over unknown possibilities. From a neurological perspective, repeating established pathways is efficient... creating new ones requires effort and uncertainty. Neurons that fire together - they wire together! The ego therefore prefers predictable suffering over unpredictable freedom. When a person approaches the edge of growth, fear emerges not as an enemy, but as a protective mechanism whispering that the unknown may be dangerous... Again, the fear is imagined, however, for your brain - it is real. your brains doesn't know the difference between imagination and reality. Hence, a lot of people prefer to live the illusions... 

Beyond habitual beliefs, trauma operates as a deeper anchor. Trauma is not merely a painful event from the past, it is frozen energy and fixed interpretation (a story) embedded in the nervous system. Modern trauma research, including the work of Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté, emphasizes that the body stores unresolved experience. A child who internalized rejection may grow into an adult who anticipates abandonment everywhere. This expectation is not purely cognitive, it is also physiological. The nervous system remains calibrated to past conditions. In this way, trauma functions as an anchor, pulling perception back toward old conclusions even when the present moment offers something different. Even when the present moment offers opportunity.. 

Complicating this further are what might be called “factory settings” installed by the environment. We are born highly adaptable, and early environments shape us for survival within specific contexts. If love required pleasing others, we learned that love equals compliance. If safety required strength, we suppressed vulnerability. If belonging required competition, we internalized that the world is a battlefield. These adaptations were intelligent responses to circumstance. They ensured survival. Yet survival strategies are not necessarily expressions of our deeper nature. Most people mistake these acquired settings for identity itself, unaware that they were molded by necessity rather than chosen consciously.

Across psychological and spiritual traditions, there is recognition that something within us observes all of this. Buddhism speaks of awareness or the witness. Vedanta refers to Atman. Christian mysticism speaks of the soul. Jung described the Self as a totality beyond the ego. On one level, there is the ego structure maintaining continuity and protection. On another level, there is a witnessing presence capable of observing thoughts, emotions, and patterns without being identical to them. This observing force is oriented toward expansion. It senses that life is larger than the current story and is drawn toward growth, even when growth destabilizes familiar identity.

Most people assume they are the thinker of their thoughts. We say, “I decided,” “I chose,” “I concluded,” as if there were a central commander inside issuing orders. Yet if you pause for even a moment and try a simple experiment, the illusion begins to crack. Sit quietly for sixty seconds and attempt not to think a single thought. Do not suppress, do not replace, just refrain from thinking. Within seconds, a thought appears. Then another. Perhaps a commentary on how well you are doing. Perhaps irritation. Perhaps boredom. The thoughts arrive uninvited. They are not requested, scheduled, or consciously authored.

If you truly controlled your thoughts, you would be able to stop them on command. You would be able to choose only pleasant ones, eliminate intrusive ones, and prevent anxiety from forming in the first place. But this is not how the mind works. Thoughts arise. Emotions follow. Images surface. Memories intrude. And only afterward does the narrative self step in and claim ownership: “I thought that.” In reality, something was aware of the thought appearing. That awareness is not the thought itself. It is the space in which the thought is noticed.

There is a difference between “I am anxious” and “Anxiety is arising.” The first collapses identity into the emotion. The second reveals a subtle distance. When you say, “I am anxious,” anxiety becomes you. When you observe, “Anxiety is present,” there is an observer who is not identical to the feeling. This distinction is small but radical. It introduces the possibility that you are not the content of your mind, but the awareness in which that content unfolds. and when you see that content, you may see how your life actually unfolds too... 

This is why the idea of total control is misleading. We do not choose the initial thought that appears in response to a stimulus. We do not choose the first emotional surge in the nervous system. Those are conditioned responses shaped by past experience, biology, and environment. What we can develop is awareness of them. And that awareness is the witnessing presence.

When a thought arises such as “I will fail,” something notices it. If you were the thought, there would be no noticing. There would only be belief. The very act of observing proves that there is a dimension of you that is prior to the thought. This witnessing presence does not argue, defend, or justify. It sees.

Spiritual traditions have pointed to this for centuries. Buddhism calls it mindful awareness. Advaita Vedanta speaks of the Self that observes the fluctuations of the mind. Contemporary psychology refers to metacognition, the ability to think about thinking. In each case, the insight is similar: you are not identical to the stream of mental activity. You are the field in which it flows.

And this observing presence has a different orientation than the ego. The ego seeks stability, repetition, and protection. The witness is curious. It leans toward expansion. It senses that the current identity is not the totality of what is possible. Even when growth threatens the familiar narrative, something inside feels drawn toward it. That pull is not reckless, it is evolutionary. It is the impulse toward becoming more conscious!

Transformation begins the moment you recognize this difference. Instead of being carried unconsciously by every thought, you begin to see thoughts as events. Instead of believing you are the anxious story, you notice anxiety as a pattern moving through awareness. From that space, new responses become possible... and it is not because you suddenly control everything! haha it's because you are no longer fully entangled in what you observe. You let it be, you don't fight with it, you "look" at it... and it dissolves as it appeared... into nothingness again... until next time you meet again... 

The ego says, “I am thinking.” The witness quietly reveals, “Thinking is happening.” And in that shift, identity expands beyond the story the mind has been telling.

Transformation does not require destroying the ego. It requires loosening the anchor and strengthening the observing presence. When awareness expands, fear does not disappear, but it becomes tolerable. Trauma can be felt without total identification. Automatic reactions can be noticed before they dictate behavior. The person begins to see their “factory settings” as configurations rather than destiny. In that moment, space opens. And within that space lies the possibility of conscious participation in one’s development.

Changing personality does not mean becoming someone else. It means ceasing to be exclusively shaped by past conditions. It means recognizing which beliefs were installed for survival, which fears belong to earlier chapters, and which reactions are outdated strategies... And you finally see that you outgrew this suit! When a new distinction appears, perception reorganizes. When perception reorganizes, behavior follows. A new reality is not forced into existence, it becomes visible. You do not step into a different life by willpower alone. You become the kind of person capable of perceiving and inhabiting it.

Once perception shifts, the old reality loses its grip. Circumstances may not instantly change, however the interpreter has transformed! And when the interpreter transforms, the world reorganizes around that new center of awareness. 

I just need a new vocabulary these days!