1.4.1 What are the characteristics of the interaction between one’s personality and the process that is reality?

Through the complex of one’s needs and desires, one attempts to live a fulfilling and satisfying life. This one achieves to a greater or lesser extent according to one’s own way of measuring such matters. We all experience certain things in common. We all have our measure of joy and sorrow, physical and emotional pain and pleasure. We each have our sufferings, frustrations, disappointments and failures; our own weaknesses and fears which we face or fail to face as we are put to the test.

A common pattern of our lives is the attempt of the individual personality to attain fulfilment through the control of aspects of reality. This usually manifests itself as the wish to impose one’s will on others or on oneself and the world. This is doomed to failure: we can only temporarily bend the world to our will. In the end, reality, apparently external to the needs and desires to the personality, is too powerful.

Again and again one pitches one’s personality against an apparently external and uncaring world. The twin forces of one’s personality and reality dance in constant opposition. In this way we waste our lives and our energies in an unwinnable struggle.