“Man cannot evolve beyond his character”—Ernest Becker
Becker makes the point that the humanization process is one wherein the individual exchanges the natural organismic propensity for a mysterious symbolic dictation. The child in its very essential formative age is faced with denying that which ‘comes naturally’ for what are symbolic dictates that are far beyond its ability for comprehension. The child’s formation of character is dictated by its need to be somebody in the symbolic world.
This need to create an ego of personality is taught to the child, because it (the child) is not recognized by the parent(s) as other than the meat-sack created after having sex. Parents don't recognize the soul in the child, only the surface projections of their physical union and what it produces. An adult can be just as enamored with a puppy from a litter of pups created by the union of two dogs. They will love and train them both whether child or dog, according to the beliefs of what they think the object can be trained with and deserves.
I'm not sure what you are inferring as natural organismic tendency. The natural tendency of any child is to express love. However the adults inadequate sense of unconditional giving and the need to take love because of low self esteem and a co-dependent nature created by being starved of love from their parents, creates a vicious cycle of personal beliefs in values based on actions rather than natural quality of being. Children are taught by their parents to value themselves and others according to belief and systems of relative measure. Love is valued for accomplishment and outward appearances. Parents love their children within boundaries of relative measure. They get love for performance, meaning they are trained from the beginning to be individual and make choices to take care of themselves. Proud parents revel in the values that emerge from the child that meet their values and expectations. They believe they own the child until they do not want to own it anymore. They confuse the innocence of children to ignorance, as they apply their own ignorance of who and what the child is to mold it to be what they want it to be.
I am not using the word habit in the way we often do, as a technical ability existing apart from our wishes. These habits are an intimate and fundamental part of our selves. They are representations of our will. They rule our will, working in a coordinated way they dominate our way of acting. These habits are the results of repeated, intelligently controlled, actions.
They become habit from repeated conditioning and choice. They do not control our will. Our will is what keeps them in place. Our ability to change our habits is determined by what we value and if we find something that has more value, it is by our will that we can change our habit.
“Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction.”[/b] “The medium of habit filters all material that reaches our perception and thought.”
You could say this, but then we need to return to what is natural to humans prior to conditioning of belief passed down from parental and societal influence. There is an intelligence within the human psyche which exists prior to human birth that is brought into the world that is ignored and replaced with habit of belief passed down from generations of delusion.
“Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness.” “Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.”
Will stands with the psyche, which exists prior to any
class of stimuli. The adjustment of will to the physical condition upon entering the body creates a distraction from what is real and normal as it invades the subtle senses. With the bombardment of dense stimulation of belief and limitation the will is blinded of its prior understanding, experience and sense of self.
Habit that is below direct consciousness or in this case ego, is Soul personality. That is tied to the Absolute One consciousness which gives birth to the Soul. It is imbued with everything that exists in the parent at its conception, similar to the human DNA naturally installed within every Human to contain everything that is necessary to be a human passed from parent to child.
Britannica specifies that attitude is “a predisposition to classify objects and events and to react to them with some degree of evaluative consistency.”
If I consult my inner self I cannot focus upon an attitude but can infer such an attitude based on behavior. If I wish to become conscious of my intuition I can through observation of behavior describe the attitude, which, in turn, allows me to ascertain the nature of my intuition.
If you go beyond the conditioning of definitions and the beliefs of mortality the inner Self can reveal itself to expose the illusions of behavior based on attitude. Then as you focus on the Self, the natural tendency to reveal more of what was natural to the Will at birth returns in what Eastern philosophy and Scripture calls
"the innocence of a child", or that natural intuition and function of, human "
being."
When a mother tells her son “you must change your attitude”. The son cannot change the attitude directly but the son must change his intuition from which the inferred attitude emanates. This does become a bit convoluted but in essence when we wish to change an attitude we are saying that our intuition must be modified. We can modify intuition only through habit directed by our will.
I think if the word intuition is used it must remain in context with the ability to understand and know truth absolute rather than changing beliefs and personal truths and opinion.
Conditioning and or manipulation of truth thru relative beliefs and personal opinions never really take individuality from the ego. If a Mother tells her child what she wants him/her to do there is always the quality of individuality that separates the child from the parent and that quality is interpretation based on feeling and cognitive awareness. No two people feel exactly the same thing or think exactly the same thing in any scenario.
Mechanically speaking, the precognitive functions of intuition which are buried under habit (ego) and the ability of each individual egoic personality to listen, hear, and comprehend what is being conveyed by another always filters relative reality thru the layers of thought, emotionally attached beliefs and ideas of free will as it functions in that particular moment.
You can't make someone feel something like love instantaneously. You might get someone to feel anger by pushing some buttons, but the mind follows its neural pathways thru conditioning of thought and free will to surmise what it will thru individual personality grown from the fertilizer of parental and societal programming. The developing child takes in what it can and uses what it will based on what it can remember of itself prior to birth. That underlying influence is what makes each birth unique and sets a direction for life.
“Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character would exist. There would be simply a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. Character is the interpenetrating of habits. If each habit in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others, character would not exist. That is conduct would lack unity being only juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations. But since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those remote from one another contain like elements, a continuous modification of habits by one another is constantly going on.”
My understanding of character and the quotations concerning the nature of character are taken from “Habits and Will” by John Dewey
The nature of the soul prior to its birth does have a character. I have seen it, heard it, experienced it I and live with it. It is consistent, in that it supports constant expansion of conscious awareness above and beyond the conditioning of habit and belief that ties the human to the physical body in limitation and mortality.
My understanding doesn't come from a book. It's more of an underlying habit gained prior to conditioning, tho I have read many books that describe the nature of the soul and what it means to be human.
