There is much illusion to this idea that we hold of ourselves as ‘Amir’, ‘Nassim’, or whatever name you may arbitrarily go by. Our psychology is unbelievably fragmented, and it is unimaginably subversive in hiding this truth from the light of our self-awareness. Likes and dislikes of all sorts, tendencies and compulsions of all varieties, and a thousand tastes and preferences which boil down to a very muddy state of affairs. A man takes himself to be one person because he has one body, but our personalities are nevertheless a plurality, a multiplicity that allows each and every single one of us to behave like a dog chasing its tail in circles.

Negativity comprises a host of little men living within us, based on expectations and anticipations in many cases, but often simply the result of an anxious or irritated body. Gravity to our bodies is negativity to our personalities. This is the psychological offspring of what the body often causes by its agitations to innumerable inner stifles that we are typically completely unaware of. We take our states to be real and attach to them immediately without a single moment of pause. To find a man that is always positive regardless of the influence of this force of gravity on our psychology is indeed a rarity.

And so negativity as a frequent inner state may be unavoidable, at least for the majority of us earthbound mortals, but an awareness to this situation may at times allow us to rebel to some varying degree and scale. We may in fact be able to defy a negative state outwardly, even when our inner state begs for a release of negative emotion. Self-awareness allows such a defiance to play a part in our daily manifestations, even if only for a split moment of consciousness. A man thinks to himself, “I am not this state”, “this impulse is not me”, “this is the chaff, not the wheat”, and so separates himself from one second to the next from these poisonous inner habits, and so isolates a part of himself into a cocoon of clarity.