One of the biggest impacts on how we react to outer and inner experiences is our temperament.
We can understand the temperament if we think at a knight. Each knight had his armor that did not allow his skin to be visible and vulnerable to his potential enemies. This armor makes one reveal oneself differently to others, as the others can only see the metal shield, can hear a voice behind a mask and can see a behavior, but not the eyes that cry or smile. So is it likewise with our temperament, the shield or armor of our self that censors the way others can see our inner world. And as this metal shield surrounds us entirely, most of our mobility and reactions are limited by its nature and texture. Each human being is put inside the armor of his/ her temperament during his/ her life, from the early years of childhood. And the individual’s perspective of the world is always filtered by temperament, as an inner constitution.
It was stated by many psychiatrists and psychologists in the last century that the temperament cannot be changed, but moderated by one’s personality. And this is true if one does not take off the armor through a serious training in self development. So this rule is true for most people, but not for those who go through a deep process of transformation by personal development. During the self knowledge practices, we learn to understand texture and limitation of the armor. But the personal and spiritual development practices help one take off this armor piece by piece and learn to act freely at a deeper level.
The four temperaments are highly dependent on the physical activity of our glands and other organic functions, so only an inner transformation so significant that it creates a change in the bodily fluids and physiology can change it. It is a given reality that the temperament is the first and sometimes biggest beast one has to tame. So a good understanding of its essence is a necessity in every self development path as such.
The alchemic perspective used both in medicine and ancient philosophy associated the four temperaments with the four elements: earth – melancholic, water – phlegmatic, air – sanguine and fire – choleric and this will be the starting point of our journey.
It must be stated for the future chapters as well that the temperament does not belong to the inner life of the individual and is not a content of the soul, but the layer or armor through which one connects one’s inner world to the outer reality.
In the following brief description of the temperaments, I intend to describe the restrictions that each of them raises to the power of our I, since we are on a self knowledge path and need to see the inner processes and their interaction clearly in order to take hold of them with full consciousness in the future.
People are not their temperaments. The temperament is the filter that the self has to stream through in order to reach out into the world. But the same thoughts, the same feelings, the same impulses are experienced at different intensities by each temperament configuration, even if for the individual self it has the same value. The sadness for not finding a purpose in life is expressed differently, though it is the same experience of the heart: the choleric might be aggressive and frustration will lead to destroying what he built; the sanguine might cry out loud and create a drama because God doesn’t love him; the phlegmatic might cope with the sadness by eating too much, by oversleeping or he may generate a somatic disease; the melancholic might sink into a depression and think he is no good and that is why there is no purpose in anything anymore. The individual self of each person chose before birth a certain genetic inheritance that activates the temperament that is the best tool for one’s life mission. And this temperament is not only the tool, but the means of what one has to develop in order to fulfill the tasks of life for the world.
Having approached each temperament separately (in the four separate articles from this series), we might have already observed that each individual has an armor that is a composite of more characteristics. Each individual has an armor that is made of all four temperaments, but they are not balanced, so that two of them are usually very strong and take over the other two, that cannot bloom and grow.
The stronger one temperament is, the more captive the lower self is within its restrictions. That is the reason why one should find for oneself the two or three dominating temperament configurations determined by hereditary and physiological laws and start developing the other two that are more or less missing. The best way to work with one’s temperament isn’t fighting with what we are. As an example, if a choleric fights his anger, he might only grow it at a deeper level; so he might not fight his boss at noon, but yell at his wife in the evening. What the choleric ought to do is to develop the calmness of the one temperament he can’t stand: the phlegmatic. The same goes for the melancholic, who thinks too much of a situation and cannot decide what to do. He must grow the choleric strength inside himself with determination. When the sanguine sees his senseless speech in some life situation, he might try to deepen relationships like a melancholic would do. Meeting his own laziness and seeking for comfort, the phlegmatic should develop the sanguine’s dynamism or the choleric’s strong impulsive will. These are examples of how to work with developing what is weaker out of our four-folded temperament structure. Sometimes the two dominating temperaments balance themselves within the inner world’s configuration. But there are always the other two temperaments that must be developed for reaching a balanced path of inner transformation in order to achieve a wider, free perspective on life.
Articol de Prof. Dr. Sebastian Stănculescu
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