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All our life experiences, including our relationships, our chosen professions, our ability to perform, our quality of life, health and illnesses are conditioned by the constructs on which our identities are built.
Our identity parameters are generally made of two components:
- Inherited
- Acquired
- Inherited identity – The social construct in which you took form:
- The family you were born into
- Their psycho-social-economic-spiritual position:
- Gender
- Genes
- Geo-economic political context: continent, country, culture, ethnic background, peace or war zone, developed or underdeveloped country, economic stability or recession, etc.
- Temporal context: each period has a massive influence on our identity. Since the education of the masses began with the industrial revolution, each segment of time would play a tremendous role in the identity formation based on the available information, social mores, trends, and technological advancements. People born in the pre-industrial revolution times have based their identity more on religion and superstition.
- Acquired Identity – The social construct on which you built your default identity as a result of your inherited background
- Boy or girl
- Single child, brother, sister. Loved, unloved, abandoned, traumatised – by whom? Loved how?
- Physically
- Emotionally
- Mentally
- Spiritually: strict adherence to parents’ religious beliefs and practices, or free to enquire and choose one’s practice
- Good/bad at school, native intelligence, cultivated, uncultivated, mediocre
- Job/social position: qualified, highly qualified, unqualified; stable/unstable employment/entrepreneurial
- Happily or unhappily married/single/divorced
- Scientific acquired identity:
- Materialistic science, Darwinian identity, product of evolution
- Religious science: Monotheistic, polytheistic, mixed undefined (and often at odds).
Based on these identity parameters, in order to navigate our social constructs (reality), we unconsciously develop avatars to answer the requirements from the constructs we operate in.
The Identity Avatars
The identity avatars are not personalities or personality treats. They are standalone identities, albeit of a chameleonic nature, developed with the sole purpose of navigating at a functional level the multidimensionality of our existence.
Three forms of avatars
- Unconscious (inherited)
- Semiconscious (acquired)
- Conscious (deliberately formed)
As offshoots of our global identity, each avatar will develop on the same process as the identity. However, until we are called-upon, polarised by a social construct, we are in an undefined state; avatar-free, existent and non-existent at the same time (the state of Self – unmanifested and manifested).
For example, in the most critical moments of our existence, when critically ill, when threatened with starvation, or simply before going to sleep, we don’t think of ourselves in terms of gender, sexual attraction, social status, and so on.
You don’t fall asleep, suffer, love, despair, or die as an employee, director, gay or straight, black or white, rich or poor, etc. Left on an island devoid of social interaction, the last thing we’ll worry about will be which dress or suit we should we wear. Should we look more feminine or more masculine, more casual or more formal.
Unless triggered by the presence of a construct, we won’t identify as heterosexual, gay, fluid, trans, or whatever else we may choose to identify with. Equally, devoid of the social construct on which we’ve built one particular avatar, it will not show up.
Continuing with the island example, a person who changed from meat eating to a vegetarian diet, left alone on an island, will sooner rather than later revert to meat eating if that will secure their survival. The vegetarian avatar based on the social construct ascribing superior moral and/or spiritual values will subside to the primal survivor avatar.
Being a man, a woman, an employee, a company director, a doctor, a therapist, a patient, ill or healthy, shy or daring, soft or tough, loving or hating, forgiving or vengeful, a father or a mother, a daughter or son, sister or brother, friend or enemy – they all are avatars we deploy at the request of the construct in which we operate.
A man will not deploy its father avatar when called upon by his boss or when pursuing a woman.
As an individual, woman or man, we’ll deploy our avatars based on the required circumstances. If we have siblings and love them, we’ll deploy our sibling avatar when meeting with them only. The way they will know us will be different than the way our spouses, parents, friends, colleagues, bosses know us, and vice-versa.
In reality, we rarely interact with one another. Our interactions are circumstantial avatar interactions.
Classic example, romantic relationships:
At the beginning of the relationship each develops and deploys the avatar most likely to succeed in that endeavour.
Each act, gest, micro expression will inform the other of their position and desire. More sexual, intellectual, or spiritual? Adventure seeking or more serious? Each will try to build and deploy an avatar closest to the perceived requirement from the other.
A demoiselle in distress will trigger the protector male avatar more than a powerful independent woman avatar will, for example. Equally, an alpha male will hardly call for a feminist avatar.
No matter the construct, they are all avatars. With time, the construct changes and the avatars either evolve to maintain the union or fall in desuetude, with new avatars, more promising and more in line with the developed one at the horizon. The classic affairs and middle-age crisis in couple relationships.
Affairs intervene at the point when one or both avatars evolve past their initial construct without mutually contracting a new one.
Either after the fulfilment of their initial construct (married, with children and a successful career), or as a result of its failure (desire of children but sterility, promising career at the outset but lack of fulfilment of that promise – which could be interdependent – one avatar is undermined by the other causing it to have less drive to perform, leading ultimately to its underperformance, or as evolution of the active avatar and stagnation of the passive – generally the woman/mother, but not only).
Depending on the complexity of the initial avatar – rooted in high moral or spiritual values or not – it will either continue the relationship satisfying the more fundamental aspects of the construct (social respectability, reprobation of divorce) externally, and will deploy a separate avatar to satisfy the missing aspect of its evolved construct (sex, love, understanding, complicity, etc.) illicitly (secret affairs).
If the avatar has evolved passed the general social construct to the point of the third stage of consciously determined, it will undergo a radical transition from which it will reverse the order of its existence. Instead of trying to submit and conform to the construct, it will try to correct the construct in which operates to meet its chosen identity.
Only when the plurality of avatars within an inherited and acquired identity has reached this level of self-determination, can we say that we are in the presence of a self-determined individual.
From this moment forward, the interaction with the constructs it will still be via avatars, only that they will be gradually more consciously determined rather than circumstance-imposed ones. It is at this point when the circumstance-imposed employee/spouse, etc. avatar soars above the construct of job/marital social security and tells his or her boss, abusive or neglecting partner, etc. “to shove it” despite the known risk factors.
When it comes to the treatment of “mental conditions” or other life dissatisfactions, no successful resolution will be attained until the individual has reached the third form of identity.
Otherwise put, until the individual has reached the higher stage of its evolution: self-awareness and self-determination, free from its inherited and acquired identity avatars context-construct-dependent. That is not to say that they will be toil-free, rather toil-chosen.
Practical use of self-determined identity avatars
Knowing how we operate within our constructs provides us with the power to identify our weak avatars leading to psychosocial and even spiritual crisis, and with the choice of building better-equipped avatars able to influence, if not change, the constructs within which we operate.
