The Five Human Character Structures - Their True Significance

Introduction

Important note - This page is meant to be read in conjunction with Astral Entities - Interference and Attacks from 'The Dark Side', which explains the degradational sequence of soul incarnations which is mentioned below. It is therefore best to read that page first, and you would then find that it links you back to this page.

I appreciate that many people wouldn't want to read anything about astral entities or 'dark forces', but, as I know from hard life experience, they are a fact of life, and indeed they interfere with everyone, so if we are serious about healing and self realization, somewhere along the line we have no sane option but to acknowledge and address the issue - which isn't the scary matter which so many people believe (even though it is challenging!), as I show on this site.

One particularly important aspect in which I have had to step out of line with almost all healers is that I understand the most 'open', aware and wise people to be NOT old, highly evolved souls at all (as healers almost universally believe), but incarnations of NEW souls, who are the least fettered, least distorted or obfuscated manifestations of fundamental consciousness ('the Ultimate' as far as anyone can tell). Thus the people who are the least aware - the poorest and most distorted manifestations of fundamental consciousness - are actually incarnations of the oldest and most DEGRADED souls.

Barbara Brennan, in her classic books on spiritual healing, Hands of Light and Light Emerging, describes five 'character structures' - what you could loosely call character types - which are recognised in Bioenergetics and whose description and understanding she has considerably extended to take into account their significance in spiritual healing. I strongly recommend* these two books for gaining an understanding of this phenomenon. In Light Emerging, Brennan shows how we can apply understanding of these five character structures to enable us to produce healing responses rather than compulsive, pattern-driven ones to these structures (which are really defences which hide the real person and get in the way of any prospective self healing / self realization of theirs).

* This does not, however, indicate a full endorsement or recommendation of those books, for Barbara Brennan shows clear signs, like virtually all healers, of being led astray by astral forces. For example, she works with, and 'sees' guides, and has a personal guide called Heyoan for her healing work. What she doesn't realize is that ALL these guides are astral ('dark') force inventions or simulations, and that the reason why Heyoan comes out with so much wise and insightful information is because her interfering astral entities relay to her information and insights from her own deepest aspects (which she can't 'hear' directly), presenting it all as though it is from an external being - and of course, while the entities keep much of the information intact as a lure, in places they censor it or add distortions.

One particular problem about her explanations of the character structures is that it is based on the notion that affected people have had particular types of past life trauma experience which have carried over into the present lifetime. It's not that she's wholly wrong about that, but rather, that she doesn't know about the effects of parasitic lost souls* (which her interfering astral entities are hiding from her), and herself believes in evolutionary sequential, karmic soul reincarnations for everybody, which is actually a fiction given to us from the astral forces for an extremely pernicious reason. So I would describe her explanations as not fully wrong but distorted and seriously misleading.

* You can read about the parasitic 'lost' soul phenomenon and the troublesome agenda of the astral entities in Astral Entities - Interference and Attacks from 'The Dark Side'.

She is a typical 'advanced' healer - having masses of energy awareness, but in very poorly grounded form so that she is extensively open to the astral sub-reality of illusion and delusion and the interference of astral entities. People like her would do well to stop completely using such ungrounded awareness and ignore all non-physical beings or supposed higher realities (including ALL that she is calling 'Higher Sensory Perceptions', which are ALL ungrounded perceptions and actually being relayed to her by astral - yes, 'dark' - entities), and take up the strongly grounding energy-awareness and ki cultivation methods taught by Stephen and Lynda Kane - please see Healing and Self Realization - The Safest and Quickest Way - and thus to develop proper grounded energy awareness.

So, let me repeat this here for emphasis - the character structures or types do NOT describe the person but rather, they describe the person's particular defences which are rooted in past traumas - which have usually originated from previous lifetimes either of the person or/and of attached parasitic 'lost' souls (which are being experienced as though they belonged to the person), no matter whether such traumas have been repeated in any form in the current lifetime. Thus, it is incorrect to regard a person as being, e.g., a schizoid or a masochistic type, but it is correct to say that the person has a predominantly schizoid or masochistic 'character structure' or defence strategy.

The names generally given to the five character structures (what I would prefer to call defence strategy syndromes [or packages]) are: schizoid, masochistic, psychopathic, oral and rigid.

I view the first four of these names with distaste as they label a person with connotations of demeaning psychiatric diagnoses, and I feel that more loving and 'human' (and indeed informative) terms are needed for these character structures. I have therefore included my own preferred terms in the table below.

Most or all of these five defences actually occur for most of us at different times according to our responses to other people's defences. Only in a smallish minority of people is one of the defences so dominant that it manifests as the person's overall character structure. This happens most frequently for people at the opposite poles of their astrally controlled degradational soul reincarnation sequence:

• new-soul incarnations - quite commonly schizoid
• those who have been through many soul reincarnations and so are advanced in the degradational process being administered to them by the astral forces - to some extent always rigid

I am not going to try to repeat here the wealth of information on the character structures given by Barbara Brennan in her books, but I give a summary table below, derived from her information but including my own observations too, showing how each character structure is typically linked to and indeed derived from a specific stage in the soul degradation process. As far as I can tell, this is information that has not been published before.

In the case of the schizoid and rigid character structures I can see a pretty obvious reason for their association with the stages on their 'downhill' progression, but the reason for the intermediate states of soul degradation being linked to specific character structures in this particular order eludes me completely.

Notes

Aura shapes and structures

I caution about the aura descriptions in the table for the following reason. Perception of aura details (including chakras and discrete levels or 'bodies' of the aura) are almost always a manifestation of ungrounded energy awareness, and are clearly so in Barbara Brennan's case. When using such 'perceptions' we are actually NOT directly 'seeing' at all. What actually happens is that the person who is 'seeing' such non-physical things or manifestations is being shown a schematic representation of energy configurations which are actually much more subtle than could be seen by us in any comprehensible way.

Theoretically that would be fine if we were receiving such images directly from our own deepest aspects, but in practice, because almost all of us are not sufficiently self realized to be able to receive such data directly from our deepest aspects, astral ('dark') entities exploit the situation and, just as with verbal channelling, relay the original data to our ordinary minds, with distortions, additions or deletions according to what the entities want you to see or believe.

So, while on the face of it the story of different aura manifestations for the different character structures looks convincing, and many people who are similarly 'psychic' (i.e. they have similarly ungrounded energy awareness) do see roughly what Barbara Brennan sees, I would be cautious about any aura descriptions or depictions, because almost all of them have astral ('dark') force involvement and are thus liable to contain distortions which are aimed at leading us astray.

The 'schizotype' / 'normal' polarity - who is healthier?

Schizotype 'personality disorder' is a diagnosis imposed by psychiatrists and mental healthcare workers upon people with various unorthodox perceptions and generally poor grounding (at least of their attention / awareness) - because the psychiatric workers almost universally do not understand that weak grounding is the underlying issue and so do not understand what the true healing requirement is.

I myself was at one point labelled as being "mildly schizotypal" by an uncomprehending psychiatric consultant, and that is now indelibly in my medical records. (see My Little Brush With Psychiatry.)

As noted in the table, paradoxically it is overall the incarnations of the most degraded category of souls (generally speaking, apart from the real rock-bottom ones) who tend to get regarded as the mentally healthiest and often the physically healthiest too - though actually if you look more awarely at the situation you can see that the medical and psychiatric professions are turning a big blind eye to something pretty important.

If those people are really the healthiest, why is it they who are most inclined to decline into dementia conditions? And why is it that people in that category don't live particularly longer, and in particular are actually less motivated than others towards truly healthy lifestyles or preserving their environment? And why is it that such people also get so much less out of life than the other people (while typically believing that they're getting all there is for them)?  And why is it these people who generally most depend on the medical services to try to patch them up, rather than take charge of their lives and their physical state as much as possible and become their own healers? And why is it these people who, first and foremost, regard any mental / emotional stresses as medical issues for which to take medication instead of considering even for one moment actually using healing / lifestyle change methodology to address underlying causes?

By the same token, if people who are new soul incarnations are really so flaky and unsound and really have a personality disorder (so-called schizotype), how come that it is they who have the maximum capacity to experience life, to excel in all manner of fields of creativity, and who have the strongest motivation to improve their lives still further? And how is it that it is these people overall who are most interested and motivated in looking after their own health and addressing underlying causes of issues so that the latter can actually be resolved?

Is it really saner or healthier for people to regularly slump back into their armchairs and watch television (living vicariously) or to get on with actively creative and invigorating pursuits as new-soul incarnations are most inclined to?

I have really implied the answer to all these questions in the table, for it is actually incarnations of NEW souls who are (potentially) fundamentally the healthiest people, but they do have the need to get more strongly grounded before their health potential (physical and non-physical) can be fully manifested. The healthiest state that a person could be in would be that of a new-soul incarnation who is fully self realized. That is, one who is optimally grounded and has cleared out any negative or obstructing influences which have been covering up or clouding that person's true nature as a full and undistorted Earthly manifestation of none other than fundamental consciousness - what you could call 'the Ultimate'. We are all manifestations of fundamental consciousness, but the soul degradation process over many reincarnations progressively increases the distortions and outright blockages in that manifestation process for each of us (actually not all of us, because some - mostly new-soul incarnations - make it 'back to Source' at death, thus escaping the astrally intruded degradation process).

For people at any stage or level of the degradational process, on the face of it, having a significant 'character structure' is a great hindrance towards self healing and self realization - but on the other hand, particularly for new-soul incarnations with the Ungrounded ('Schizoid') character structure, the latter often serves a useful function in drawing certain healers' attention to the person's true healing needs, and especially the grounding issue, thus enabling the person to at last start understanding what he needs to change in order to resolve various issues which have been troubling him, and to then be able to turn his life around in more of a self realization direction, towards a state of great balance and health in all his aspects, both physical and non-physical.