At some point in life, we are all going to undoubtedly need a paradigm shift, a shift from the first half of life to the second half of life. A paradigm shift to love which is the transformation to your Sacred Self. Sooner or later, there will be a necessary letting go. We will have to let go of everything that is false, everything that is unreal, and we will need to move back towards authenticity, towards what people call your higher self and what we call your sacred self. This work could change your life. Top to bottom. Let’s get into it thoroughly.
Stress and trauma are part of everyone’s life. The way our lives are socially constructed means that we need to develop defence mechanisms, and defence is the first act of war upon ourselves and the way we see the world. We are born into a world that is increasing in momentum, in pace with time and space, the most valuable of commodities. We grow up isolated, alone, and afraid. Our parents are stressed, and they are stressed because their parents were stressed. They move into a world that requires their time and their space. We grow up with one or two parents who are stressed. They move into a world that requires their time and space. What we need to understand is that everyone was stressed and traumatized at some point.
Barriers and boundaries had to be built. Walls had to be erected. We had to develop certain traits to survive. When we developed these traits, we suppressed our true emotions. We developed an outer self and an inner self, one that is seen by the world and one that is a shadow that we can no longer see. This is how addictions, depression, personality disorders are born. They are created. They don’t just appear, and it’s not just luck of the draw. We develop eventually a personality, a persona developed by millions and millions of traits that become perfectionistic, controlling, neurotic, and codependent, to name just a few. And this is what we would call necessary suffering, the necessary suffering of being human.
When our basic needs weren’t met as children, we carry this into adulthood, where eventually the truth will out. The truth needs to set us free, and it is uncompromising with its task. We operate in a world with five senses sight, sound, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. That’s how we interact with the world on a very sensory level. Our fears need soothing. That soothing later on turns into addictions, personality defects, and inflammation and disease. Anytime we’re in fear, we’re entrenched in our personalities, our masks, and our personalities are all created on a shaky foundation of fear.
Life refuses to be denied or held back for too long. The transformation to your Sacred Self will become necessary when you have endured enough suffering to let go of your need to control and let Life have you
Mark L Lockwood
The Paradigm of Personality
Our personalities are a combination of all the qualities and characteristics that helped develop our character and our traits. Our interests, our self-conception, and our drives. Our brains are hardwired for fear. Everything that we experience only through the five senses comes through and is scanned primarily for fear. Our brains are hardwired for survival.




Now, if we had a sixth sense, if we had a sense for ultraviolet rays, which are probably in the room with you now, you would be able to know that they’re there, but you cannot see them. Just like we cannot see fear. Our personalities define our archetypes, who we are going to be. We may be a sage or a scholar, a king or a priest, a warrior or an artist. How we win fire has been developed over decades of actions. Our actions are motivated by the fact that we are trying to avoid our greatest fears, and most of our most debilitating fears shape and mould our personalities. They build our characters. They make us stronger if they close us off and make us feel powerful. But power means to take action, right? Action, in other words, to be powerful means to live the life you want to live, an authentic life, a good life. But we become powerless, unable to face our fears, and unable to take the actions we want to take. And soon enough, our very own masks begin to suffocate us.
Fear of change, loneliness, and fear of rejection, uncertainty, feeling of being judged or loss of control are based in fear. Fear builds our masks. One of our biggest fears becomes change, our fear of uncertainty, fear of failure, rejection, and even fear of missing out. Losing control or being judged keep us from showing our authentic selves. And if we’re not acting from a place of authenticity, we’re lying. We’re not speaking the truth, and pain and suffering manifest soon enough. “I shall not lie” really means that we should not hide who we really are from the world or ourselves, for that matter.
The journey of the transformation to your Sacred Self might just be the most important journey of our lives. It’s the journey we take within ourselves. So our personality that was once there to serve us, protect us, and keep us safe and secure starts to throttle and choke us out over time. Our personalities end up seeking control rather than self-love, authentic love for self, God, and others. They seek out and desire control, perfection, and freedom from fear, which of course they never find. Like attracts like, that is the law of attraction. Fear attracts fear, and the personality is very limited in what it can attract.

As divine human beings, we’re on a journey, growing every day, becoming more conscious. We have a need to heal, grow, and contribute, a powerful need that no one can ignore. First, we must become aware. We must become conscious that we’re on a hero’s journey, a journey back to our sacred selves. And we must cross an abyss, an abyss from certainty to uncertainty, from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the limited to the boundless. We must take that journey, knowing consciously that we’re on a journey. It’s the beginning of a physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual awakening. We move from being five-sensory to multisensory and then to extra-sensory perception, where we can see beyond seeing, where we can start to understand who we are and the journey we are undertaking. This is true intuitive power.
It is the moment we turn from fear towards love. Love is the most powerful emotion that exists, there’s no stronger force or energy in the universe other than love. In the end, only love will remain. When we start to use our intuition, we start to realize that something is wrong, that we are addicted, depressed, anxious, and afraid. And we start to seek more. We move out of fear towards love. We move out of the darkness and into the light, light which we have not had the capability to understand until now.
When we move from the sensory to the multisensory and to the extra-sensory, we can use our intuition to set our intentions, to set our course towards finding the pathway back to our sacred selves, the self that does not need depression, anxiety, or addictions. It does not need to be ruled by fear any longer because it is able to bear mystery, uncertainty, and the unknown. Something which our personality might not have been ready for in the past.
Intuition is a guiding light. Oftentimes we cannot see until we are ready to see until we need to see. The beginning of a paradigm shift that is the transformation to your Sacred Self, we must understand that this whole organism called a human being is designed to survive, to control its environment. When trying to control our environment, we use fear. We lose respect for ourselves, self-love, and the most powerful force in the universe, and fear spreads in all its many forms, like wildfire. Trying to control the world, if we don’t understand that we are unable to manage the world with our senses, we engage with it. Taking a paradigm shift to love, we’ll have feelings of losing control, feelings of fear that show up as shame, depression, anxiety, and stress. Eventually, we can even believe that the dream of life is a nightmare. With enough fear, we can start to hallucinate, hear voices or feel like we are being controlled. Our desire for control is rooted in a fear of uncertainty, and so we develop to survive, we create our own defense mechanisms.

Know thy defence mechanisms
Our defense mechanisms are like a small army, an army of ego insurgents. Your ego insurgents are the containers for your early emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Your ego insurgents will do all that they can to defend your personality with the impenetrability of a Sherman tank. But they are not you. They are the mind’s outdated operating system. Your ego insurgents fought hard for you and kept you alive all this time. They’ve done their job of allowing you to survive. Now, they’re hardwired into our brains. This hardwiring works for children and people in the first half of life, but not for those on a sacred quest, on a journey to grow, experience the fullness of life, and our own unlimited nature. Our ego insurgents have taught us not to speak about these traits and characteristics. They’ve taught us to keep these things inside. If anyone sees them, they’ll judge, laugh, or criticize us. So we bury them inside. Only a feeling of emptiness, a feeling of loss, a feeling of being devoid of direction remind us that they’re still there. This is why the transformation to your Sacred Self becomes a necessary journey that life insists you take.
Your ego insurgents develop supervisory voices inside your head that keep you away from self-love and fixated on control. They keep you away from gratitude and judging, so you can never quite rest. Insurgents are built on fear and thrive on negative reinforcement. They tell us we’re not good enough, that we could always do better. They ridicule and blame. This internal critic is highly empathic and strongly rooted in the most basic needs for safety, food, and shelter.
To find your sacred self, you’re going to have to leave the stressed world you were born into. You’re going to have to take the reins and, in doing so, take control. But this time, authentic control. Control that comes from a place of self-love, deep and empathic love. You’ll have to leave your culture, your ethnicity, and even your gender behind. Your sacred self is not bound by such things. Divinity knows no bounds. It will require a shift in your consciousness, a total paradigm shift.
A paradigm shift is a change in thinking from thinking one way to another. It is a scientific revolution of the self, the self that is physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. It is not only a personality and nervous system of the five senses. It is more than that. It is a sacred self. It comprises soul, spirit, and sacred self. No need to move past your assumptions, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. It is a change that goes beyond our concepts, our worldviews, and our practices. It is a shift from fear and the unconscious to love consciousness, to understand that everything is ultimately rooted in love.
If we use our contemplative intelligence long enough and practice often enough, we will understand that we are all one, all brothers and sisters. Perhaps this is why St. Francis of Assisi used to say, “Brothers and sister men, brother river, sister tree.”
The paradigm shift is a model or pattern for something that can be copied, just as this world is a carbon copy of the next. So our paradigm shift that is the transformation to your Sacred Self, away from personality to sacred self is the same. Living 90 to 100 years means that at some point we will run out of time unless there was an opportunity for spiritual awakening, a shift to higher consciousness. We do this through practice, and the first part of practice is awareness.
Awareness of the journey, awareness of who you really are. Do you know who you really are? Have you had a voice deep within asking you about who you really are? What you’re really doing here? This is the subtle voice that calls us towards waking up. There are ten strong personality types, ten dominant ego insurgents that fortify and protect our persona, our masks, our personalities. When we get to know the controller insurgent, the perfectionist insurgent with us leading us astray, the neurotic, codependent, eccentric, the victim insurgent, and the actor, the pleaser, the judge, and the anxious insurgent. When we get to know the enemy, we start to succeed, we start to truly shift, we start to recover who we really are.
Letting go of what no longer works for us, and in return, for doing the work on letting go of inauthenticity, of fear-based manifestations of personality that we’ve created, we recover that deep sense of who we really are, and we start to love the self once again. Love is so powerful, it attracts gratitude, surrender, connection, certainty, and helps us recover a sense of resilience.

10 Pathways back to your Authentic Self
The Ten Pathways Back to Sacred Self help us understand a life of presence rather than fearfully running into the past or into the future. We’re able to open up, show up, grow up, and a paradigm shift to love that is the transformation to your Sacred Self moves us beyond what we created out of fear in childhood, moving beyond what no longer serves us. We start to recover a sense of self-regulation, a deep sense of wisdom, and then we find our courage, courage to lead an authentic life. The courage that helps us understand and sit with our sacred selves and other sacred selves, of which there are 8 billion of us at the moment, all on a quest for authenticity, a quest for light and truth, a quest for love.
This is the paradigm shift process, the transformation to your Sacred Self, that we embark on today, one step at a time. We’ll move through the ten ego insurgents that are most strongly rooted in fear, the insurgents that defend us and hold us back from opening up. Insurgents that keep us away from empathy, emotion, and love. This journey is about taking control of the controller, releasing the perfectionist, quieting the neurotic, and soothing the codependent. It is about aligning your personality with your sacred self, dissolving and integrating, transcending and including. We don’t need to leave anything behind; we just need to take control, take the reins, and become authentically human and spiritual at the same time.
And so, this is the journey of how we evolve, of how we return to love through a new consciousness, a collective universal consciousness based on authenticity. When we realize who we are, fear flees. It runs from us as we develop a relationship with ourselves, with the world, with others. We develop a new social construct, one that is not based on stress, fear, and disease, but one that is based on gratitude, community, and belonging. When we dissolve the personality and integrate it, we grow. When we transcend the personality, we become free. And when we start to include instead of separating, fear, we become free. We regain our resilience and our creativity begin to unfold just as life is unfolding, just as the Big Bang is still unfolding. Light has not changed how it operates because it is authentic and true.
Emotions of depression, anxiety, and stress carry low energy. Feelings of connection, gratitude, and self-love carry immense, unlimited power. Power that you will find for yourself again. Your codependency and people-pleasing will be transformed into connection as we move from a survival mind to a thriving mind. We will develop acceptance beyond significance and move beyond disordered personality to a thriving personality.
This is a paradigm shift to love on another level. A paradigm shift to power. It moves us beyond disconnection towards love and affiliation. It moves us from the ego towards connection and contribution. When we are contributing, pain dissolves. Suffering is no longer necessary. When we’re all contributing, we’re part of one universal community, a community striving towards love. Returning to love, we use the ten pathways back to our sacred selves to discover who we really are. We learn on this journey, how to heal, integrate, and thrive. We move from an intellectual understanding of where we are, a sensory understanding of who we are, towards a more emotional understanding of who we are. We develop our IQ and open our hearts. When we open our hearts, we no longer need to stay depressed. We’re destined to thrive, to love with emotional awareness. We’re destined to create something beautiful as we are all being turned and created into something beautiful. So in turn, we will create beautiful things. This is simple science, simple math. It is each and every one of our responsibilities to wake up and choose love. We cannot suppress and repress. We must develop a higher intelligence, a contemplative and creative intelligence, or CQ, our highest intelligence. It allows us to look at reality exactly the way it is, ourselves exactly the way we are, and other people exactly the way they are.
There are 8 billion people in the world today embarking on the transformation to your Sacred Self along with you, all of us with different perspectives and viewpoints, and yet there’s still one singular reality, one truth that we are all striving to understand. We ask, give, and explore. At some stage in life, we will discover that what we are thinking will never quite give us the answers we need. Thinking always tends to end in more questions, leaving the mind afraid, seeking control, leaving the soul unsatisfied. So what we need to understand is that we need to go above our thinking, we need to transcend it. In science, we would call this metacognition. We need to go above our intellectual capabilities, our sensory capabilities, and understand why IQ and EQ will lead us to a place where we become the creators, contemplative, pulling out of reality from the contemplative field.
What we choose, what we love, what we choose will be joy, bliss, gratitude. We will choose all. This is the spiritual and holy journey of contemplative intelligence. It leads us back to our sacred selves. Charles Difficult said that faith strips the masks from the world and renders meaningless such words as anxiety, danger, and fear. So the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy, like a child hand in hand with his mother.
Although we have around 85,000 thoughts a day, most of these thoughts are derived from our five senses, the same as they were yesterday and a decade ago. They’re the same as when we were two years old, fearing rejection, isolation, and being alone. Most of these thoughts no longer serve us, and that is why we find that 98% of people are spending 98% of their time on things that don’t matter.
A Contemplative Conclusion
Moving beyond your personality, back towards your sacred self, is a divine place where mind and spirituality meet. A Course in Miracles reminds us that perfect love casts out fear. If fear exists, then there is not perfect love, but only perfect love exists. If there is fear, it produces a state that does not exist.
When we return to authenticity, finding out who we really, really are, we understand that the sacred self cannot be jailed, our hearts cannot be contained. Our destiny is not to live a life with fear and all its attributes. We need to allow love to liberate us. We need to be conscious that we are creative, and when we start to awaken, we start to create a new self, an authentic self, a powerful sacred self. We transcend the old but include it. We dissolve the personality but integrate it. And we become better human beings. Cognitive will become creative, contemplative will become powerful. We will be able to choose love over fear at every turn.
Namaste and blessings to you as you take the journey of the transformation to your Sacred Self with us along this journey with us.
