Identity and the Magickal Personality

We’ve been watching Dollhouse recently, and great fun it is, too. A fairly well-written sc-fi series about people who are ‘imprinted’ with a complete personality and sent out to do various jobs. The drama arises out of the ethical problems arising from this and the ‘dolls’ having touble with different personalities surfacing at different times. There’s also stuff about nasty corporations etc, which can only be a good thing.
OK, this is just a piece of dramatic entertainment, but it has started me thinking about identity (or identities). Most of us have a concept of the ‘real’ me, with various aspects of that trotted out at different times. So Mocuar and I are husband and wife, we’re also parents and grandparents, Master and slave etc. These multiple facets exist in one form or another for must of us, and that’s pretty much the way the world goes.
It becomes a bit more complex when we start to work on the magickal personality (MP). Googling around for a definition of the MP, I found this. It's written from a wiccan point of view but it can be applied to any belief system. This paragraph puts it accurately, I think:

It is simply the creation of an alternate personality. In some ways this is a controlled schizophrenia. There is an occult philosophy that states that we are more than just body, emotions, subconscious and conscious. They include a spiritual part of our being that exists beyond the physical plane and our own perceptions, This is called by many names including our "high self". By creating a magical personality as a psychic reality we are also giving our "high self" a tool to use to communicate with us and to function with on this plane.

The key word here is 'controlled'. The MP is something we flow into, or invoke, at will. But before we can get there, we have to set it up. The first step is to find out what we really are and want to be, or if you like, our 'true will' (That can take some time!) Then we create the MP which matches that. In practice, I've found that the more honest and aware of myself I am, the easier the MP comes into being, almost as an organic process rather than a conscious creative act. Eventually the MP assumes it's own reality, it becomes, in effect, a person who's always there, the voice of our magickal selves.
What often happens then is that there may be a disconnect between our 'ordinary' self and the MP. This is because the MP can be a real smart-arse at times, always pointing out uncomfortable truths or directing us towards courses of action which we know to be right, but we still fight them. And the the resistance to the MP is always, and I do mean always, our hangups. This is particularly true of any sex magickal stuff. The hangups are more deeply rooted. Bloody Judao-Christian 'morality'. As it says in the Book Of The Law, 'I spit on your crapulous creeds.'

So in my case, the MP is The Master. Not just a master on a purely physical/sexual sense which I'm quite happy to see as part of my 'ordinary' self, but The Master. With capital letters.
I've mentioned this before, particularly my tendency to be over-cautious. Now The Master hasn't got a cautious atom in his being. He simply doesn't give a shit. He points me towards the goal and says "just do it". And that's OK, most of the time, but I sometimes find myself having reservations and pushing him away as a result. He doesn't care. He just sits back, grins and says 'Fine, do what you want, but you'll find out, sooner or later, that I'm right' And the damned annoying thing is that it always happens that way. Whenever I've given in to my caution I've always regretted it, and whenever I've gone with The Master, it's always worked out, even the failures have resulted in me learning something important that I otherwise wouldn't have done.
Smug bastard.

Or as the Book Of The Law says:
If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.
If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.

So who is the 'real me? My 'ordinary' self? The Master? The answer, of course, is that they both are. It's about where we place the emphasis. The ordinary me is fine for daily wear, as t'were, and as time passes there is less division between the ordinary me and The Master. So I try and ignore any resistance to The Master whenever it crops up. I find that works.
Mocuar often refers to her MP as 'being in my power'. When that happens, the different aspects of the self seem to work together, rather than being in conflict with each other. Things are cleaner, simpler and a hell of a lot more easy to do.

Many years ago, an old man I worked with once said to me "When you're old and looking back on your life, the only things you'll really regret are the things you didn't do" and he was right. Listen to that part of yourself that wants to go forward, to do the outrageous thing, to take the risk. You won't regret it.