In My Father’s House are Many Mansions

People talk about 'character' as if it were as ingrained as eye color. It's not.
Many have heard of repressed memories; we all know we forget things. What is less acknowledged is how extensively our perception of things, and our reactions to them, can change.
We recognize ‘personality attributes’ like timidity, vanity, clumsiness, voluptuousness, sullenness, meticulousness, pretentiousness… in my thesaurus, these are ‘affections’. In reality, they're but transient. Many cues, or triggers, can radically alter personality. Sensitivity training, changes in gut bacteria, meditation, blood loss, sensory deprivation, hallucinogens and other psychotropic drugs, adrenaline, extremely altered circumstance, alcohol or unusual stimuli can open doors to personality change, if only temporarily. Some think psychoanalysis, religious conversion or military training can produce more permanent results (sometimes, anyway). But I think we don’t really have a handle on motivators, mood swings, what we call insanity or anything, really, about personality change. It may be because we believe too much in narrative story that requires characters with attributes (affections, affectations, attitudes, tendencies, characteristics). I say that’s like believing too much in maps or math.
A very small child won’t yet be thought of as sloppy, forgetful or good with money, and without the encumbrance or expectations, has freer rain and thus, often, surprising wisdom. But patterns develop, habits perhaps beneficial for enduring repetitive activities that help one endure. One with senses too wide open may well fail to be sufficiently self-protective to survive.
So aspects of ourselves, not just potential but once and occasionally active, become mostly walled off and forgotten. Eventually we can become hidebound, another danger to survival, in certain circumstances. When life is stable, old habits can be good, but flexibility, too, can be required even if sometimes not available.

Hidden away inside ourselves are, as it were, other selves, or other aspects of our selves, with other understandings, other ways of looking at the world, other attitudes and attributes, if not knowledge and skills. And when you find those alternative selves, you find alternate realities, and can’t be as cock-sure about everything as almost everybody in much of the modern world seems to have come to be anymore! There IS knowledge to be had, but the context and attitude within which it is held is everything.

Stupidity may often be just a form of self-image protection and a way to avoid the swirling confusions of recognizing too much. At the beginning of the ‘psychedelic revolution’ there were ‘trip guides’ to help ‘experimenters’ avoid that kind of confusion, but then quickly thereafter out-and-out self-indulgence became the rage…

In dreams you can experience other personas. I have also dreamt of vastly extensive attic spaces, once or twice with their own further attic spaces, and large underground spaces (I built and own a large rectangular underground house; in the dreams the various underground houses are almost always circular). Not entirely distinct from flying dreams, or ones where I walk or float on levels above other people, or dreams of finding things, these dreams please me. Sometimes it seems one has so little. But actually we have much more than we tend to acknowledge.