What can change the nature of a person?

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Two examples where I have reason to know the subjects pretty well.

Myself, my currently Alzhemer father.

Start with him.

Oldest child of a rather fiercely opinionated lawyer [almost always seen scowling, vry close to my younger brother in style] and a pretty weird daughter of a clergyman who despised her papa [not unlike my sister].

Formy, as I will call him here - started out as a fairly cheerful easygoing boy. I have seen early pictures. Time passed. more siblings came and mama made it clear that Formy was no fun and totally uninteresting. Papa constantly chipping - he was big into verbal oneupmanship, when they visited I stayed out of the way. Formy found his niche, got married, produced among others me.

Big mistake. Divorce being what it was, action involving work, and me being there he could not leave, but he and my mother were totally wrong for one another. Hard times professionally, uncomfy marriage, hard finances.

Result - the father I know best was taciturn, uninvolved, unemotional save occasional temper outbursts. Gloomy, inclined {I have pictures] to watch his young with a look of pained frustration.

He was able to be loose with better students and at professional meets, where he could enjoy colleagues. But eventually walked out on my mama, became more unsteady, suspicious.

Finally Alzheimers - save for a couple bouts where he was scared, stress removed. Happy to see you, happy to talk [though at times frustrated that he really can't]. Basically, the happy little boy of the early photos.

My take: the happy little boy is the baseline, but with stress he gets into fight / flight which made him and us a lot less happy. If he had married someone who did NOT super stress him my childhood would have been very different.

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And, Yrs trly - I will try to keep this short. I am much as I seem - fulltime researcher fie with small groups of close friends, interested in all kinds things but a bit incline d - long time teacher - to take official notice of stupidity. Growing up I learned to kerep my mouth SHUT except with a very few safe people. If your mother and siblings and classmates and colleagues have no idea what you think they can't get at you

Three main high stress times in my life: early teens, 75, 85. Under high social and later professional stres which need not concern us, I became depressive, angry, ducking responsibilities and acting out by violating my principles so as to get back at the world. Much more devil may care, irrational.

The eagerly interested researcher happy to tell you his latrst discovery is my baseline - whenever stress has been removed I come back to it. But Philologos stressed is wildly looking for a way out and inclined to shoot up the cafeteria [not that I ever did].

Fool that I am, I dropped out the cat.

Two littermate Abyssinians - beauties. One a very normal cat personality - feed me, scratch me, you're okay but I have my own interests to pursue. He died young, i fear.

The other, maximally timorous. Affectionate once he got to know you, but very slow to decide you were no threat. Brought him into the house, he finds a nook and goes to hide in it, will not come out unless dragged.

I am out of town for research for a year. He his boarded with a three flatsharing grad students from the department, pretty normal US female grads.

Brought him to the place, sure enough, he RUNS to the back room and as far under the bed as he can get and will not come out.

So off for a year Come back - the cat is still quiet, still inclined to woory. But he is easy and affectionate, comes to be petted and to knead you.

Diagnosis - forced to live in a small apartment with highly social hmans, he learned that humans could be friends, sources and objects for affections, which life in a battery cattery had been too stressful to let him figure it out. His baseline is shy but affection craving.

We are as much our actions as we are our involuntary reactions. What you are taking as a 'baseline' is merely one facet of the overall nature of a person.

Certainly, in that certain defensive strategies are coded in as well as the God's in his heaven all's right with the world strategies - so that I sleek and at ease am as different from John McGuire at ease as I stressed to the max am from John at crush depth.

Which is where I come back to - I have yet to encounter an instance of nature change. Now one sees it alleged that the multiple personality types manifest some highly divergent patterns. And possibly thst would be where to look, But i would want to spend some tme with a few different outputs of a nondramatized case to have a sense of what is involved.

Good point. I'll have to consider this further.

The engine or e- motive force behind "us," can change direction with an "experience" if this is significant, (as mentioned). The substrate "you" -- all of your acquired memory, is the "baseline." Lose this baseline and you lost your "nature" as in a neurological disease, e.g. "Alzheimer's." Lose "will" -- (the emotive force that is tagged in this discreet storage of the memory event), as in an extreme psychological event, then the "you" becomes compartmentalized by a loss in non- verbal memory access. You could say a "change in his nature," as one example.

As far as the philosophical, you could say that an epiphany in knowledge of some sort, can change this "emotive force" or the force that actuates the mind. We heard or read of accounts of dramatic changes in behavior with a knowledge of something. " He's a different man, now." Is he really the same man? From a hard memory standpoint the prior data is the same, he certainly remembers everything, but it is now emotionally encoded differently or used differently, moving him in a different direction."For years upon years "I" thought I was going to burn in hell, now I'm a free man." The old data/memory changed significantly by a different emotional value of it-- all of it was revalued, the nonsense was discarded. Old memory died = born again. Hallelujah!

Most (if not all) of the responces on this topic so far (including my earlier one) have been about being changed or changing other people; how about changing yourself?

Underhill, Evelyn "Practical Mysticism

Of course, that is a mysticical concept and judging from previous topics on that subject there will not be much interest in doing it that way; however, I am curious, is anyone else interested in changing themselves?

A fine question:

Changing my basic style - not n the least. In my younger days, seduced by envy of more obviously successful or accepted styles, or led astray by the teachings of the Be Like Me cadre, I tried. Of course it failed miserably - the frog cannot become the size of an ox, nor can an ape ape even and apeman.

But I have today no motive to change in that way, anymore than I want to lose an eye, or add a hand, acquire a prehensile tail or finish my life female.

However, I would like sharper vision, feet that work better. I would not even mind being able to grow a beard that did not look ridiculous.

And similarly while retaining my style I would like to be a more enlightened, wiser, less rritable version of it.