Cultivate a Caretaker Personality
Another happiness strategy to enhance your state of mind is to reshape your personality, and take on the caretaker personalities.
What is caretaker personality?
You can adopt caretaker personalities to work in the world. These are uniforms that you wear, clothing that you put on and that you also take off. Wear that caretaker personality which is apropos, which is appropriate, for what you are doing. Don’t be afraid to be creative and change these caretaker personalities. Modify them as you will and you’ll find that they tend to modify themselves in time.
What are these personalities?
The first caretaker personality is the child, the second is the warrior. One is appropriate in one situation, the other in another situation. You’ll find it easier and easier to alternate them as the flow of consciousness becomes freer in your being from your meditation.
The caretaker personality of the child is innocence. Just think of the idyllic qualities of the child – excitement, love, trust, humility, purity, joy. I’m speaking of a very young and good child about age four – the child who looks with wonder and awe at all of the world, who sees magic in everything, who is not preoccupied with her or himself, who becomes absorbed totally in the moment. The child doesn’t give up or get frustrated because things don’t work out the way she or he had planned, because a child doesn’t plan.
The child lives in the moment. If the child meets with a frustration and cries and is upset, within a moment the child can be running off to play someplace else, having forgotten, not being hung up. The child doesn’t sit around and live in the world of memory; all that matters is the moment. You can choose to enter into this mode of consciousness when you’re with friends whom you can trust; who love you and whom you love; when you’re with yourself; when there’s no one else around; in other words, when it’s safe. The child should not be around people who would abuse it because a child has no natural defenses. Its own innocence will not necessarily protect it.
When you deal with the world more directly, I suggest the caretaker personality of the warrior. The warrior is calm and efficient. The warrior uses discipline. The warrior is happy. The weapon of the warrior is laughter. The warrior learns to be impeccable, to use her or his life as a way of attaining liberation. The warrior also is always at the beck and call of others. While the commoners in the land may have fallen down to the lower depths, you rise above that, and even while others may not be interested in nobility of the soul, courage, valor, self-giving, sacrifice, dedication, kindness to others and protecting those who are weak, the warrior does these things.
The warrior never feels sorry for him or herself. The warrior doesn’t have time for self-indulgence, for self-pity. The warrior does not have personal history, although the warrior carries the sword of discrimination and certainly learns from experience.
“You can think of an image of the warrior and you can adopt this mode. Just put yourself into that place, into that consciousness, when you go out and deal with the world. Remember that the warrior, the real warrior, is always humble, as is the child. That’s their true condition: humility” (Rama).
Use these two caretaker personalities in the first years of your meditative practice. After years of meditation, and when you live only for the welfare of others – not just as an idea, but you’re of service to others 24 hours a day – when you’ve swept the island of your being completely, then there are some other forms you can use.
The meditationclub.com site has more info about the topic, read this PDF: reincarnation.pdf
Rama’s talk about the caretaker personalities is available on Youtube: