As I imagine you know, the earliest shock therapy practitioners took this concept to a horrify level by attempting to "fix" troubled patients by erasing their personalities entirely. It didn't work.

But the idea that we have qualities of personality at birth has always been part of Eastern culture.

Unfortunately, in Western cultures we've too long convinced ourselves that man should only believe what he has either tested in a lab or thought up himself.

The respect for anecdotal knowledge, even if passed on through centuries of lived experience, was largely ignored in favor of what we could touch, see, smell, and recreate.

Until recently, it seemed to me as if we constantly confused the map with the territory--and when there was a contradiction between the two, the map won!

It is nice to know that this has slowly been changing as people have continued to evolve.

Great article!