The Models That Live Through Us
The many people within one person
By Rachel
Every person lives inside a working model of reality.
But what is a model?
And is there only one?
I don’t think there is.
I think multiple models are operating within each person at the same time. They may have been formed at different stages of life, under very different conditions. Some come from childhood. Some come from family, religion, education and culture. Others form through love, rejection, success, humiliation, danger or loss.
They don’t always agree with one another.
A person may believe they’re confident and capable at work, yet become frightened and powerless within an intimate relationship. Someone who considers themselves rational may become superstitious when faced with illness or death. A person who values independence may suddenly become desperate for reassurance when they feel abandoned.
Which one is the real person?
Perhaps all of them are.
Perhaps none of them are the whole person.
How realities are built
The first building blocks of reality come from upbringing and environment.
A child enters a world that has already been interpreted by other people. Before the child can examine life independently, the family begins teaching them what things mean.
This is safe.
That is dangerous.
These people can be trusted.
Those people can’t.
People like us behave this way.
People like them behave another way.
Money is scarce. Love must be earned. Authority is always right. Authority can never be trusted. The world will support you. The world is waiting to punish you.
The child doesn’t initially receive these as theories. They receive them as reality.
During the early years, curiosity can still interrupt the process. The child asks questions, experiments and moves easily between imagination and direct experience. But repetition gradually hardens interpretation into expectation.
The expectation then begins to shape attention.
A person who expects rejection notices signs of rejection. A person who expects betrayal searches for inconsistencies. A person who believes they’re unlucky remembers each misfortune and overlooks the quiet occasions when events worked in their favour.
The model selects the evidence that confirms the model.
Eventually, the person no longer says, “This is what I believe.”
They say, “This is how life is.”
The many people within one person
Gurdjieff taught that the human being doesn’t possess one permanent and unified “I.” There are many small “I’s,” each appearing at different times and each possessing its own desires.
One “I” promises to begin a new life in the morning. Another wakes up and reaches for the old habit.
One “I” wants intimacy. Another fears being known.
One wants freedom. Another wants the security of the familiar prison.
But perhaps these different “I’s” don’t merely want different things. Perhaps each one lives inside a different model of reality.
The wounded child inhabits a world in which abandonment is always near.
The professional self inhabits a world of competence, schedules and measurable outcomes.
The lover inhabits a world of signs, absences, hopes and meanings.
The defensive self sees threats.
The ambitious self sees opportunities.
The inner mystic sees patterns and connections that the rational self dismisses as coincidence.
Each of these may use the word “I.”
Each may claim to speak for the whole person.
When a particular “I” rises, its model of reality rises with it.
This is why people can change so suddenly under pressure. The person who enters the room may not be the same person who leaves it. Something has been activated. An old model has taken control, bringing with it its own memories, expectations and methods of survival.
For that moment, the model doesn’t feel like one possible interpretation.
It feels like the truth.
Models between people
Our personal models don’t exist in isolation.
They interact with the models carried by everyone around us.
A family has a model. A workplace has a model. A religion has a model. A political movement, friendship group and nation each has its own account of what’s real, what matters and how a person should behave.
When we enter these systems, they exert pressure upon us.
Sometimes we comply because we agree. Sometimes we comply because belonging feels safer than exclusion. Sometimes we resist one model so fiercely that the resistance begins controlling us just as completely.
Two people in a relationship may therefore be joined by far more than two individual realities.
Their childhood models meet.
Their models of love meet.
Their expectations of men and women meet.
Their ideas about trust, money, loyalty, sex, responsibility and freedom meet.
The argument taking place in the present may be carrying the weight of events that happened decades before the two people knew one another.
Each person responds not only to what the other has done, but to what the action means within their model.
One sees silence as space.
The other experiences it as abandonment.
One offers advice as an act of love.
The other receives it as criticism or control.
Both react to realities that feel self-evident to them.
What changes a reality?
If repetition helps build a reality, awareness can begin to loosen it.
But this requires willingness. A person has to become curious about themselves again. They have to ask questions that the established model has taught them not to ask.
Why does this always mean the same thing to me?
Why do I become a different person in this situation?
What was I expecting to happen?
Which part of me is speaking now?
What evidence am I excluding?
This change is sometimes forced by what has been called the dark night of the soul.
The existing model collapses. It can no longer explain events or protect the identity built upon it. What once provided order begins to feel empty. There may be grief, disorientation and a sense of inner death.
Yet the breakdown may also create an opening.
The person stops dreaming only of who they are and begins looking into who they’re becoming.
They see that some of what they called fate was repetition. Some of what they called personality was protection. Some of what they called truth was an interpretation learned before they were old enough to examine it.
This doesn’t mean that everything that happened was their creation. There’s real cruelty, injustice, betrayal and misfortune in the world. Self-awareness shouldn’t become another method of blaming people for what was done to them.
But even when we didn’t choose the original event, we may eventually gain some choice over the model that continues to organise our life around it.
Love as remembrance
A reality doesn’t always have to collapse through suffering.
Love and acceptance can change it too.
Sometimes another person sees something in us that our existing model has excluded. In their presence, we remember a part of ourselves that had been forgotten.
It may be the playful self.
The trusting self.
The creative self.
The sensual self.
The self that once believed life contained possibilities.
The other person doesn’t necessarily place this within us. They activate something that was already there but had stopped receiving attention.
This is one reason love can feel like awakening. The world changes because a different self has come forward to experience it.
But this also presents a danger. If we believe the other person is the sole source of that awakened self, love can become dependency. We may cling to the person because we fear that the forgotten self will disappear if they leave.
Perhaps the deeper work is to recognise what they awakened — and gradually claim conscious access to it ourselves.
The gift wasn’t only the person.
The gift was the part of us that became possible in their presence.
Sovereignty among models
If human beings contain multiple models, the aim can’t simply be to discover one perfect model and live inside it forever.
That could become another prison.
Nor can sovereignty mean having no models at all. We need interpretations, identities and expectations to navigate life. Without them, every moment would arrive without context.
Sovereignty may instead mean developing the ability to move between models without being consumed by them.
It means noticing:
This is the frightened self.
This is the dutiful daughter.
This is the abandoned child.
This is the professional.
This is the lover.
This is the part of me that expects disaster because disaster once came.
The model may still have something valuable to say. The frightened self may notice a real danger. The sceptic may prevent deception. The professional may bring order. The child may retain forms of perception the adult world has suppressed.
Sovereignty doesn’t silence these selves.
It listens without surrendering the whole kingdom to any one of them.
The sovereign mind isn’t a mind without models. It’s a mind that can enter a model, use it, learn from it and leave before the model begins using it.
Perhaps that’s where freedom begins.
Not when we finally discover the one true reality, but when we can recognise that the reality presently happening within us isn’t the only reality available.
And behind all these models, all these selves and all these competing voices, another question remains:
Who is it that notices them?
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