We are not not our personalities

There is an often posited stance that our personalities are an impediment to spiritual growth, but that undervalues and undermines the reason why we incarnate.

There is an affirmation that goes like:

I am not my body.
I am not my emotions.
I am not my thoughts.
I am my spiritual self.

What's implied by this is that our personalities are of no consequence and that we should be focused upon our higher selves. Now, while that may be relevant for the exercise in trying to decouple from our daily concerns so that we can get into a meditative state to be with our higher selves, its sentiment seems to have permeated a lot of attitudes and thinking in religious and spiritual groups about our bodies and personalities. This is often taken to the point of that it seems the only reason we have a body is to get out of it.

Certainly, we have seen a lot of religious practices that are intent on punishing our bodies in order to prove that we can resist its temptation and assert our dominion over it. This separation of body and soul is called dualism and leads to the idea that our bodies are the enemy of our spiritual development, or at least a significant impediment that undermines our efforts to reunite with our higher selves, as if that is the only reason why we are here on earth. But that begs the question of do we really need to incarnate to do that? That seems like an awful lot of wasted and nihilistic effort.

Perhaps we need to look at our incarnation not as a means of plotting an escape, but the means by which we can understand a deeper part of creation, where we focus upon exploring the many paths of understanding that this earth offers. It holds so many treasures but not if we demolish it, or try to hide ourselves away from it in our indulgences and addictions.

The earth allows us to explore our creative abilities, but we can only efficiently do that if we engage our higher selves for guidance rather than refuge or escape. We have so many opportunities to understand ourselves and our capabilities if we embrace our personalities as an extension of our higher selves down to the physical realm. By this integration, we can come to understand our place in the world and how we can help the evolution of humanity and the planet.