All of us have a false nature that is presently acting as an intermediary between who we really are and the world around us. It is this same false nature that both creates and places us on the psychological battlefield, and that prevents us from directly experiencing life from our real Selves. This false nature is a result of jumble of our memories, conditioning, and some temperamental qualities. If you looked at the world through green lenses, everything you saw would be tinted green. Similarly, the false nature, which is a product of our past, can only see the flow of present events through the lenses of its experience.

There comes the temporary person who becomes in charge or TPIC (Temporary person in charge), a custom creation of the false self, is put into action to safely steer the individual through the circumstance. We rarely respond spontaneously, but mostly as we have done before. All forms of adaptive behavior learned to help free us in the present moment still leave us acting out of the false prison of the past. Each time a new challenge seems to come before us, yet another new TPIC pops up to handle it. As a result, from one moment to the next our behavior and our plans change, causing us to run through a gamut of emotions and thoughts within a short period of time.

From moment to moment, we bounce back and forth from one temporary personality to another. One is happy, and one is depressed. One is excited, and one is bored. Like a leaf in the wind, our mood and outlook are blown one way and another, with no central self in control. Each TPIC feels capable of handling whatever the new challenge may be, because it believes that it is independent of the condition it tries to control. But it is not. In reality, this temporary self now striving to call the shots for you didn’t even exist until the condition in question made its appearance before your mind’s eye.

Every action the TPIC takes to free itself of any troubling situation secretly confirms its initial mistaken interpretation that created that situation. This unconscious confirmation process secretly serves the false self in an unsuspected and sinister way. If the situation it sees looming ahead is real, then so must be that growing sense of self that you have no choice but to be its victim. TPIC may put on a show of solving the problem, but its efforts can never be successful because it always sees the cause of the problem in the external event. All its efforts in that direction must fail because the true cause lies within the false self and its self-imposed definition of the event.

Each new occurrence in life gives rise to another TPIC, and as each new TPIC pops into the driver’s seat, it brings with it a full explanation of who we are and what we must do to steer ourselves straight. These explanations appear so logical to us we are able to ignore any faint echoes from an old TPIC that may conflict with what the current self is saying. No matter what happens, the invisible superstructure of the TPICs remains intact.