The persona is the role that a person assumes in order to display his conscious intentions to himself and to others. “[It] comes from the Latin per+sona, meaning ‘to sound through.’ The persona were the large wooden masks worn by the actors in Greco-Roman theater. Hence, the persona is the form of an individual’s general character and attitude toward the outer world. The persona is a compromise between individual and society as to what a person should appear to be.” In that compromise we find much of the origin of human suffering.
Whenever society doesn’t like how we are “appearing,” we are pressured to repress those behaviors and those aspects of our persona into our shadow. When we deny certain aspects of ourselves, we overcompensate by becoming their opposite. This is the underlying dynamic that explains how we are indoctrinated into a story that bears little resemblance to reality and the creation of an identity that is unhealthy and at odds with our True self. Virtually all of humankind is then expressing behaviors that are to one degree or another inauthentic, self-destructive and unsatisfactory.
