Can we truly change ourselves?

An opinion from the Internet:

“It sounds like you’re saying that if we try hard enough in the correct circumstances, we can change. I agree with of course, but I still believe it doesn’t change your core traits on beliefs that have been deeply ingrained in you, which was my original point.

After 35 years of experiencing something one way, all the thinking in the world isn’t going to override the emotional response your brain will have made. And when I say made, I mean that literally, your brain has made a physical connection in it between stimuli and response. For example, dealing with a justice system that discriminates against the poor has made me hate ALL police and prosecutors. Logically, I know that they’re not all bad. I tell myself this all the time. But I can’t change how I feel about it, because of all the times that viewpoint has been reinforced in my life.”

I agree with you. Our original, instinctive layer of existence with its intellect, emotions do not change. What I tried to explain is that we can develop, learn a “second layer” on top of the original program, as if installing a new operating system on our hardware that complements the original.

Or you can look at it as if being “method actors”, practicing a new role to such an extent, that the new character becomes the new, dominant layer of our personality, with new clothing, new behavioral patterns to such an extent, that we identify with the new character more than we identify with the old, while both exist simultaneously.

But this does not lead to schizophrenia, as first of all, I am not doing this on my own, but I do this with other people, second, this new character will turn out to be our real character, life as if waking up from a coma, a dream we lived in before, since we will understand that so far we only used a very partial, very incomplete and distorted part of our being, and only the new character truly made us who we can become.

And one more way to look at it, where we are now is a very preliminary, undeveloped stage of our evolution, while we received the chance, ability to fast forward to a much more developed, qualitatively much higher state of our evolution and experience both layers parallel to each other, as if a slightly developed ape and a truly Human being could live in us side by side to help us in comparing the two states.