beau said:
I've noticed it. It's really quite weird and amazing. Of course this is within the US/Canada region, so it's a relative notion but I still have found myself thinking how people in one place are so remarkably similar to people of another. They're like carbon copies, not only are physical attributes alike but also the personality.
I agree with the personality thing also being a mold. Barbara Ann Brennan has an interesting theory (although I'm sure she did not invent everything about it) that there are in fact 5 major character structures (schizoid, oral, psychopathic, masochistic, rigid) which develop according to the events/traumas during the childhood. We all have a percentage of all 5 structures but mostly one or two are really predominent. For example, the mostly schizoid personality has probably had a trauma with a hostile mother at birth or before. That child will develop a daydreaming personality, will try to live intense experience, because he is trying to feel something. He is very willing to leave his body (he will be interested in out of body experience, in death, in dreams, etc.). He's torn between his will to at last exist (his hostile mother prevented him to do so) and his wish to stop the masquerade and go back -to what he sees - as a better existence: in another dimension. His physical and energy barriers are generally loose and he is the first to be an unwilling victim of the psychopath. I say unwilling, because, in some ways the masochistic structure is willing, for example. Brennan goes on to talk about how a specific trauma forces the child to wear a 'mask' to compensate for the pain and that it even has an impact on the body, notably on the shape of the body, because, among other things, of accumulated drains or buffers.
The psychopath she is talking about is not the kind we usually talk about here, which a flaw in her system. She only talks about the kind which is developed throught traumas.
This explanation may seem simplistic because i don't want to go into a long post about that, but I wouldn't talk about these structures if I hadn't experienced their value in my Health Kinesiology practice. I have not found this system to be wrong once since I have tried to analyze my clients with it. Sometimes people react in unexpected ways and surely enough, i make some research about their structures, and it all makes sense. For example, i had this very controlling client. I ask her if she had a trauma at around 2 years old (time when this structure develops). She said that her mother abandoned her to her father. It was confirming the structure, but not the detail: this particular structure usually develop because of a betrayal of the parent of the opposite sex, in that case, it should have been the father. I asked her about her relations with her father. She told me that she had felt betrayed (her words) by a father for letting her mother go. And thanks to that structure, i had a better understanding of why she was the way she was, why she had blockages in her body where she had them, etc.
The book is called "Hands of light". It seems very new agey at first, but she used to work as a physicist for NASA and explains everything she sees (aura, energy, etc.) scientifically. It is truly fascinating.