CHERRY PLUM relates to the principle of Openness and Composure.

When a Basic Personality is able to bear extreme external and internal challenges which would often stop or delay others, one likely has a Positive Cherry Plum perspective. This requires a full harmony between one's Higher Self and one's Basic Personality with the other Identity elements of Reptilian Structure, Ego (Personal values), and SuperEgo (Social standards) looking to one's Personal Spirit in trust. It is with such a dynamic that the individual can receive the insights and awareness required to cope with confidence with new and powerful forces.

A dependency upon one's Ego (Personal values) and/or SuperEgo (Social attitudes) to the exclusion of Spiritual Guidance, on the approach to times of critical change, is like having a trainee engineer being left in charge of a nuclear reactor just before it begins to fail and endanger safety. The Personality quickly adopts great fear from the realization that neither conscious Identity element is capable of the skills and knowledge that will be required to avert or resolve the growing emergency. The Identity potentially will become responsible for events which are projected into great disaster.

To recover from a negative Cherry Plum state, one must allow oneself to be open to new ideas and concepts which appear to threaten the orderliness and security on which the Ego and SuperEgo rest their significance. Perhaps known only as a husband and a public transit driver earlier, economic and health changes have now resulted in lay off and abandonment. Long-term held expectations and projections have now come to an end and the future looks bleak and bereft of options if one is to see oneself as a multiple failure and now worthless worker. This fantasy of the ideal future held through the past is now best to be reframed into the reality that change will always occur and an ideal future can only be built through a constant readjustment in the present in preparation for that future.