Personality

Personality, like consciousness, life, soul, is not a brief-lived stranger in an impersonal Eternity, but contains the very meaning of existence.¹

Personality is regarded as a fixed structure of recognizable qualities expressing a power of being. Personality as a flux of self-expressive or sensitive and responsive being, character as a formed fixity of Nature’s structure. But flux of nature and fixity of nature are two aspects of being neither of which, nor indeed both together, can be a definition of personality.²

The Person puts forward the personality as his role, character, persona, in the present act of his long drama of manifested existence.²

The human individual is a very complex being composed of innumerable elements, each one of which is an independent entity and has almost a personality. The most contradictory elements are housed together. If there is a particular quality or capacity present, the very opposite of it, annulling it, as it were, will also be found along with it and embracing it.³

The basic three being evidently the triple status or world of Body, Life and Mind.⁴

The mental man tends to subordinate to his mental self-expression, mental aims, mental interests or to a mental idea or ideal the rest of his being. Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body.⁵

The vital self, the being of life, who dominates and rules the mind, the will, the action; then is created the vital man, concerned with self-affirmation, self aggrandisement, life-enlargement, satisfaction of ambition and passion and impulse and desire, the claims of his ego, domination, power, excitement, battle and struggle, inner and outer adventure.⁶

In some human beings it is the physical Purusha, the being of body, who dominates the mind, will and action; there is then created the physical man mainly occupied with his corporeal life and habitual needs, impulses, life habits, mind habits, body habits, looking very little or not at all beyond that, subordinating and restricting all his other tendencies and possibilities to that narrow formation.⁶

A truly harmonious personality implies a conscious arrangement of the inner individualities. But to succeed in this one must consciously take the psychic being as the centre and arrange, harmonise the various individualities around it. True harmony, inner organisation is the result of such a persistent effort.⁷

It is the individual personality which is transformed into the world-personality. Instead of having the sense of the individual, this little person amidst all the others, becomes aware of the world-individuality, the world-personality, and naturally becomes divine. It is a transformation. It is one thing being transformed into the other.⁸

When the individual has become a portion of the impersonality or the universal personality of the Eternal. No other object than the manifestation and play of the Divine Spirit in life and the maintenance and conduct of the world in its march towards the divine goal.⁹

The inmost being, the true personality, the central consciousness of the evolving individual is his psychic being. It is a very tiny spark of light lying in normal people far behind the life-experiences. In grown-up souls this psychic consciousness has an increased light—increased in intensity, volume and richness.¹⁰

When the psychic being holds this central position in the personality, everything becomes very easy.¹¹

The psychic being at the time of death chooses what it will work out in the next birth and determines the character and conditions of the new personality.¹²

For, in the Divine you do not really lose your individuality: you only give up your egoism and become the true individual, the divine personality which is not temporary like the construction of the physical consciousness which is usually taken for your self. One touch of the divine consciousness and you see immediately that there is no loss in it. On the contrary, you acquire a true individual permanence which can survive a hundred deaths of the body and all the vicissitudes of the vital-mental evolution. Without this transfiguring touch, you always go about in fear; with it, you gradually develop the power to make even your physical being plastic without losing its individuality.¹³

When one is able to live within, aware of one’s inner being, identified with it and to regard the rest as not oneself, as a creation of ignorant Nature from which one has separated oneself and which has to disappear and, secondly, when by opening oneself constantly to the Divine Light and Force and steadily pushes out the movements of the ignorance and substitutes even in the lower vital and physical being the movements of the inner and higher nature.¹⁴

Surrender is looked upon as an abdication of the personality; but that is a grievous error. For the individual is meant to manifest one aspect of the Divine Consciousness, and the expression of its characteristic nature is what creates his personality; then, by taking the right attitude towards the Divine, this personality is purified of all the influences of the lower nature which diminish and distort it and it becomes more strongly personal, more itself, more complete.¹⁵