The Human Personality

The drama of our evolution begins when the soul enters the plane of time, takes the human form, and forgets her eternal essence. The soul does need the medium of the human in order to enter physical reality, but the moment she becomes limited to her human consciousness, she is sucked down into the dimension of ignorance. The equivocal nature of the human is that he both obscures the soul's essence and serves as the apparatus through which she awakens.

The human self cannot be separated from the complex structure of its personality and mind; it has no stable identity in itself. Although the human is an expression of the soul and the vehicle through which she evolves on earth, prior to her awakening she lies dormant. In his ignorance and alienation from the soul, the human remains alone, as if abandoned to live exclusively in the realm of ego. Before the soul can awaken, the human must awaken. Only by realizing the true purpose behind our creation from within our human existence can we return to the root of the soul.

Human life has two aims: completion within the personal dimension and the awakening of the soul. The need for personal completion is complementary to the soul's blueprint - it is necessary to fulfill her earthly destiny. The soul's evolution begins within the framework of her human personality and runs parallel to her human awakening. Through human longing, the soul awakens; through human completion the soul is freed; through human surrender, the soul transcends the earth.

The Structure of the Personal Self

Our human nature is very complex, because it reflects the complexity of the world around us and the mind that perceives it. Bound by a compulsive need for physical and psychological security, and threatened by a fear of our own extinction, we are forced into incessant interaction with the external environment in order to ensure our survival. We are programmed by an overpowering desire to prolong our own existence, at any cost. We experience the seemingly external world through our sensory gates, feelings and thoughts. Living in the realm of separation, we only can categorize our experiences in terms of polarities - positive and negative, attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, calm and agitation, love and hate. Because it is our human nature to instinctively pursue happiness and contentment, we desire experiences that our body-mind organism translates as positive and feel aversion to all that is disturbing and negative.

The physical, mental and emotional bodies are the outer shells of the soul, and represent the human personality. While we remain in an ignorant state, these bodies have a relatively autonomous existence, as they operate without any conscious connection to the soul. The human personality is actually a microcosm of the collective mind channeled through an individual stream of experience and memory. The psyche of a human contains the sum total of countless impressions, tendencies, associations and memories, a hologram of personal identity. Since he does not possess I am, the human borrows his sense of identity from the soul to create a unified sense of self from this scattered flow of psychological elements. This reflection of I am in the mind we translate as our sense of me, or ego. Although the human's existence is devoid of any real substance as long as he is unawakened to the soul, there is still a definite wisdom, continuity and purposefulness in his psychological existence. Our countless incarnations are linked together by the thread of evolutionary continuance.

Living in the World

The primary orientations of personality are the search for security and exploration of the outer world. The three bodies of personality - physical, emotional and mental - are conditioned to seek satisfaction through their interaction with the world. The physical body seeks pleasure, comfort and fulfillment through the medium of the senses. The emotional body seeks gratification through affection, love, attention, acceptance, and recognition. The mental body derives pleasure through the accumulation of knowledge and understanding, and by growing in intelligence. These three bodies are fully intertwined, each affecting the performance of the other. Beautiful music or stunning scenery experienced through the sensory gates of the physical body, create excitement and pleasure in the emotional body, and register as a thought in the mental body. The mind and emotions can never be fully separated; what we feel and what we think are always interconnected. Some humans live more through their emotions; others, more through the mind - but all of them feel what they think and think what they feel.

That which fuels our actions in the world is the force of desire. We live because we desire to live. We have been drawn to the earth because this is where we hope to fulfill our countless desires. The inability to reach satisfaction in this reality is caused by the illusory nature of these desires, which promise so much, yet rarely bring fulfillment. Some desires are perfectly natural, and in accordance with our growth, but most are generated by the greed of the mind and its perpetual state of dissatisfaction. The force of desire should not rule us blindly, for what we desire, we shall become. To live intelligently, we need to understand the nature of our desires and their possible outcomes. A human being should channel the energy of desire with discrimination, and in harmony with the deeper wisdom and purpose of evolution.

The Complexity of the Human Being

Human beings are too conscious to live in silence and too unconscious to transcend the mind. The human race is not able to handle the amount of self-consciousness originally allotted to it by evolution. Most species on earth have only enough consciousness to serve their earthly survival, but humans have become unnaturally disconnected from both the wisdom of the earth and the higher purpose of their evolution. Our spirit simply cannot catch up with the disproportionate development of our brain. By developing the mind, but remaining disconnected from our spiritual essence, we are at great risk of misusing our mental power, for selfish and exploitive purposes, and destroying our environment and ourselves in the process. Our intelligence is a gift that allows us to function efficiently in the world, but with this gift comes great responsibility. The intelligence of the mind has to be transformed so that its power will serve our spiritual evolution, expanding beyond our territorial instincts and primal need for survival.

Our psychological wellbeing is based on a delicate balance between the movement of thinking and the stillness of silence. The moment thinking overrides silence, our consciousness becomes unnaturally agitated and the resulting friction creates various states of neurosis and depression. The overactive mind undermines our basic sanity, the sanity of silence. Humans are too unconscious to intelligently use their consciousness; their mind is too heavy a burden. The human being is the only creature that suffers because of his own mind. No wonder there is so much suffering around us. The only way to transcend this fundamental disturbance is to become more conscious, transform the mind, and gain a deeper spiritual perspective.

The Art of Living

The chief characteristic of human existence is a discord between our natural desire to reach peace, harmony and love and our inability to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of their fulfillment. One of the solutions that various spiritual traditions offer to resolve this discord is the renunciation of the world. Relative renunciation is a valid option, but only for those who are comparatively mature, both in their spiritual and worldly existence. We enter the earth-plane not only to transcend it, but also to experience it fully. Although no true satisfaction can be found in the realm of illusion, to seek happiness is an integral part of our human life. To renounce and withdraw completely from the world is not the way, since we have chosen to be here and in any case cannot escape. To exist as a human personality is a challenge that we must face from a place of wisdom, clarity, humility and acceptance. If we do not pass through certain experiences and embrace the lessons they teach us, we will never become whole. Living in the world, we need to grow on two levels, psychological and spiritual. To master the art of living we must learn how to participate fully in human life while maintaining a relaxed detachment from the world, and growing inwardly into the realm of the self.

Free Will

Thinkers have long engaged in academic discussions over the question of free will. However, the existence of free will cannot be affirmed through linear logic or philosophical argument. Only by going beyond the mind and getting in touch with the deeper layers of our consciousness can we discover the power of free will inherent to our spirit and intelligence.

Beyond the question of the presence or absence of free will lies the far more important issue of its accessibility. The ability to access free will and its potency are determined by the level of one's evolution. Because most humans remain locked in the subconscious realm, which is completely conditioned and determined, they are cut off from the power of free will. Free will is a characteristic of higher intelligence and cannot operate within the mechanical mind. It requires a level of awakening; it cannot function in the state of forgetfulness. The more we become conscious and free from our false personality, the more our will is freed from the confines of the lower intelligence. As free will can only operate when it refers to pure subjectivity, it cannot fully emerge until the soul awakens. Only when we are in touch with the light of I am and connected to the soul's purpose can we begin to mature into the ability to access a will that is free from the determination of reactive consciousness.

The fact that we can exercise free will does not mean that we are free to do anything we please. It is not the ego that is free, but our consciousness of unity. There is no free will within the bounds of ego-consciousness, because the ego is too primitive to be in touch with real will. The ego merely imagines that it has the freedom to choose, while in truth all of its choices are karmic in origin, pre-determined by basic laws of cause and effect and subconscious tendencies. Our free will is an expression of the soul, our higher being, and operates in absolute consonance with the infinite will of the divine.

Free will signifies our intelligent cooperation with the evolutionary movement and wisdom of the universal whole. Having slept through countless incarnations in a repetitive cycle of unconscious living, we must finally empower the free will of our intelligence and unite it with the higher purpose of our awakening and completion. It is from the place of free will that we begin to serve true wisdom and our highest good and initiate the process of growing into the light of the self.