This book adds to the material presented in the first two books in this series. Experimental Spirituality puts forward in broad terms the purpose of human existence and the issues involved in being a spirit that repeatedly incarnates in a human body. It also introduces the concept of the five-layered self as a means to understand human psychospiritual make-up. Practical Spirituality examines the preconditions that apply when planning a life and how blockages and limiting psychological factors impede the realisation of an individual’s life plan.
The purpose of this book is to extend our examination of the human psychospiritual make-up utilising the paired concepts of true personality and false personality. Contrasting these two psychological aspects will cast light on why some lives achieve satisfactory conclusions and others conclude unsatisfactorily. Note, however, that in the sense intended here, satisfactory and unsatisfactory have nothing to do with whether a life was spent happily or unhappily, was easy or complex, or resulted in much or apparently little being achieved.
In our terms, satisfactory has entirely to do with achieving life goals and realising a significant percentage of the life plan – because, in fact, that life plan may have involved dealing with the consequences of unhappiness and learning to be strong through it, or with exploring complex and difficult situations or relationships, or in achieving what appears to have been only a little, yet achieving that little fully and in great depth. This is in contrast to superficially achieving much but actually going into situations half-heartedly and ending up poorly working through chosen tasks. On the spiritual level, as on the human everyday level, superficial evaluations can deceive.
Human psychology is complicated. It contains many locks. Our intention is to provide you, throughout this series of five books, with the keys you require to open those locks. Of course, not everyone wants this. The reason is not difficult to discern. The human psyche is a Pandora’s Box. Opening it releases undesired memories of all kinds of distasteful childhood incidents, along with nasty feelings and horrible thoughts, the reperception of which makes life miserable. Then there are the negativities in the psyche’s basement, at the very bottom of Pandora’s Box. Opening the door to the basement releases ghouls that shake perceptions, stir up anxieties, and destabilise even the most apparently stable life. Accordingly, it is understandable that very few people wish to open the Pandora’s Box of their psyche: they don’t want to deal with issues they have worked so hard to forget.
The situation is the same for spiritual seekers who wish to bathe in the heavenly glades of their spirit. They certainly don’t want to wade waist-deep in the fires of hell. Yet hell must be traversed. Why? Because otherwise individuals continue to carry unresolved trauma, negative emotions and attitudes, and self-limiting behaviours that, however well buried, and however long they remain hidden, will eventually flare up and burn to cinders the delightful glade in which they wish to stroll. And, of course, by “hell” and “flames” we do not refer to a nasty place or places the unwary may enter, although they certainly do exist. Rather, we refer to the negative aspects of the human psychospiritual make-up. Such negative aspects are psychospiritual because they are not limited to this life. Rather, they are carried from life to life. And if they are not addressed they continue to impact life after life.
We have grouped these negative and self-limiting emotions, attitudes, traits and behaviours under the rubric of false personality. In one sense this is an arbitrary demarcation, because no one actually possesses a false personality. What human beings possess is a collection of psychological materials, so to speak, that collectively shape their everyday identity. Much of this material is conditioned during childhood. Some of it is chosen prior to incarnation. Some of it takes the form of negative traits attached to the essence self. And some of it is brought into this life via deep essence.
To call this mass of psychological traits false is not technically correct, because it is present to provide obstacles the individual has chosen to deal with in this life for the purpose of learning how to better negotiate the difficult task of living as a spirit within a human body. So what we are calling false personality may equally, and definitely more accurately, be termed obstacle personality.
Just as validly, what we are calling true personality, being the collection of positive traits centred on the essence self and its moving, emotional and intellectual capacities, may more properly be termed the seeding personality. This is because these positive qualities grow as a result of self-transformation and contribute to the blooming of the evolving spirit.
This metaphor may be extended by comparing an individual’s growth to that of a grapevine. On the whole, vines develop grapes with the most intense flavours when they are in stony or well-drained soils. The principle is that when vines have to fight the environment for nutrition they develop greater flavour. The more they fight, the better the quality of the grapes. Similarly, it can be said that the more obstacles an individual spirit addresses and overcomes in its struggles to experience, learn and grow, the deeper the lessons it draws from its experiences, and the correspondingly greater its eventual levels of love, knowledge and wisdom. In this way obstacles and what is learned as they are worked through flavour the evolving spirit. To describe this transformation in developmental terms, positively overcoming obstacles, without impinging on others in the process, is a sign of increasing maturity. And the more complex and demanding the obstacle, the greater the resulting maturity.
So it must be noted that using the terms false personality and true personality as collective descriptions of negative and positive collections of psychological traits provides only a partial description of human psychology. The term false ignores what is useful in the supposedly false, and downplays the significance of obstacles for assisting in the development of positive traits and facilitating human maturity.
Nonetheless, the opposition of false personality to true personality does remain a useful piece of shorthand, because this opposition encapsulates another psychological truth about human incarnation – that a significant part of each individual’s psychology constantly and unwaveringly functions to distract human beings from fulfilling the most important reason they were born, that reason being to enter the situations, meet the people, and fulfil the tasks that together constitute the activities of their life plan.
Insofar as false personality fills individuals’ everyday awareness with desires, feelings and thoughts that distract those individuals to the degree that they don’t complete life tasks or fulfil their life plan, it may be said it “plays the individual false”.
Of course, the most significant aspects of the various psychological components that constitute false personality were actually selected prior to incarnation expressly to form an obstacle, and so they have a valid place within the individual’s make-up. Yet this does not lessen the fact that false personality leads individuals to be false to their own deepest self and its desires and plans.
What causes individuals to be false to their deepest desires and plans? Fear. Fear is the central emotion around which all the behaviours and traits of false personality are arrayed. So opening the Pandora’s Box of the human psyche involves addressing and working on the fears that underpin all negativities. Remove the fears and negativities lose their power to “play you false”. This book identifies the principle types of fears and describes how they shape the false personality’s chief feature. The qualities of true personality are then explored in relation to the essence self, along with how false personality impinges on the essence self. Our overall aim is to outline a process by which inner obstacles may be overcome and false transformed into true.
As with the previous two books in this series, this is a channelled text emanating from the spiritual realm, offered to those who wish to understand their situation on Earth and who are striving to realise as much of their life plan as motivation, opportunity and sustained effort facilitates.
We wish you well in your search for self-knowledge. May these words sprinkle a little extra sustenance on your identity in this incarnation, trickle down to your roots as they draw life lessons from the gravel in your life, and feed the fruits of your personal wisdom!
