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Transcending The Plane of Personality
Personalities can be fun and delightful. If you look back on all the happiest moments of your life you will find that your personality was deeply and powerfully engaged in those moments. You had fun because it was so fun to be you in those moments! And the brightest portions of your personality were able to shine. You were witty, sexy, warm, talented, strong, etc. Your personality played nice with the other personalities around you. Smiles, laughs and other forms of delight were shared.
But we all know that our personalities are not always like that. They can take us down. We can be petty, frazzled, freaked out, irritated and irritable. The personalities of others can enrage us. The world of conflict is a world of clashing personalities when all boiled down.
Our happiest AND unhappiest moments all play out on the Plane of Personalities. My 'I', your 'I', meshing or clashing, finding something interesting and enjoyable to share or something irritating and infuriating to start a fight about. Or a war.
If we were nothing other than our personalities then I suppose that little could be done about this. Insofar as I identify exclusively with my personality, then I sink or swim alongside it. And this collective plane of personalities we all inhabit would be the only game in town.
However, we are not limited to our personalities, and recognizing this holds great promise for us both individually and societally. Our personalities are merely our expressions, emanations from a higher source of consciousness. Learning to engage with your personality on YOUR terms rather than its has great benefits. If everyone learned how to do this, we'd be expressing societally at a much higher level.
I should explain how I am defining personality. I just pulled this up from Oxford: "the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character.” I think that is pretty clear, but I am also using it to define your sense of 'I/myself'. Basically the person that you identify as, the one who chooses what to buy, what to read, whom to vote for, where to go on vacation and what to do on the weekend. When and how to ask for a raise, etc. ALL of that is your personality, as I define it. Your body as well. At least in terms of how you relate to it and think about it. If you are critical of your body, it is your personality criticizing the apparatus it inhabits. If you are proud of it, your personality is what enjoys what looks back at in in the mirror. If you are uncomfortable due to maladies and ailments, it is your personality that feels the way you feel about all of that. Body ailments can make us depressed, for example, and it is the personality that experiences the depression.
All of this can be summarized as 'self sense' or 'my sense of I'. Your personality is reading this right now and forming thoughts around what you read, perhaps agreeing in part and disagreeing in part. Choosing to continue reading or not. Hopefully that is clear. Now, the wrench I throw into the works at this point is my insistence that this 'self sense' is FAR from what you actually are. You are no more your personality than your hand is your body. It is by missing out on the larger identity that we come to feel exclusively identified with our personalities and therefore more or less trapped within them. We misidentify as personalities, in other words.
The Plane of Personality IS the human experience. It is every artist's urge to create art and every tyrant's desire to claim power. It is every twisted individual's enjoyment of cruelty and every kind person's generosity of spirit. Personality identifying as self, and personality interacting with other personalities. And every goddam war in between.
People typically consider the personality to be that which one invests nearly all of one’s time and energy into, from anywhere up to 100 years, and then not at all. Life goes on for others, while one’s own personality is simply culled from the machinery of life. We obsess over ourselves, our concerns and our ambitions until our bodies can no longer sustain us, and then all is darkness.
How pointless it all seems, doesn't it? Given this concept, does it not seem that the whole point of the personality is to merely busy itself for a tiny sliver of time and then disappear along with all its obsessions, fascinations, met and unmet goals, acts and musings? And all those wars, WHAT were they for? Merely so some temporary personalities could vent their anger at other personalities they felt wronged by, when all becomes erased by time anyway? The passions that Israelis and Palestinians feel today are the same passions the Egyptians and the Hittites felt in a war that nobody ever thinks about anymore that took place 4000 years ago. Meaningless hatred, meaningless slaughter, erased by time and replaced by a fresh batch of personalities. If I'm wrong, please correct me.
Is there anything beyond this, and much more importantly, is there a way OUT of this?
I say there is.
We live in a time of great social turmoil, and personalities are agitated. I hardly need to go through the litany of global calamities one by one to call them to mind. Yet, calling them 'global' can itself be misleading, because each of them are comprehended and considered at the level of personality. What does climate change mean to YOU? What does the Palestinian genocide mean to ME? What do Trump's economic fiascos mean to someone else? What does that whole mix of uncertainties and tragedies do to one's personality? How does the personality cope, or does/can it cope? All played out on the level of individuals, billions of them. The Plane of Personalities. We experience our own fears, our own worries; no one else's. The fears are collective, but experienced person by person.
And yet, consider: if you are reading this, it is likely that your personality's journey has already moved through decades of time. If you're anywhere close to my age, then the lifespan of your body has less time in front of it than behind it. Mere decades from now, you don't expect to be here, and once that candle goes out, every thought goes with it. The personality that feared and fretted will fear and fret no more. This very day's concerns will soon be as if they never existed at all, vanished the instant your body breathes its last breath. It all seems meaningless, does it not?
We need a new perspective in order to see the human experience as anything other than meaningless. We need to recognize that which sages have taught for thousands of years and scant few have paid attention to. They have framed it in different ways but on the core message they have been resolute: we are NOT our personalities and we are so much more than them. We are not the personalities that worry and plan and second guess, day after day, thought after thought, until that 85th or 90th year comes around and then POOF! all that worrying and planning and second guessing and thinking stops and may as well have never been.
If we are not our personalities, then what are they and what are we? The personality is something that you as a higher consciousness are currently expressing as and through. If you are a singer, you might think of it as a song. If you are a painter, you might think of it as the canvas you are currently working on. It has great value. The singer needs the song to express her soul and communicate to others, to touch listeners. The painter needs the painting to express his visions and share them. He relates to the painting almost as a lover. This is also true of you. You love this personality that you are currently expressing as and through, and you value it highly. If not, it would not exist.
Some see esoteric practices as attempts to become liberated from the illusion of personality, but that in itself is also an illusion. Though your personality may do things casually and later come to regret them, this is not so of your true Self. The fact that you are expressing as a personality in this moment means that your Self is fully intending to be expressing in such manner, just as a painter knows what painting he is working on, why, and what he hopes to achieve by painting it. If a painter decides to abandon a painting, he abandons the painting. He doesn't continually work on it while wishing he could be free of it! Exactly the same with your personality. That which you TRULY are is expressing as and through the personality because that is as You will it to be.
A singer can only sing one song at a time, but that is not so of You. Indeed, You are expressing as every other personality while also expressing as and through your own personality. There is one Source, and there is one Self. Since there is only one, there is nothing else for you to be. This is what sages have taught through the ages: You Are It. The Cosmic Consciousness, the Cosmic Love Source. Ever and eternal. You have created this individual personality in order to make full use of it. If You were aware of all the other 8 billion personalities that you are ALSO expressing as and through simultaneously, you wouldn't be giving THIS one the attention it deserves. Your personality would fade into nothingness; just another tiny star in the vastness of the Milky Way. It is perfectly wonderful that You are able to localize Your personality in this way and give it the attention it deserves, in order to maximize its value to You.
What is less wonderful is the illusion of this personality being your totality. The localized identification has a great purpose; however, the EXCLUSIVE identification creates disharmony up and down society as it has done for century upon century, long before the Hittites and Egyptians were taught to despise each other and kill or be killed.
Evolving beyond this disharmony is the key. Moving away from exclusive identification with the personality while continuing to value temporary localized identification with it turns that key. This is important enough to repeat: What will best serve us in our lives is that we move away from exclusive identification with our personality while continuing to find value in temporary localized identification with it.
Truth seeks to be known; thus deviation from truth is experienced as discomfort. As the personality is not your truth, agitation experienced at the plane of personalities is inevitable. It is your nature to experience yourself as you are, not exclusively identified with your personality. Imagine that your hand suddenly came to identify exclusively with itself, and no longer was able to recognize itself as part of your body. It would fixate on this illusion. Something as mild as a paper cut may be seen as an existential crisis. It may adorn every finger with gold and diamond rings in an attempt to create a sense of importance. It may view the other hand as a fierce rival, and feel deeply suspicious even when the two come together to pick up a basket of laundry. "What do you want from me?" "What are you hiding from me?” Happiness would be impossible for the misidentifying hand. The Plane of Personality plays out the same way. We are agitated because we are not living our truths. We try to create a false sense of identity in order to decrease our agitation. But it never works.
It can't, because just as the hand will always be deluded in thinking itself complete unto itself, the personality will always be agitated, by Truth, to end its delusion. This is basic, and inevitable. Because your localized personality is merely expression, you will eventually move past your exclusive identification with it. At that point, you can begin refining your relationship to it. It is your song, your painting; your temporary and beautiful instrument through which exquisite features of your Divine Self can be expressed and shared. You have already experienced this many times, in the happiest moments of your life. But you have also experienced the opposite. Your personality has trapped you in a cage of insecurity and suspicion. Not because the personality is bad, but because falsehood, by its very nature, is uncomfortable.
When a society is filled with people who are all exclusively identifying as personalities, the Plane of Personality is like a row of discount bins at the opening hours of a Black Friday sale. Everyone is out for themselves, pushing and shoving, desperately trying to take something before somebody else grabs it. Not even really needing the item or even desiring it, particularly, most of the time. Just engaged in the fight to get it before somebody else does.
This dynamic plays out in families and companies just as it does when countries make war on other countries. Large or small, the problem is the same: exclusive identification causing the personality to be the sin qua non, the be-all-and-end-all, the fortress on the hill to be defended at all costs. It is not a pretty picture, to say the least.
So, what can society become when the Plane of Personalities is correctly understood by all - or most - of its members? What happens when people see their personalities as localized - but not exclusive - modes of expression? Well, then the Black Friday sale becomes a Jazz improv session! A festival even! Think of a festival market where some folk are playing instruments together, children are making up games, other people are selling handmade clothing or pieces of jewelry. An impromptu Shakespeare play is happening on a temporary stage high on a hill. The aroma of food, the beat of drums, the blend of laughter and songs, all dappled in sunshine ~ THIS is how we can live when we understand what are personalities ARE, and what they are NOT! And, my friends, this is possible. Each one of us deserves this and each one of us intuits at some level that this is where we belong.
Transcending the Plane of Personality doesn't mean escaping from it or causing it to no longer exist. It does not mean liberating oneself from the wheel of reincarnation if that is where one's beliefs lie.
It means recognizing that the Plane of Personality is a mere temporary expression of something far greater that is neither temporary nor itself an expression. The Plane of Personality is being expressed as one avenue of self expression of the Source/Self. Each of us in each moment can trace ourselves back to that Source/Self without the aid of gurus or Ascended Masters or the samsara of multiple lifetimes.
It is as simple as knowing, 'I am the painter, not the painting' or 'I am the whole body, not merely the hand'. Your personality is not the totality of you, because that would be impossible. You are Source/Self and you are without beginning and without end. It is simply that you have LOCALIZED your awareness into the personality that you identify with, the 'mind/body having experiences' that you think of as yourself but ISN'T yourself. Is it possible to know this? Yes; I know it. Is it possible to know this without being 'enlightened'? Yes; again, I know it and I am hardly some miracle-manifesting holy man. If you begin by simply accepting the possibility that what I am saying is true, you can change your perception and see the world differently. Not always easy, but always available to you.
Recognizing that your personality is not your truth but is merely your temporary localized expression, you can use it very differently. It becomes less 'important' while becoming even MORE valuable. It is a work of art - a masterpiece, even - and you are the artist producing it. Same with everyone else. They are also mere temporary localized expressions of Source /Self. The very same Source/Self that YOU are! Thus the sacred teaching that 'We are all One'. This is neither a concept nor a philosophy; nor is it a mantra. It's a plain fact. And with this fact settling into our consciousness, the Plane of Personality transforms. Source/Self is being all beings in all times and all places. That is You. Source/Self is localizing the experience of all beings in all times and all places in order to receive full benefit of each and every temporary expression It (You, in other words) chooses to express as and through. The Plane of Personality is a curious and marvelous forum for expression, nothing more. It has no actual power over you, as YOU are expressing IT, not the other way around.
It has been said of money that it makes a good servant but a terrible master. If anything, this is even more true about the personality than it is about money. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the phrase had been originally coined in reference to the personality by a wise person long, long before money had even been invented! Individually, the personality traps us in insecurities, flitting seductions and feelings of rivalry and possessiveness toward others. Collectively, the Plane of Personality as it currently expresses is a tyrant, trapping humanity in an endless cycle of wars, scarcity, divisiveness and misery.
Now, esoterically it must be said that there are two minds about this. Some feel that this Plane of Personality on dear old Planet Earth is as it should be; a sort of kindergarten where immature souls with little experience work out their issues, with concomitant growing pains. Happier worlds, by this conception, await us all when we have sufficiently mastered our lessons here. If we were to elevate our Plane of Personality to one of harmony, then another benighted realm would simply take its place. Thus, accepting this Plane for what it is and not asking more of it is our task. This path of Acceptance may be thought of as a 'Buddhist' approach.
On the other hand, what we might call the 'Christ' approach is to hold that it very much is our destiny and mission to elevate this Plane of Personality. Take it from the Black Friday bargain bins of conflict and anguish and transform it into the arts festival of harmony and creativity. Since each of us is an expression of Self/Source, this should be attainable if enough people come to recognize the truth about themselves.
On this matter, I find myself agreeing with F. Scott Fitzgerald that it is a mark of intelligence to accept that sometimes two opposing ideas can both be true. Although I would like to see a New Earth emerge, and have written quite a lot about this notion, at the same time I sense that the benefits of this New Earth may wait for us in another realm, not here. On Earth, throughout history we have seen that very few people seek enlightenment, many are completely uninterested in it and recently many others see it as unscientific fantasy and hogwash. Perhaps this may never change. It doesn't really matter one way or the other, however. Truth, as I pointed out earlier, continually seeks itself, moving falsehood aside as it does so. Since you ARE Self/Source expressing, and your personality IS merely a temporary and by no means exclusive aspect of your identity, YOU can come to know this without the rest of the Plane of Personality waking up.
I write about these matters a lot, because an aspect of MY personality feels a calling to assist, in such ways as I can, in the awakening of humanity in order to reach that more harmonious Plane. A 'Christ calling', if you will. On the other hand, I am well aware that few people read what I write and fewer still are actually moved by it, and so the 'Buddhist' path of acceptance is another aspect of my personality I find it fruitful to develop.
The point is that I am the one in charge. I am steering my personality; it is not steering me. I am not ruled by it nor am I fooled by it. It is my servant, not my master. My canvas. This is how I want to be, and this is how I choose to make use of my personality.
But we all know that our personalities are not always like that. They can take us down. We can be petty, frazzled, freaked out, irritated and irritable. The personalities of others can enrage us. The world of conflict is a world of clashing personalities when all boiled down.
Our happiest AND unhappiest moments all play out on the Plane of Personalities. My 'I', your 'I', meshing or clashing, finding something interesting and enjoyable to share or something irritating and infuriating to start a fight about. Or a war.
If we were nothing other than our personalities then I suppose that little could be done about this. Insofar as I identify exclusively with my personality, then I sink or swim alongside it. And this collective plane of personalities we all inhabit would be the only game in town.
However, we are not limited to our personalities, and recognizing this holds great promise for us both individually and societally. Our personalities are merely our expressions, emanations from a higher source of consciousness. Learning to engage with your personality on YOUR terms rather than its has great benefits. If everyone learned how to do this, we'd be expressing societally at a much higher level.
I should explain how I am defining personality. I just pulled this up from Oxford: "the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character.” I think that is pretty clear, but I am also using it to define your sense of 'I/myself'. Basically the person that you identify as, the one who chooses what to buy, what to read, whom to vote for, where to go on vacation and what to do on the weekend. When and how to ask for a raise, etc. ALL of that is your personality, as I define it. Your body as well. At least in terms of how you relate to it and think about it. If you are critical of your body, it is your personality criticizing the apparatus it inhabits. If you are proud of it, your personality is what enjoys what looks back at in in the mirror. If you are uncomfortable due to maladies and ailments, it is your personality that feels the way you feel about all of that. Body ailments can make us depressed, for example, and it is the personality that experiences the depression.
All of this can be summarized as 'self sense' or 'my sense of I'. Your personality is reading this right now and forming thoughts around what you read, perhaps agreeing in part and disagreeing in part. Choosing to continue reading or not. Hopefully that is clear. Now, the wrench I throw into the works at this point is my insistence that this 'self sense' is FAR from what you actually are. You are no more your personality than your hand is your body. It is by missing out on the larger identity that we come to feel exclusively identified with our personalities and therefore more or less trapped within them. We misidentify as personalities, in other words.
The Plane of Personality IS the human experience. It is every artist's urge to create art and every tyrant's desire to claim power. It is every twisted individual's enjoyment of cruelty and every kind person's generosity of spirit. Personality identifying as self, and personality interacting with other personalities. And every goddam war in between.
People typically consider the personality to be that which one invests nearly all of one’s time and energy into, from anywhere up to 100 years, and then not at all. Life goes on for others, while one’s own personality is simply culled from the machinery of life. We obsess over ourselves, our concerns and our ambitions until our bodies can no longer sustain us, and then all is darkness.
How pointless it all seems, doesn't it? Given this concept, does it not seem that the whole point of the personality is to merely busy itself for a tiny sliver of time and then disappear along with all its obsessions, fascinations, met and unmet goals, acts and musings? And all those wars, WHAT were they for? Merely so some temporary personalities could vent their anger at other personalities they felt wronged by, when all becomes erased by time anyway? The passions that Israelis and Palestinians feel today are the same passions the Egyptians and the Hittites felt in a war that nobody ever thinks about anymore that took place 4000 years ago. Meaningless hatred, meaningless slaughter, erased by time and replaced by a fresh batch of personalities. If I'm wrong, please correct me.
Is there anything beyond this, and much more importantly, is there a way OUT of this?
I say there is.
We live in a time of great social turmoil, and personalities are agitated. I hardly need to go through the litany of global calamities one by one to call them to mind. Yet, calling them 'global' can itself be misleading, because each of them are comprehended and considered at the level of personality. What does climate change mean to YOU? What does the Palestinian genocide mean to ME? What do Trump's economic fiascos mean to someone else? What does that whole mix of uncertainties and tragedies do to one's personality? How does the personality cope, or does/can it cope? All played out on the level of individuals, billions of them. The Plane of Personalities. We experience our own fears, our own worries; no one else's. The fears are collective, but experienced person by person.
And yet, consider: if you are reading this, it is likely that your personality's journey has already moved through decades of time. If you're anywhere close to my age, then the lifespan of your body has less time in front of it than behind it. Mere decades from now, you don't expect to be here, and once that candle goes out, every thought goes with it. The personality that feared and fretted will fear and fret no more. This very day's concerns will soon be as if they never existed at all, vanished the instant your body breathes its last breath. It all seems meaningless, does it not?
We need a new perspective in order to see the human experience as anything other than meaningless. We need to recognize that which sages have taught for thousands of years and scant few have paid attention to. They have framed it in different ways but on the core message they have been resolute: we are NOT our personalities and we are so much more than them. We are not the personalities that worry and plan and second guess, day after day, thought after thought, until that 85th or 90th year comes around and then POOF! all that worrying and planning and second guessing and thinking stops and may as well have never been.
If we are not our personalities, then what are they and what are we? The personality is something that you as a higher consciousness are currently expressing as and through. If you are a singer, you might think of it as a song. If you are a painter, you might think of it as the canvas you are currently working on. It has great value. The singer needs the song to express her soul and communicate to others, to touch listeners. The painter needs the painting to express his visions and share them. He relates to the painting almost as a lover. This is also true of you. You love this personality that you are currently expressing as and through, and you value it highly. If not, it would not exist.
Some see esoteric practices as attempts to become liberated from the illusion of personality, but that in itself is also an illusion. Though your personality may do things casually and later come to regret them, this is not so of your true Self. The fact that you are expressing as a personality in this moment means that your Self is fully intending to be expressing in such manner, just as a painter knows what painting he is working on, why, and what he hopes to achieve by painting it. If a painter decides to abandon a painting, he abandons the painting. He doesn't continually work on it while wishing he could be free of it! Exactly the same with your personality. That which you TRULY are is expressing as and through the personality because that is as You will it to be.
A singer can only sing one song at a time, but that is not so of You. Indeed, You are expressing as every other personality while also expressing as and through your own personality. There is one Source, and there is one Self. Since there is only one, there is nothing else for you to be. This is what sages have taught through the ages: You Are It. The Cosmic Consciousness, the Cosmic Love Source. Ever and eternal. You have created this individual personality in order to make full use of it. If You were aware of all the other 8 billion personalities that you are ALSO expressing as and through simultaneously, you wouldn't be giving THIS one the attention it deserves. Your personality would fade into nothingness; just another tiny star in the vastness of the Milky Way. It is perfectly wonderful that You are able to localize Your personality in this way and give it the attention it deserves, in order to maximize its value to You.
What is less wonderful is the illusion of this personality being your totality. The localized identification has a great purpose; however, the EXCLUSIVE identification creates disharmony up and down society as it has done for century upon century, long before the Hittites and Egyptians were taught to despise each other and kill or be killed.
Evolving beyond this disharmony is the key. Moving away from exclusive identification with the personality while continuing to value temporary localized identification with it turns that key. This is important enough to repeat: What will best serve us in our lives is that we move away from exclusive identification with our personality while continuing to find value in temporary localized identification with it.
Truth seeks to be known; thus deviation from truth is experienced as discomfort. As the personality is not your truth, agitation experienced at the plane of personalities is inevitable. It is your nature to experience yourself as you are, not exclusively identified with your personality. Imagine that your hand suddenly came to identify exclusively with itself, and no longer was able to recognize itself as part of your body. It would fixate on this illusion. Something as mild as a paper cut may be seen as an existential crisis. It may adorn every finger with gold and diamond rings in an attempt to create a sense of importance. It may view the other hand as a fierce rival, and feel deeply suspicious even when the two come together to pick up a basket of laundry. "What do you want from me?" "What are you hiding from me?” Happiness would be impossible for the misidentifying hand. The Plane of Personality plays out the same way. We are agitated because we are not living our truths. We try to create a false sense of identity in order to decrease our agitation. But it never works.
It can't, because just as the hand will always be deluded in thinking itself complete unto itself, the personality will always be agitated, by Truth, to end its delusion. This is basic, and inevitable. Because your localized personality is merely expression, you will eventually move past your exclusive identification with it. At that point, you can begin refining your relationship to it. It is your song, your painting; your temporary and beautiful instrument through which exquisite features of your Divine Self can be expressed and shared. You have already experienced this many times, in the happiest moments of your life. But you have also experienced the opposite. Your personality has trapped you in a cage of insecurity and suspicion. Not because the personality is bad, but because falsehood, by its very nature, is uncomfortable.
When a society is filled with people who are all exclusively identifying as personalities, the Plane of Personality is like a row of discount bins at the opening hours of a Black Friday sale. Everyone is out for themselves, pushing and shoving, desperately trying to take something before somebody else grabs it. Not even really needing the item or even desiring it, particularly, most of the time. Just engaged in the fight to get it before somebody else does.
This dynamic plays out in families and companies just as it does when countries make war on other countries. Large or small, the problem is the same: exclusive identification causing the personality to be the sin qua non, the be-all-and-end-all, the fortress on the hill to be defended at all costs. It is not a pretty picture, to say the least.
So, what can society become when the Plane of Personalities is correctly understood by all - or most - of its members? What happens when people see their personalities as localized - but not exclusive - modes of expression? Well, then the Black Friday sale becomes a Jazz improv session! A festival even! Think of a festival market where some folk are playing instruments together, children are making up games, other people are selling handmade clothing or pieces of jewelry. An impromptu Shakespeare play is happening on a temporary stage high on a hill. The aroma of food, the beat of drums, the blend of laughter and songs, all dappled in sunshine ~ THIS is how we can live when we understand what are personalities ARE, and what they are NOT! And, my friends, this is possible. Each one of us deserves this and each one of us intuits at some level that this is where we belong.
Transcending the Plane of Personality doesn't mean escaping from it or causing it to no longer exist. It does not mean liberating oneself from the wheel of reincarnation if that is where one's beliefs lie.
It means recognizing that the Plane of Personality is a mere temporary expression of something far greater that is neither temporary nor itself an expression. The Plane of Personality is being expressed as one avenue of self expression of the Source/Self. Each of us in each moment can trace ourselves back to that Source/Self without the aid of gurus or Ascended Masters or the samsara of multiple lifetimes.
It is as simple as knowing, 'I am the painter, not the painting' or 'I am the whole body, not merely the hand'. Your personality is not the totality of you, because that would be impossible. You are Source/Self and you are without beginning and without end. It is simply that you have LOCALIZED your awareness into the personality that you identify with, the 'mind/body having experiences' that you think of as yourself but ISN'T yourself. Is it possible to know this? Yes; I know it. Is it possible to know this without being 'enlightened'? Yes; again, I know it and I am hardly some miracle-manifesting holy man. If you begin by simply accepting the possibility that what I am saying is true, you can change your perception and see the world differently. Not always easy, but always available to you.
Recognizing that your personality is not your truth but is merely your temporary localized expression, you can use it very differently. It becomes less 'important' while becoming even MORE valuable. It is a work of art - a masterpiece, even - and you are the artist producing it. Same with everyone else. They are also mere temporary localized expressions of Source /Self. The very same Source/Self that YOU are! Thus the sacred teaching that 'We are all One'. This is neither a concept nor a philosophy; nor is it a mantra. It's a plain fact. And with this fact settling into our consciousness, the Plane of Personality transforms. Source/Self is being all beings in all times and all places. That is You. Source/Self is localizing the experience of all beings in all times and all places in order to receive full benefit of each and every temporary expression It (You, in other words) chooses to express as and through. The Plane of Personality is a curious and marvelous forum for expression, nothing more. It has no actual power over you, as YOU are expressing IT, not the other way around.
It has been said of money that it makes a good servant but a terrible master. If anything, this is even more true about the personality than it is about money. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the phrase had been originally coined in reference to the personality by a wise person long, long before money had even been invented! Individually, the personality traps us in insecurities, flitting seductions and feelings of rivalry and possessiveness toward others. Collectively, the Plane of Personality as it currently expresses is a tyrant, trapping humanity in an endless cycle of wars, scarcity, divisiveness and misery.
Now, esoterically it must be said that there are two minds about this. Some feel that this Plane of Personality on dear old Planet Earth is as it should be; a sort of kindergarten where immature souls with little experience work out their issues, with concomitant growing pains. Happier worlds, by this conception, await us all when we have sufficiently mastered our lessons here. If we were to elevate our Plane of Personality to one of harmony, then another benighted realm would simply take its place. Thus, accepting this Plane for what it is and not asking more of it is our task. This path of Acceptance may be thought of as a 'Buddhist' approach.
On the other hand, what we might call the 'Christ' approach is to hold that it very much is our destiny and mission to elevate this Plane of Personality. Take it from the Black Friday bargain bins of conflict and anguish and transform it into the arts festival of harmony and creativity. Since each of us is an expression of Self/Source, this should be attainable if enough people come to recognize the truth about themselves.
On this matter, I find myself agreeing with F. Scott Fitzgerald that it is a mark of intelligence to accept that sometimes two opposing ideas can both be true. Although I would like to see a New Earth emerge, and have written quite a lot about this notion, at the same time I sense that the benefits of this New Earth may wait for us in another realm, not here. On Earth, throughout history we have seen that very few people seek enlightenment, many are completely uninterested in it and recently many others see it as unscientific fantasy and hogwash. Perhaps this may never change. It doesn't really matter one way or the other, however. Truth, as I pointed out earlier, continually seeks itself, moving falsehood aside as it does so. Since you ARE Self/Source expressing, and your personality IS merely a temporary and by no means exclusive aspect of your identity, YOU can come to know this without the rest of the Plane of Personality waking up.
I write about these matters a lot, because an aspect of MY personality feels a calling to assist, in such ways as I can, in the awakening of humanity in order to reach that more harmonious Plane. A 'Christ calling', if you will. On the other hand, I am well aware that few people read what I write and fewer still are actually moved by it, and so the 'Buddhist' path of acceptance is another aspect of my personality I find it fruitful to develop.
The point is that I am the one in charge. I am steering my personality; it is not steering me. I am not ruled by it nor am I fooled by it. It is my servant, not my master. My canvas. This is how I want to be, and this is how I choose to make use of my personality.
