*
THE STRUCTURE & TRANSFORMATION OF THE TOTAL PERSON
The words person and personality are confusing because they have acquired several meanings. Another term, personhood, recently has been brought forward to describe the state of being a person — a state to which a highly positive value is attributed.
The word person derives from the Latin persona, which refers to the mask worn by Greek actors performing in large, open-air amphitheaters. The features of these masks indicated the basic emotional character of a role, and they hid a small device that amplified and projected the voice. Masks are used in many tribal rituals, often to represent the countenance of a god. The essence and value of many of these sacred rituals is that they allow a human being who is only one member of the tribal whole to act symbolically and temporarily as the mouthpiece of the god who represents the wholeness (the soul) of the tribe. A part of the whole for a moment is made to experience the wholeness of the whole by ritualistically identifying with its archetypal form. In the Catholic ritual of the Mass, the priest does not wear a mask, but he acts ritualistically as Christ; and when the Pope performs the rite he more specifically identifies himself with the God-man. The experience of such a sacred and symbolic identification in acts and words, even if brief, can be far more important for the celebrant than what he or she does and says as a merely human being performing everyday work or even banal acts of love.
When I use the word person here (and in other recent books), I mean the state of existence of a human being within a culture-whole. A person performs many actions and thinks or voices many thoughts that are more or less prescribed, or at least inspired, by the culture and its traditions. He or she may instill these acts, thoughts, and words with feelings having a particular, relatively unique character. To the extent they have such a character, the "person" acts or thinks as an "individual." He or she has become, to some degree and in specific circumstances, an "individualized" person. An ordinary person usually merely mirrors and projects the collective images, meanings, and values the culture and its language have impressed upon his or her developing mind since birth.
In rare and specific situations, such a collectively determined person may become for a time a particular embodiment of the essential character of his or her society and culture — a "representative" man or woman. This occurs in varying degrees when the person is selected to perform a sociopolitical office in which the power of the whole community is focused upon and released through him or her while performing the duties of the office. It occurs in a limited sense when a police officer or a judge acts "in the name of" the law; much more so if the person happens to be the president of the country and makes crucial decisions affecting all the people. When a person consistently acts as a representative and mouthpiece of a culture-whole or nation — or of a particular religious community or institution — he or she can be called a "personage." This person then embodies a definite role in the culture's development and, still more generally, in human evolution.
These definitions of terms — person, individual, personage — are most important if one is to understand clearly what is generally called a human being's personality, in contrast to his or her spiritual aspect or soul. The personality is a composite entity and not (as the materialist believes) simply the development of a physical body into a feeling and thinking person able to use energy and will to carry out self-chosen decisions. A person must be a physical body, but while the psychic and emotional parts of the personality interact and are intimately associated with the physical body, their origin is basically independent of it. They are rooted, not only in the collective culture in which the person operates, but also in an individual past.
To clarify the situation, I refer the reader to the diagram in the chapter The Physical & the Psychic Bodies. But I must stress that any kind of listing is analytical and far too separative. All the factors listed interact and interpenetrate to some extent. Separating them is like dissecting a corpse and describing the different tissues one finds: the livingness of the body when alive inevitably escapes the analyst. Because he concentrates on parts, the wholeness of the whole eludes the searcher. Nevertheless, analytical procedures are necessary if experience and knowledge (or intuition) are to be communicated.
The physical body of a human being can be considered a trinity of factors. (1) In its dense material aspect it is the aggregation of an immense number of cells, which in turn are made up of a myriad of molecules and atoms. (2) A planetary life force (prana or chi) animates this body. (3) The operations of the life force are structured by two factors: a generic-racial web of lines of force exteriorizing the archetype of Man as a biological species and subspecies, and a composite set of karmic factors. Some of the latter refer to the collective karma of a series of ancestors and the particular culture or cultures to which they belonged; others refer to what I have called an at least relatively individual past.
At the level of psychism and the "astral body" or "body of desires," three factors also are operative. (1) The energy factor here is the power of desire, kama, which like prana (the life force) to which it is related also has a nonindividual, planetary character. The energy of desire is given a more or less definite and concrete form by (2) the "lower mind." The operations of this concretizing mind are directed by (3) a set of karmic factors to which the skandhas of Buddhist doctrine presumably refer. They are factors which constitute the remains of a previous personality (or a previous series of personalities).
The basic problem is how to define and interpret the interaction between the concretizing mind and these karmic factors. According to the prevailing popular interpretation, behind these karmic factors stands a definite psychospiritual entity, a "reincarnating soul." The generally accepted Buddhist teaching, on the other hand, is that what reappears in a new human being is only the "karmic deposits" once generated by a previous human being. This doctrine is called the anatma doctrine, the term literally meaning "no atma," atma or atman in the tradition of India referring to the highest aspect of the spiritual entity in Man. While in one sense this universal principle, atman, pervades everything, it also is said to be nowhere in particular. Thus to speak of atman "reincarnating" makes no real sense.
For the modern theosophist following the teachings of H. P. Blavatsky, the "reincarnating principle" is not atman but an aspect of the "higher mind." "Something" within yet beyond this higher mind involves itself in a new attempt at uniting a spiritual Quality with a new personality. This "something" is what I call the principle of individualization (the spiritual will). It seeks to exteriorize the spiritual Quality in answer to the pressure of the power of Compassion.
This periodic attempt of the principle of individualization may of course be interpreted as "reincarnation," yet nothing actually "in-carnates," that is, becomes flesh. If one can speak of incarnation, one should refer to the karmic deposits of a past personality that give a particular form to physical matter. But "giving form to" material operations does not mean "becoming" matter (or flesh).
We have seen that karma operates in and through the lower level of the so-called "etheric body" of a human being (the "fourth ether") and from there precipitates into physical existence in various ways. At the level of psychism, it operates through the concretizing mind by giving a personal form to desire. While desire always means a desire for relationship, it also can have a negative character. The avoidance or active refusal of relationship (especially if fear or hatred is involved) is as much a mode of relationship as love or devotion. The desire for relationship takes forms that are controlled (1) partly by the culture and religion of the community and (2) partly by personal karma. The formative agent is the concretizing mind. In part, the ego is a formation of the power of desire: "I" am what I desire and the manner in which these particular, desires for relationship are objectivized into thoughts and acts by "my" will — the ego-will.
The feeling of "being I" is the realization that desires presuppose a being that desires, the subject that wants an objective result. This subject is endowed with a degree of permanence by the concretizing mind, even though it changes and develops through the years and is affected by biological, sociocultural, intellectual, and spiritual factors. Among these are health and eating habits, fashion, schooling, personal and emotional crises, and the attempts which the spiritual trinity makes to contact, impress, inspire and transform the total being.
Eventually the
desire-nature, centralized into an ego, at least partially
frees itself from biological compulsions and an innate
longing for material possessions, social
Then, as the lower concretizing mind increasingly reflects or mirrors the archetypal mind and, through the performance of dharma, the karma of the past is neutralized, a permanent and spirit-infused "body of individuality" gradually is built. It is developed by the mind functioning as an undivided whole; it is powered by the spiritual will (the individualizing principle), and it becomes a consecrated place — a shrine or Holy Place — within and from which the spiritual Quality can release its compassionate power through dharma-manifesting, creative and/or transformative acts.
What is transformed is not merely one person; more significantly, but only potentially, it is the culture and society to which the person belongs, and eventually even the matter of the physical body. The material transformation should operate through the third and second levels of the etheric force-field; these refer to higher forms of planetary life. The first and highest level represents (and when activated reflects in its fullness) the Image of planetary Man in this present cycle of being.
