< True and False Personality (continued from page 10-94) >
destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.” We know how little acceptable that compromise was to the God of Israel; and no illustration can be more apt than this narrative, which we may well, as we would fain, believe to be rather typical than historical. Typical of that indiscriminate and radical sacrifice, or “vastation,” of our lower nature, which is insisted upon as the one thing needful by all, or nearly all* the great religions of the world. No language could seem more purposely chosen to indicate that it is the individual nature itself, and not merely its accidental evils, that has to be abandoned and annihilated. It is not denied that what was spared was good; there is no suggestion of an universal infection of physical or moral evil; it is simply that what is good and useful relatively to a lower state of being must perish with it if the latter is to make way for something better. And the illustration is the more suitable in that the purpose of this paper is not ethical, but points to a metaphysical conclusion, though without any attempt at metaphysical exposition. There is no question here of moral distinctions; they are neither denied nor affirmed. According to the highest moral standard, A may be a most virtuous and estimable person. According to the lowest, B may be exactly the reverse. The moral interval between the two is within what I have called, following Swedenborg, the “continuous degree.” And perhaps the distinction can be still better expressed by another reference to that Book which we theosophical students do not less regard because we are disposed to protest against all exclusive pretensions of religious systems. The good man who has however not yet attained his “sonship of God” is “under the law”— that moral law which is educational and preparatory, “the schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,” our own Divine spirit, or higher personality. To conceive the difference between these two states is to apprehend exactly what is here meant by the false, temporal, and the true, eternal personality, and the sense in which the word personality is here intended to be understood. We do not know whether, when that great change has come over us, when that great work† of our lives has been accomplished—here or hereafter—we shall or shall not retain a sense of identity with our past, and forever discarded selves, In philosophical parlance, the “matter” will have gone, and the very “form” will have been changed. Our transcendental identity with the A or B that now is‡ must depend on that question, already disclaimed in this paper, whether the Divine spirit is our originally central essential being, or is an hypostasis. Now, being “under the law” implies that we do not act directly from our own will, but indirectly, that is, in willing obedience to another will. The will from which we should naturally act—our own will—is of course to be understood not as mere volition, but as our nature—our “ruling love,” which makes such and such things agreeable to us, and others the reverse. As “under the law,” this nature is kept in suspension, and because it is suspended only as to its activity and manifestation, and by no means abrogated, is the law-—the substitution of a foreign will—necessary for us. Our own will or nature is still central; that which we obey by effort and resistance to ourselves is more circumferential or hypostatic. Constancy in this obedience and resistance tends to draw the circumferential will more and more to the centre, till there ensues that “explosion,” as St. Martin called it, by which our natural will is for ever dispersed and annihilated by contact with the divine, and the latter henceforth becomes our very own. Thus has “the schoolmaster” brought us unto Christ, and if by “Christ” we understand no historically divine individual, but the logos, word, or manifestation of God in us—then we have, I believe, the essential truth that was taught in the Vedanta, by Kapila, by Buddha, by Confucius, by Plato, and by Jesus. There is another presentation of possibly the same truth, for a reference to which I am indebted to our brother J. W. Farquhar. It is from Swedenborg, in the Apocalypse Explained, No. 527:—“Every man has an inferior or exterior mind, and a mind superior or interior. These two minds are altogether distinct. By the inferior mind man is in the natural world together with men there; but by the superior mind he is in the spiritual world with the angels there. These two minds arc so distinct that man, so long as he lives in the world, does not know what is performing within himself in his superior mind; but when he becomes a spirit, which is immediately after death, he does not know what is performing in his inferior mind.” The consciousness of the “superior mind,” as a result of mere separation from the earthly body, certainly does not suggest that sublime condition which implies separation from so much more than the outer garment of flesh, but otherwise the distinction between the two lives, or minds, seems to correspond with that now under consideration.
What is it that strikes us especially about this substitution of the divine-human for the human natural personality? Is it not the loss of individualism? (Individualism, pray observe, not individuality.) There are certain sayings of Jesus which have probably offended many in their hearts, though they may not have dared to acknowledge such a feeling to themselves: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” and those other disclaimers of special ties and relationships which mar the perfect sympathy of our reverence. There is something awful and incomprehensible to us in this repudiation of individualism, even in its most amiable relations. But it is in the Aryan philosophies that we see this negation of all that we associate with individual life most emphatically and explicitly insisted on. It is, indeed, the impossibility of otherwise than thus negatively characterising the soul that has attained Moksha (deliverance from bonds) which has caused the Hindu consummation to be regarded as the loss of individuality and conscious existence. It is just because we cannot easily dissociate individuality <... continues on page 10-96 >
* Of the higher religious teachings of Mohammedanism I know next to nothing, and therefore cannot say if it should be excepted from the statement.
† The “great work,” so often, mentioned by the Hermetic philosophers, and which is exactly typified by the operation of alchemy, the conversion of the base metals to gold, is now well understood to refer to the analogous spiritual conversion. There Is also good reason to believe that the material process was a real one.
‡ A person may have won his immortal life, and remained the same inner self he was on earth, through eternity; but this does not imply necessarily that he must either remain the Mr. Smith or Brown he was on earth, or lose his individuality.”—Isis Unveiled, vol. i., p. 316.
Editor's notes