When reading many modern books on mystical development, you might think that the personality was now viewed as negative; a foe to be overcome on the way to the real self.

There is much truth in this, but it is incomplete and spoken from an ‘immature’ perspective. That partial vision of it misses the finest potential of what we have loving crafted of ourselves during our lifetime, however long or short that has been.

The infant is born with the ability to see, but cannot recognition or sense of what is entering the consciousness via the senses. If the environment, centred on mother, is warm and nurturing, then everything in the infant’s world is grounded in beauty and love.

The new mind is as hungry as the body, and constantly adds to what it can perceive. There is no sense of separation; of a ‘me and it’. The young mind is simply adding to itself. The view through the child’s eyes is like a rich tapestry: differences are seen but there is no sense of objective boundaries, which will later become objects in the child’s world.

Eventually, the child learns that the seen ‘arm’ belongs to a body. Much later, that body is known to be something that others have, too, and is a ‘type’ of object that has arms and legs and other appendages. Each such object has properties knowable from all the senses. Loved objects, like mother; have a rich set of touch, smell and sound vibrations to add to the developed seeing that the human being now possesses.

That sense of personal possession of, say, an arm – of me– eventually becomes part of the young person’s identity. Having an identity is essential to the development of a strong ego – personality.

As the child matures – full of sensory capability and now equipped with logic and reason, the perceived world moves from an exterior reality, conveyed immediately to the senses, to an interior world of abstraction and representation. This power of the Mind uses its memory of ‘like objects’ – ‘all human bodies are similar in the abstracted mental world’ – to make the process of perception more economic. Why look at a hundred bodies in the street when you can scan them and know they are a concept called ‘people’, which share the same properties – at least at the level of encounter.

A lover’s body might well be different, and we take time and effort – at least in the beginning – to see and feel it in intensity each time we make love with them.

So what’s wrong with this loving persona that we have carefully cultured according to our preferences? Nothing at all… The adult has learned to ‘manage’ a complex material environment … but its reality has shifted from a constant stream of the ‘real’ to an abstracted and increasingly dull world based on memory rather than reality. Objects are memory, and the once ‘out-there’ world is now entirely made of them…

The dense world of matter is not our only home. This finite and ultimately corruptible stay in the most ‘solid’ of worlds has been undertaken precisely to give us this perspective and to enable us to objectively use a knowledge of the ending of the life of the body, though that is not a prerequisite of a well-lived life.

The spiritual path is one of moving our consciousness back to where we came from, but not in an immature sense of losing what we have gained in maturity and understanding. The hurdles to that reconciliation are the fixed views of life and ‘the world’ that we formed in early life and that create a constant ‘movie’ (link here) of all we do in our movement through life, twisting our actual perceptions into fixed forms of reaction.

This happens to us all, We have no control over it, and yet we are mainly unaware of it. However this set of ‘fixations’ distorts the whole of our lives.

These interior objects are not an ‘enemy’; they are a natural result of experience, hurts and bruising. They are like a suit of armour that makes our movement sluggish and lacking in grace. They were put in place to protect the developing child and they stayed there long past the need for them. But because they came first, they are the foundations of everything else that followed: our character.

Developmental psychology has shown that there are a small number of such fixations and modern mystery schools have developed their own techniques for the discovery and personal healing of these invisible but pervasive barriers.

The techniques for their removal are a soul-call to the deepest level of our selves – the inner sense of presence and power that we cherish at times of ‘peak experiences’. The joyful energy available to us from this level exceeds that of normal living, and has the power to make our fixations visible, as though we had shone a brilliant and other-worldly light through them – from the far side – exposing their anatomy for the insubstantial yet fearful matrix that it is.

In his book, Diamond Heart, A.H. Almass, the celebrated mystical teacher refers to this as the ‘Embodiment of Essence’, which is a stage beyond the usual reference to transcendence. Embodiment brings back the essential qualities of the personal Soul where they flower in the full potential of the person, now made whole in a truly spiritual sense: body and soul, dynamic, ultimately capable and filled with love.

This entire consideration encompasses the idea of a spiritual ‘death and rebirth’; a theme that has gripped mankind for millennia, as though we have always possessed an inner knowledge that this was and is possible.

©Stephen Tanham 2023

Stephen Tanham is a writer, mystical teacher and director of the Silent Eye, a correspondence-based journey through the forest of personality to the dawn of Being.

http://www.thesilenteye.co.uk and http://www.suningemini.blog