Read Summary of '''[[Personality Summary|Personality]]'''
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=In Relation to Other Concepts=
===Past-life and Personality===
What is remembered mainly from past lives is the nature of the personality and the subtle results of the life-experience. Names, events, physical details are remembered only underexceptional circumstances and are of a very minor importance. When people try to remember these outward things, they usually build up a number of romantic imaginations which are not true.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/rebirth#p89</ref>
===Rebirth and Personality===
But this opulent taking up of the past would not be a repetition of personality; it
would be a new formation and large consummation. It is not as a machinery for the persistent renewal or prolongation of an unchanging personality that rebirth exists, but as a means for the evolution of the spiritual being in Nature.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/rebirth-and-other-worlds-karma-the-soul-and-
immortality#p26</ref>
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This persistent soul-existence is the real Individuality which stands behind the constant mutations of the thing we call our personality. It is not a limited ego but a thing in itself infinite; it is in truth the Infinite itself consenting from one plane of its being to reflect itself in a perpetual soul- experience.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-modes-of-the-self#p3</ref>
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Some psychic beings get into relation with the birth-environment and the parents from the time of inception and determine the preparation of the personality and future in the embryo, others join only at the time of delivery, others even later on in the life and in these cases it is some emanation of the psychic being which upholds the life. It should be noted that the conditions of the future birth are determined fundamentally not during the stay in the psychic world but at the time of death—the psychic being then chooses what it should work out in the next terrestrial appearance and the conditions arrange themselves accordingly. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/rebirth#p32</ref>
===Individual Self and Personality===
The Self, even the individual self, is different from our personality as it is different from our mental ego-sense. Our personality is never the same; it is a constant mutation and various combination. It is not a basic consciousness, but a development of forms of consciousness,—not a power of being, but a various play of partial powers of being,—not the enjoyer of the self- delight of our existence, but a seeking after various notes and tones of experience which shall more or less render that delight in the mutability of relations. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-modes-of-the-self#p6</ref>
===Memory and Personality===
The importance of Memory becomes apparent in the well-observed phenomenon of double personality or dissociation of personality in which the same man has two successive or alternating states of his mind and in each remembers and co-ordinates perfectly only what he was or did in that state of mind and not what he was or did in the other. This can be associated with an organised idea of different personality, for he thinks in one state that he is one person and in the other that he is quite another with a different name, life and feelings. Here it would seem that memory is the whole substance of personality. But, on the other side, we must see that dissociation of memory occurs also without dissociation of personality, as when a man in the state of hypnosis takes up a range of memories and experiences to which his waking mind is a stranger but does not therefore think himself another person, or as when one who has forgotten the past events of his life and perhaps even his name, still does not change his ego- sense and personality. And there is possible too a state of consciousness in which, although
there is no gap of memory, yet by a rapid development the whole being feels itself changed in every mental circumstance and the man feels born into a new personality, so that, if it were not for the co-ordinating mind, he would not at all accept his past as belonging to the person he now is, although he remembers perfectly well that it was in the same form of body and same field of mind-substance that it occurred. Mind-sense is the basis, memory the thread on which experiences are strung by the self-experiencing mind: but it is the co-ordinating faculty of mind which, relating together all the material that memory provides and all its linkings of past, present and future, relates them also to an "I" who is the same in all the moments of Time and inspite of all the changes of experience and personality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/memory-ego-and-self-experience#p12</ref>
===Impersonality and Personality===
We have said, however, that personality and impersonality, as our minds understand them, are only aspects of the Divine and both are contained in his being; they are one thing which we see from two opposite sides and into which we enter by two gates. We have to see this more clearly in order to rid ourselves of any doubts with which the intellect may seek to afflict us as we follow the impulse of devotion and the intuition of love or to pursue us into the joy of the divine union. They fall away indeed from that joy, but if we are too heavily weighted with the philosophical mind, they may follow us almost up to its threshold. It is well therefore to discharge ourselves of them as early as may be by perceiving the limits of the intellect, the rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way of approaching the truth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which sets out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need not be the whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual experience.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-divine-personality#p3</ref>
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Impersonality is in its source something fundamental and universal; it is an existence, a force, a consciousness that takes on various shapes of its being and energy; each such shape of energy, quality, power or force, though still in itself general, impersonal and universal, is taken by the individual being as material for the building of his personality. Thus impersonality is in the original undifferentiated truth of things the pure substance of nature of the Being, the Person; in the dynamic truth of things it differentiates its powers and lends them to constitute by their variations the manifestation of personality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p29</ref>
===Personality and Impersonality in the Supermind Consciousness===
In the supermind consciousness personality and impersonality are not opposite principles; they are inseparable aspects of one and the same reality. This reality is not the ego but the being, who is impersonal and universal in his stuff of nature, but forms out of it an expressive personality which is his form of self in the changes of Nature. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p28</ref>
===Person and Personality===
The Person is the being supporting what is thus impersonal, holding it in himself as his, his nature of self; he is that which is the lover and warrior. What we call the personality of the Person is his expression in nature-status and nature-action,—he himself being in his self-existence, originally and ultimately, much more than that; it is the form of himself that he puts forth as his manifested already developed natural being or self in nature. In the formed limited individual it is his personal expression of what is impersonal, his personal appropriation of it, we may say, so as to have a material with which he can build a significant figure of himself in manifestation. In his formless unlimited self, his real being, the true Person or Purusha, he is not that, but contains in himself boundless and universal possibilities; but he gives to them, as the divine Individual, his own turn in the manifestation so that each among the Many is a unique self of the one Divine. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p29</ref>
==Beyond Personality==
But the Person is larger than his personality, and it may happen that this inner largeness overflows into the surface formation; the result is a self-expression of being which can no longer be described by fixed qualities, normalities of mood, exact lineaments, or marked out by any structural limits. The gnostic Individual would be such an inner Person unveiled, occupying both the depths—no longer self-hidden—and the surface in a unified self-awareness; he would not be a surface personality partly expressive of a larger secret being, he would be not the wave but the ocean: he would be the Purusha, the inner conscious Existence self- revealed, and would have no need of a carved expressive mask or persona. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p30</ref>
==Stages of Evolution==
The gradations of consciousness are universal states not dependent on the outlook of the
subjective personality; rather the outlook of the subjective personality is determined by the grade of consciousness in which it is organised according to its typal nature or its evolutionary stage. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/28/sachchidananda-existence-consciousness-force-and-bliss#p19</ref>
==Individual Personality and Divine Personality==
Take someone who is writing a book, for instance. If he looks at himself writing the book, you can't imagine how dull the book will become; it smells immediately of the small human personality which is there and it loses all its value. When a painter paints a picture, if he observes himself painting the picture, the picture will never be good, it will always be a kind of projection of the painter's personality; it will be without life, without force, without beauty. But if, all of a sudden, he becomes the thing he wants to express, if he becomes the brushes, the painting, the canvas, the subject, the image, the colours, the value, the whole thing, and is entirely inside it and lives it, he will make something magnificent. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/26-april-1951#p30</ref>
==What is Divine Personality?==
“Transform the divided individual into the world-personality; let all thyself be the divine. This is thy goal”
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/5-december-1956#p5</ref>
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"Transform the animal into the Driver of the herds.”
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/5-december-1956#p24</ref>
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The Divine, the Eternal, expresses himself as existence, consciousness, bliss, wisdom, knowledge, love, beauty, and we can think of him as these impersonal and universal powers of himself, regard them as the nature of the Divine and Eternal; we can say that God is Love, God is Wisdom, God is Truth or Righteousness: but he is not himself an impersonal state or abstract of states or qualities; he is the Being, at once absolute, universal and individual. If we look at it from this basis, there is, very clearly, no opposition, no incompatibility, no impossibility of a coexistence or one-existence of the Impersonal and the Person; they are each other, live in one another, melt into each other, and yet in a way can appear as if different ends, sides, obverse and reverse of the same Reality. The gnostic being is of the nature of the Divine and therefore repeats in himself this natural mystery of existence. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/22/the-gnostic-being#p29</ref>
===Notions about Divine Personality ===
'''Not Self-Deception'''
There is another one. There are people who without knowing it—or because they want to ignore it—always follow their personal interest, their preferences, their attachments, their conceptions; people who are not wholly consecrated to the Divine and who make use of moral and yogic ideas to conceal their personal impulses. But these people are deceiving themselves doubly; not only do they deceive themselves in their external activities, in their relation with others, but they also deceive themselves in their own personal movement; instead of serving the Divine, they serve their own egoism. And this happens constantly, constantly! They serve their own personality, their own egoism, while pretending to serve God. Then it is no longer even self-deception, it is hypocrisy. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-51#p9</ref>
===Objective of Divine Consciousness===
It can be said that there is a possibility of psychic consciousness in Matter —the diffusion of the divine Consciousness had only one object: to make possible an organisation which would be under the direct influence of the Divine. That is why it passes over all the worlds of disorder. It may hence be said that the Origin of the soul is also in the atom, in all the elements constituting the atom, but it is only the Origin.... I must tell you that when it is fully formed, the psychic being has a distinct form which corresponds to our physical form. It is not altogether similar, but it has a definite form. Every psychic being is different from another— they are not all cut out, modelled to one pattern. They are different, each has an individuality, a personality. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/04/24-february-1951#p10</ref>
===The Truth about Divine Personality===
On the other hand, the way of devotion is impossible if the personality of the Divine cannot be taken as a reality, a real reality and not a hypostasis of the illusion. There can be no love without a lover and beloved. If our personality is an illusion and the Personality to whom our adoration rises only a primary aspect of the illusion, and if we believe that, then love and adoration must at once be killed, or can only survive in the illogical passion of the heart denying by its strong beats of life the clear and dry truths of the reason. To love and adore a shadow of our minds or a bright cosmic phenomenon which vanishes from the eye of Truth, may be possible, but the way of salvation cannot be built upon a foundation of wilful self-deception. The bhakta indeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to come in his way; he has the divinations of his heart, and these are to him sufficient. But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to know the eternal and ultimate Truth and not to persist to the end in the delight of a Shadow. If the impersonal is the sole enduring truth, then a firm synthesis is impossible. He can at most take the divine personality as a symbol, a powerful and effective fiction, but he will have in the end to overpass it and to abandon devotion for the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge. He will have to empty being of all its symbols, values, contents in order to arrive at the featureless reality.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-divine-personality#p2</ref>
===Some Common Misconception with Regards to DivinePersonality===
'''God and Divine Personality'''
We conceive of God as such a person, only without body, a separate person different from all others with a mind and character limited by certain qualities. At first in our primitive conceptions his deity is a thing of much inconstancy, freak and caprice, an enlarged edition of our human character; but afterwards we conceive of the divine nature of personality as a quite fixed quantity and we attribute to it those qualities alone which we regard as divine and ideal, while all the others are eliminated.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-divine-personality#p11</ref>
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At a higher pitch the attribution of mind and character to God becomes less anthropomorphic and we regard him as an infinite Spirit, but still a separate person, a spirit with certain fixed divine qualities as his attributes. So are conceived the ideas of the divine Personality, the personal God which vary so much in various religions.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-divine-personality#p11</ref>
'''Devil and Divine Personality'''
This limitation compels us to account for all the rest by attributing them to a Devil, or by lending to man an original creative capacity for all that we consider evil, or else, when we perceive that this will not quite do, by erecting a power which we call Nature and attributing to that all the lower quality and mass of action for which we do not wish to make the Divine responsible.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-divine-personality#p11</ref
===Truth of Impersonality and Divine Personality===
For beyond the divisions and contradictions of the intellect there is another light and there the vision of a truth reveals itself which we may thus try to express to ourselves intellectually. There all is one truth of all these truths; for there each is present and justified in all the rest. In that light our spiritual experience becomes united and integralised; no least hair's breadth of real division is left, no shade of superiority and inferiority remains between the seeking of the Impersonal and the adoration of the divine Personality, between the way of knowledge and the way of devotion.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/the-divine-personality#p16</ref>
==What Obstructs One from Achieving a Divine Personality==
I don't think it can be said that you have no personality. Coordination and harmonisation of parts is absent in many; it is a thing that has to be attained to or built up. Moreover at a certain stage in sadhana there is almost always a disparity or opposition between the parts that are already turned towards the Truth and are capable of experience and others that are not and pull one down to a lower level. The opposition is not equally acute in all cases, but in one degree or another it is almost universal. Coordination and organisation can be satisfactorily done only when this is overcome. Till then oscillations are inevitable. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/the-difficulties-of-human-nature#p26</ref>
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And first of all he must give up his desires; for desire is the most obscure and the most obscuring movement of the lower nature. Desires are motions of weakness and ignorance and they keep you chained to your weakness and to your ignorance. Men have the impression that their desires are born within; they feel as if they come out of themselves or arise within themselves; but it is a false impression. Desires are waves of the vast sea of the obscure lower nature and they pass from one person to another. Men do not generate a desire in themselves, but are invaded by these waves; whoever is open and without defence is caught in them and tossed about. Desire by engrossing and possessing him makes him incapable of any discrimination and gives him the impression that it is part of his nature to manifest it. In reality, it has nothing to do with his true nature. It is the same with all the lower impulses, jealousy or envy, hatred or violence. These too are movements that seize you, waves that overwhelm and invade; they deform, they do not belong to the true character or the true nature; they are no intrinsic or inseparable part of yourself, but come out of the sea of surrounding obscurity in which move the forces of the lower nature. These desires, these passions have no personality, there is nothing in them or their action that is peculiar to you; they manifest in the same way in everyone. The obscure movements of the mind too, the doubts and errors and difficulties that cloud the personality and diminish its expansion and fulfilment, come from the same source. They are passing waves and they catch anyone who is ready to be caught and utilised as their blind instrument. And yet each goes on believing that these movements are part of himself and a precious product of his own free personality. Even we find people clinging to them and their disabilities as the very sign or essence of what they call their freedom.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/4-august-1929#p5 </ref>
===Inter-personal Conflicts===
An "entity" is a personality or an individuality. There are many such "personalities" in each one of us. If these personalities agree and are complementary with one another, they make up a human being, a rich and complex "person". But that is not what usually happens. These personalities do not agree with one another. For example, one of them might wish to make some progress, to become more and more perfect, to get a deeper knowledge of things, to realise more and more, to proceed towards the perfection of the being, while another one may simply want to have fun and enjoy itself as much as it can; one day it will do this, the next day something else, etc. If the personalities do not agree, this person's life will be incoherent, and that is not unusual: in fact, these cases are very common. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/30-december-1950#p11</ref>
===A Sense of Separate Personality===
There are people who have such a need to keep the sense of their separate personality that if they are forced to admit that all that springs upwards is inspired by the Divine or even done by Him, they keep for their little person the whole side of defects, faults, errors, and they cherish their defects, so that at least something remains theirs, which is indeed their own, their personal property: "Yes, all that is beautiful, luminous, is the Divine; all horrible things—that's myself." But a self... a big self; one must not touch it! <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/07/9-november-1955#p9</ref>
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It could be said that these are like sounds—any kind of sounds: words, music, anything—
recorded by an instrument, then reproduced by another instrument which plays them back like a gramophone, for instance. You wouldn't say that the gramophone has created the sound you hear, would you? That would never occur to you. But as you are under the illusion of your separate personality, these thoughts which cross your mind and find expression, these feelings which comes through your vital and find expression, you think, have come from you; but nothing comes from you.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/8-february-1956#p9</ref>
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The sense of separation is spread everywhere, but it is an illusion; it is one of those false moods of which we must be cured if we want to enter into the true consciousness. The mind cuts the world into small bits: it says, here this stops, there that begins, and by this fragmentation it succeeds in distorting the universal movement. There is one great flow of a single, all- embracing, all-containing consciousness which manifests in an ever unrolling universe. This is the truth that stands behind everything here; but there is too this illusion which masks the truth from you, the illusion of these many movements which imagine that they are separate from one another, that they stand by themselves, in themselves and for themselves and that each is a thing in itself apart from the rest of the universe. They have the impression that their action and reaction upon one another is something external, as if they were like different worlds standing in each other's presence but with no point of contact except some external relations at a distance. Each sees himself as if he were a separate personality existing in its own right. This error of the separative sense has been allowed as part of the universal play, because it was necessary that the one consciousness should objectify itself and fix its forms. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/26-may-1929#p7</ref>
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“To be free, one must come out of the prison. The prison is the ego, the sense of separate personality. To be free, one must unite consciously and totally with the Supreme and through this identification break the limits of the ego and eradicate the very existence of the ego by universalising oneself, even though the individualisation of the consciousness is preserved”
[Based on Aphorism 178-Men say and think “For my country!’, “For humanity!”, “For the world!”, but they really mean “For myself seen in humanity!”, For myself imaged to my fancy as the world!”. That may be an enlargement, but it is not liberation. To be large and to be in large prison are not one condition of freedom]
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/10/aphorism-178#p2</ref>
==Transformation of Consciousness to Become a Divine Personality==
When one becomes a divine consciousness, a divine personality, then one can become the master of all the bodily activities, because one is superior to them; one is not bound to these activities, not subject to them, one dominates them, one has a greater consciousness than that of the individual, of the little separate individual; one can make just a little more progress and instead of being subject to all these animal needs of the being, one dominates them. But these are not two consciousnesses, one superimposed on the other, it is one consciousness being transformed into another.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/5-december-1956#p24</ref>
=Why is the Path to Arrive at Divine Personality Different for All ?=