Table of Contents | More Practical Wisdom

Remember what it was like to be a carefree child, always fascinated with the world? The time we spent with each other or in nature exploring simple things. The smell of decaying leaves or fresh cut grass, the feeling of the breeze on our skin, the warm sun beating down on our heads, the experience of joy that seemed endless. We had no thoughts of what other people wanted then. We were savage and in the moment. There was no future, no past, simply ourselves experiencing the present moment.

Then, as we grew older, we began to be concerned about other, more complex matters. We began to feel "pressure" from the people around us. Life gradually became more serious and there was less and less time for the play of the child. The simple joy of just existing began to fade away into the serious considerations of achieving in school, socializing with our new friends, "fitting in", being liked, wearing the right clothes, a seemingly endless list of requirements. We gradually set aside our childish pursuits and took on the earnest business of life. In the process we may have given up things that meant a great deal to us. There may have been less time for those activities that gave us such great joy. Or, maybe we were told that the artistic pursuits we felt ourselves attracted to were "impractical", that is they would not earn us a reasonable livelihood. Maybe we were interested in sports but our parents wanted us to go to law school. Perhaps what we really felt drawn to just wasn't "cool". In any event, we were, to some degree or other, molded into who we are today by a wide array of external forces. In the process we inevitably left behind some of our true or essential self in order to acquire new attributes, new qualities, even though those new characteristics did not necessarily feed our inner life. We were told that those qualities were necessary for successful adult existence.

What we left behind was our Essence. What we acquired was Personality. Essence is what we are, it is our nature, our true self. It contains the talents, interests, and inclinations that we brought to this life at birth. Almost every person brings to life some gift, or gifts, ranging from the ability to create artistic masterpieces to being a good cook, bookkeeper or carpenter. When we develop these gifts we experience a joyfulness that no other activity can give us. Essence contains what we own, what is ours, what, for us, is real.

Essence is also a psychological state. As adults, most of us can and do experience little glimpses of this part of ourselves when we, for instance, experience Nature. Standing on the edge of a precipice gazing at the sunset and feeling the curvature of the earth, communing with a squirrel, watching a storm, all these occurrences bring a sense of oneness with Nature. When we are in the experience we are living in the moment. We feel at peace with our life and in harmony with the world around us. Our head is not filled with thoughts and worries. In fact it may not be filled with anything at all except the experience.

Adults go to play in nature in order to touch their Essence, or they may develop hobbies that stimulate some particular gift residing there. Many of us have some Walter Mitty dreams that we occasionally visit. These too may arise out of Essence.

Personality, conversely, contains all of our acquisitions from this life, those mannerisms, behaviors, affectations,imitations of others which we've programed into ourselves in order to survive in the external world. If Essence contains all that is true within us, all that we own, personality is filled with everything that is not our own, that is false.

Personality is like a shell, a facade, that protects our inner world. It is comprised of all external behavior, movements, postures, gestures, facial and verbal expressions, manner of dress (style), all external manifestations. Internally, it is the gate keeper that decides what will be let in and what will be rejected. People raised in "tough" surroundings develop a tough personality. Others raised in more refined atmospheres develop their personalities accordingly. These personalities are not necessarily, however, an accurate reflection of who they truly are.

The true purpose of personality is to protect essence and only allow in those influences which will nurture it. In the majority of cases, however, personality is formed on the basis of the obstacles to consciousness covered in the preceding chapter. That is, a False Personality is formed who's only purpose is to serve itself. Ultimately, it becomes an entity unto itself, serving itself, called the Ego some disciplines (although this label is confusing due to its use in other systems of psychological thought). When we encounter The Work, this entity becomes part of the inner resistance to it (The Work). False Personality recognizes that The Work has the potential to ultimately remove it from its position of dominance over our inner world.

The process of forming False Personality begins when the infant, confronted with parents ignorant of unconditional love, is required to produce certain types of behavior in order to receive conditional love, the beginning of Inner Considering. As language skills develop and interactions with other humans become more complex, the child begins to develop in its imagination a picture of who it is. This picture is based upon its own experience of itself, and, upon input from the external environment. To some degree or other, this imaginary picture is inaccurate or false. Ouspensky said, "We imagine ourselves, really." As we mature into adulthood we add features to this picture in the form of behaviors, mannerisms, clothing, speech patterns, facial mask, possessions and social connections. We become identified with this picture and will Lie and Talk Unnecessarily to support it. We defend it through the expression of Negative Emotions. Who is it that can be insulted or embarrassed? It is False Personality. A person is Essence has no picture to defend and is in the moment with what ever happens, learning from it, making embarrassment and impossibility.

As False Personality becomes more solidified, it retards or prevents the learning and growth process, since true learning frequently requires humility, something that False Personality does not cherish. Because it avoids humbling situations and seeks to defend its picture of itself, gradually, over time, it retards the development of Essence. For many, the growth of Essence ceases at a fairly young age so that we see physically mature adults in their 40's and 50's with 5, 6, and 7 year old children living inside them. Some modern psychological writers (eg. John Bradshaw) have rightly labeled this phenomenon "the wounded inner child".

In the extreme we have the case where False Personality has completely taken over, in effect destroying Essence. We may have observed some people in public life who always seem to be "on". Some professional politicians are this way, as are some people in the entertainment business. It is not possible to penetrate through to the person beneath. It's as if there is nothing there, nothing but the role they are playing. Gurdjieff described earth as a planet where the "sleeping are ruled by the dead." The dead he refers to are those in which Essence has been completely smothered by False Personality, the sleeping those who have not yet spiritually awakened.

Conversely, in people who live a life closer to nature, farm and country people, or primitive people, there is more Essence and less Personality. These are simple people who have very little enculturation. They are simple, uneducated and ignorant. Consequently, they have less personality. For them their Essence may by more developed, but, because of their ignorance and lack of sophistication, development of higher possibilities through the use of knowledge is not possible for they lack the means to acquire that knowledge.

We need to realize here that False Personality serves an important purpose. In a world of sleeping people it provides a necessary civilizing force. Our world would be more savage and barbaric without it, we would be nothing but selfish savage Essence. False Personality also provides the necessary resistance, or friction, through which sleeping people can awaken. Friction or adversity, its purposes and right use, will be discussed at length later on in this book.

When the time arrives that an individual becomes interested in spiritual development, it becomes necessary to reconnect to Essence. This does not mean that False Personality is stripped away like some useless facade. Even if it were possible, it would leave the person naked and vulnerable, exposed to the world with no defenses. Such a person might easily go insane. What we wish, rather, is to gradually reduce False Personality, which lives for itself alone with no regard for Essence, and replace it with a personality that is generated from within, a True Personality that is dedicated to protecting and nurturing Essence. The building blocks of False Personality consist of the obstacles outlined in the previous chapter. Imagination, Identification, Negative Emotion, Inner Considering, Lying and Unnecessary Talking form the threads of the veil of illusion in which we live. False Personality is the veil itself. As we begin to work on observing the operation of these obstacles within us, they start to diminish, for mechanical behavior cannot so easily take place in the light of inner observation. To the degree that we fund the capacity to perform the work of self-observation, we begin to diminish False Personality. As we diminish False Personality we reveal Essence.

True Personality is a product of The Work. It begins as those thoughts within us that are generated by our desire to spiritually evolve. In recognizing these obstacles to higher consciousness we develop choice. We come to recognize that prior to awakening we only had the illusion of choice, that in fact, those of us who live entirely under the control of our programing are little more than stimulus-response robots.

With the growth of our ability to Self-Remember comes a growing ability to be more true to oneself in the moment. The more we're able to perceive our personal truth in the moment, the greater becomes our ability to act from that perception of truth, and the less will our behavior be motivated by such factors as wishing to "look good", please others or support some imaginary picture of who we are. Thus our external behavior, or personality, changes. As this process develops, major aspects of our outer presentation transform themselves. We may begin to talk differently, dress differently, our posture may change, the way we walk, our hair style, all this and more will begin to shape itself to be more in alignment with our new and more accurate perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. Thus the structure we call True Personality organically takes shape.

It is important at this point to become more sensitive to requirements of our inner world. Seemingly new needs, actually previously suppressed needs, will arise, requiring us to change established habits and patterns in order to accommodate these new demands from our inner environment. There will be a need for a willingness to relinquish old activities which no longer serve us, and to summon the courage to face the unknown of new challenges. This is all connected to the development of Essence, that which is true and our own.

Essence is a bridge to higher consciousness. We must be rooted in the earth on firm ground for this connection to occur. We cannot build upon the illusory structure of False Personality. We would merely be "Pouring from the empty into the void" as Gurdjieff described it. We would be starting from no where and going no where. We must begin from a real place within ourselves, a firm foundation. We need to align our activities in the world to be in harmony with our Essence so we may erect a structure that will connect to our higher vibrational possibilities.

The development of True Personality is designed to facilitate this connection. Its priority is to educate Essence, to build a foundation upon that which is real within us. This can only occur through the integration of the diverse elements we each contain. In the first chapter of this book we discussed the idea that our internal world is not unified, that it is inhabited by a multitude of beings and that attention, that precious energy, is scattered among a wide variety of personalities. In this condition there does not exist any single unifying force that is capable of directing the full force of our attention in any single direction.The tool of True Personality is designed to foster the growth of a unifying force, a new entity within that will eventually have the strength and power to master the inner multitudes and bring order and direction to them. The establishment of the Observer is the beginning of this new entity.

It is the Observer that develops True Personality. In the beginning it is powerless, it can only watch the robot helplessly as it performs its mechanical functions. It sees how we become lost in Imagination and trapped in Identification; how we give away our personal power to other people through Inner Considering, get swept away in the tides of Negative Emotion, how we Lie and Talk Unnecessarily. It uses the tools this knowledge supplies to verify the existence of our sleep. It feels a frustration at times, having had revealed to it the possibilities of a more awakened state and then experiencing the realization that much of our lives is actually spent in a state of dull existence.

This frustration is healthy and part of the process. It provides the motivation to acquire or create psychological tools that have the capacity to alter or raise our level of consciousness in the moment. The phrase "in the moment" cannot be stressed enough. We must keep at the forefront of our awareness the idea that the only place that anything can be accomplished is in the here and now, the Eternal Moment. It is the place where all mystical experiences occur.

The tools the Observer develops come in the form of specific thoughts that have the power to defuse the action of one or more of the obstacles we defined in Chapter Three. We call these Work I's. The more motivated we become to effect a change in our level of consciousness, the more likely we are to create more and more of these Work I's. The more Work I's we manifest the more powerful The Work becomes in us. The Observer begins to acquire the capacity to affect change in the moment, and gradually is transformed from a helpless observer into a warrior, thus into the role of what Gurdjieff called the Deputy Steward.

The creation of Deputy Steward brings with it the beginning of the ability To Do. Remember in Chapter One, in the section "Everything Happens", we outlined how we do not "do" anything, everything happens. With the creation of effective Work I's and the birth of Deputy Steward we have the rudimentary beginning of an ability to alter the momentum and flow of automatic responses arising within us. Although The Deputy still can easily be defeated by powerful internal and external events, we are now not entirely helpless, and we have the beginnings of internal integration. The ability to focus attention into the moment is greater than that of the Observer, who often does its work retrospectively, having its realizations occur somewhat after the actual event.

The next stage in this progression is called The Steward. At this point the warrior evolving within us becomes even more powerful. It has accumulated an even greater arsenal of weapons, or Work I's, and has the capability to take on greater challenges. It has the authority to put our house in order, to fashion harmony out of our internal chaos, to direct and organize the unruly mob. It is The Steward who does the work necessary to prepare the way for the entry of The Master, the Higher Self.

Essence is all that is truly ours, Personality is all that we acquire in the process of experiencing life. False Personality is constructed from the obstacles to consciousness and is imposed from the external environment, while True Personality is a product of The Work, being generated internally, and is designed to protect and feed Essence which is the foundation upon which higher consciousness and access to the invisible worlds is built. Created by the Observer, True Personality strengthens the Observer allowing it to evolve into Deputy Steward, then further, into Steward, who prepares the way for the Master. There are no guarantees in this process. Many who begin The Work leave off at some point, becoming satisfied with what they've achieved or frustrated out of impatience with the process. It is worthy to note here that impatience is a negative emotion.

Many also stop with the development of Essence which may bring them the worldly goods and experiences they seek, thus becoming satisfied, at least temporarily, with relative awakening. As always, the choice is ours.

ESSENCE

Exercise 1: Spend five minutes examining your face in the mirror. Notice how the left half of your face is different from the right. The left sides corresponds to Essence, the right to Personality. Focus on this exercise, noticing the shifting back and forth of attention. Use a timer as you may find this to be a very long five minutes.

Exercise 2: Develop the habit of looking other people directly in their left eye, the right one for you as you view them. This is their essence eye and gives you a direct window into their soul.

Exercise 3: Take the time to notice nature each day, be it something as simple as communing with a tree. This feeds the essential part of us. Put aside all thoughts of any kind while doing this, remembering to Divide Attention.

Exercise 4: Begin an inner self examination that seeks out what it is that truly interests you, not what you "should" be interested in, not what pleases others, but simply what pleases you alone.

Exercise 5: Learn to be alone with yourself. Take time each day to just be, without any activity or distraction. During this time work to Divide Attention, so the time is not consumed in Imagination.

FALSE PERSONALITY

Remember here that the building blocks of False Personality are the obstacles described in the last chapter, so that any work on them is work on False Personality.

Exercise 6: Develop the power of listening, as it is an attribute of a more developed awareness. Listen for the voices of the various roles you play. In the process, listen for the inner voices that accompany these roles. What does the role of parent sound like, the role of employee or employer, the role of spouse? Become aware that who you are is not any of these roles, but someone else.

Exercise 7: As you begin to see to see these roles, develop a sense inside that feels separate from the roles you play.

Exercise 8: Use the mirror exercise given above to display the facial expressions of some of the roles you play. Begin to see that each role has its own facial characteristics.

Exercise 9: Once you have an idea of the facial characteristics of your roles, begin to feel the facial muscles as they compose themselves into each role. This is the beginning of becoming a conscious actor.Once you have an awareness of your facial muscles, you can consciously control your facial expressions and will be aware of the impact they are having.

Exercise 10: Become aware of your body postures. Certain body postures accompany False Personality, generally ones that tend to expand the space around one, such as hands on hips, or hands placed behind the head. Also be alert to body postures that tend to self-denigrate, such as head held down, spine sagging, Notice postures that tend to close out versus those that are open and strong. As you experiment with this you may notice that certain postures create certain emotions within you, that your physical stance communicates much about your emotional state. Observe this in others also.

TRUE PERSONALITY

As the Observer becomes better able to exist in the present moment, it will begin to have the capacity to suggest actions that will promote Divided Attention and Self-Remembering. Initially, perhaps, these Work I's will not be strong enough to manifest, but as time passes and efforts increase, they will gain in strength sufficiently to start having an effect upon your behavior.

Exercise 11: Utilize your listening powers to determine which of your inner voices wish to do The Work. Keep a notebook and write down what they have to say. Eventually these may become effective Work I's.

Exercise 12: Use body postures that tend to focus your energy into the center of your being, such as; standing straight, with head neither up nor down; hands held intentionally at sides of clasped in front or behind; balance body weight on one or the other foot unequally with knees slightly bent, ever ready to move into the next moment; realize that where ever you're standing belongs to you, is your spot, your space, but without identification. These are just a few, invent more on your own.

Exercise 13: Maintain an awareness of the tension in the muscles of your face. This controls subtle communication. Work to keep these muscles relaxed and mobile so as to express the feelings you intentionally wish to communicate.

Exercise 14: Cultivate internal humility. Develop an attitude that wishes to serve without recognition. Recognition is fine and not to be rejected when it occurs, but it feeds False Personality when it becomes the motivator for our actions. It becomes a corrupting influence. We can taste the difference, so develop that sense of taste.

Practical Wisdom ©1993-2001 James Westly

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