Essence and Personality

THE IDEA of essence and personality in the fourth way is often presented as two separate things that are related. Essence is described as who we are as we are born, which includes our physical body, skin color, biological gender, and what might be called our magnetism or chemistry. Essence also includes innate tendencies and talents that form the basis of our body type, chief feature, and center of gravity. Personality, on the other hand, is described as everything we acquire after birth as a result of the influences of social, religious, educational, and family ‘values’ and attitudes.

PERSONALITY rightfully acts as a protective cloak around essence, particularly around the delicate, almost formless ‘amoeba’ of essence which is the foundation of where we perceive from. You see this nearly formless aspect of essence in infants who do not think yet, who do not emote unnecessarily or artificially, who do not overly gesticulate or seem to be in a hurry, and who have no concern about how they are perceived by others or in relation to others. Behind their wide, observant, glassy eyes, essence peers out into the world, and this does not change, just as our physical constitution and skin color do not change. Personality, however, is almost always changing. More than a cloak, it is a series of cloaks that essence learns to put on in different situations—in general to hide or guard itself when it is uncomfortable and to manifest more openly when it feels safe.

AS WE AGE, the cloaks—the masks—of personality can get very complicated, especially when they are interwoven with the fabric of negative emotions. Why? because whereas personality is meant to be a naturally protectant layer for essence, negative emotions turn personality into a defensive or aggressive or timid or fearful agent of identity. As this happens, personality gets thicker and more impenetrable, and essence gets more buried—to the point that it can atrophy in harmful ways and even ‘die’ when the body is still alive. (One of the main purposes of not expressing negative emotions outwardly and not indulging in them internally—which includes suppressing them—is to neutralize these thicker layers of personality and restore the proper balance between essence and personality—principally to give essence the chance to freely breathe and ‘be’.)

ESSENCE AND PERSONALITY can also be seen as one thing, or as different degrees of the same thing, and this is why it may not be obvious at first which is which. Both have a sense of being alive at their core, however essence is more open and naively receptive. It experiences itself not so much as a feeling of ‘I’ but simply as a feeling of being. Personality, meanwhile, is where the sense of ‘I’ and ‘me’ becomes a solid psychological object of identity that gets reinforced in the mind by the variety of influences from the outside world that continually act on it and shape it, and to which it learns to respond.

THE REASON it is important to restore essence to its natural, normal condition is that essence is where the consciousness of awareness emerges from. Essence is a seedcase in human form for the formless ‘substance’ of consciousness, but this rudimentary aspect of consciousness is not conscious of itself when we are born. When the fourth way talks about self-remembering, it is talking about essence becoming aware of itself in such a way that this awareness becomes conscious of itself. In this sense, although personality may be where the ‘effort’ to self-remember begins, it is meant to lead to an effortless condition of essence realizing itself, and eventually to this realization realizing itself as pure consciousness.

WE CAN SEE from this that, although essence and personality are represented in the fourth way as two things (so the mind can grasp the distinction), they are really one, with personality as an outgrowth of essence—as a shell that accumulates around the amorphous organism of essence. And because this organism is really the earthly carrier of the substance of pure consciousness, both personality and essence are connected to consciousness. They are like concentric circles representing different dimensions or degrees of being, with unconscious consciousness at the center, surrounded by the organic being of essence, which is in turn surrounded by the outer layer (and layers) of identity that forms personality.

ONE WAY to understand what evolution is according to the fourth way—and what the entire fourth way system is designed for—is to see that we start at the outside—at our firmest convictions of ‘I’—and begin to penetrate the organic nature of being that is essence, ultimately to reach—to realize—the completely formless reality of pure consciousness which informs all three circles, all three dimensions, of who and what we are. It is a passage through the valleys of psychological identity across the mountaintops of molecular being to the vastness of metaphysical awareness. Everything else about the fourth way and the ‘system’ is directly connected to this journey.