“The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.”
C. G. Jung
The term “personality” is often tossed about casually as though it is yet one more object in in the world. It is not. Personality is a mystery. It seems an endowment from above rather than an evolutionary feature. It appears to be unique—no two persons are exactly alike.
Personality is not the identity of an individual. The identity is the embodiment of ego consciousness. The identity of a person at age eight includes his position in school, his relationships with friends, his aptitude for sports or the arts or mathematics, his disposition toward thinking or feeling, intuition or sensation. It includes the size and shape of his body, his appearance, and his family ties.
We could say that identity is based in ego consciousness. The ego identity of a person at age eight will be far different from the ego identity of the same person at age eighty. Though the identity has shifted, developed, and changed, the self-aware person remains constant. The person is aware of his identity at age eight and his identity at age eighty, and also knows that it was the same person experiencing life as those very different identities.
Personality has no antecedent cause in the evolutionary climb to higher and more complex forms of consciousness. Personality is not an innovative organic response to an environmental condition. There was no causal reason for it; it was not induced by the need for an environmental adaptation.
Personality separates the human experience from the experience of all other forms of life in this world. Personality seems to be the crowning achievement of the evolutionary ascent, an endowment destined for more august purposes than merely material survival.
Personality has a consciousness of its own. It is conscious of other personalities, apart from sensual awareness. This awareness of other persons has become obvious during these days of internet video meetings. We see and hear the same people on a computer screen, but something is missing—some important qualitative aspect of the person that is beyond sensual perception. The qualitative aspect is our personal awareness of another person in close proximity.
Personality is aware of ego consciousness. It has the capacity to observe the perceptions, the thinking, and the feeling occurring within, even the disruptions of complexes that interfere with the ego’s conscious life.
Carl Jung noticed two “personalities” within himself as a young boy. He said one of these “. . . went to school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys. The other was grown up—old, in fact—skeptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams and to whatever ‘God’ worked directly in him. As soon as I was alone I could pass over into this state. At such times I knew I was worthy of myself . . . I therefore sought the peace and solitude of this ‘other,’ second personality.”
Jung’s idea that we carry a divine radiance within us, the Self, is closely related to personality. The Self seems the center and circumference of the whole personality. Of this other personality consciousness, Jung wrote: “. . . it was as though a breath of the great world of stars and endless space had touched me, or as if a spirit had invisibly entered the room—the spirit of one who had long been dead and yet was perpetually present in timelessness until far into the future. Denouements of this sort were wreathed with the halo of the numen.”
Personality unifies the imbalances of ego identity. The eight ego orientations known as psychological types are each brought into greater unity and balance through the unifying personality.
The ego itself is often fragile, easily offended, subject to inflation, readily wounded by other ego-identities. But personality is able to rise above the “pettifogging captiousness” of an imbalanced ego. It sees life from a transcendent perspective.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna found that elevated perspective with the help of his charioteer, the divine Krishna. At the threshold of a great battle, Arjuna was full of anxiety. He was to meet those he knew well in battle and he quivered with the misgivings of his ego identity:
“In the dark night of my soul I feel desolation. In my self-pity I see not the way of righteousness.”
In an extensive and enlightening dialogue with Krishna, one that is easily grouped with the most beautiful scriptures ever written, Krishna reminds him who he truly is, and the way of the cosmos that he lives in:
“Energy, forgiveness, fortitude, purity, a good will, freedom from pride—these are the treasures of the man who is born for heaven.”
By the end of their long dialogue, Arjuna found his way to his more transcendent self: “By thy grace I remember my Light, and now gone is my delusion.”
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion, meditated regularly for the purpose of moving from his ego identity to the more transcendent consciousness of personality, his “higher self.” After one of his visits to his publisher, he walked out into the street and nearly fell to his knees to worship when he saw the people there in a new light, not as objects, but as transcendent persons.
Self-protection and self-interest are the fruits of the ego identity. Unselfish love is the fruit of the transcendent consciousness of personality. It can feel as though there is no bodily identity to protect, that the personality is already identified with the infinite and with a more noble destiny than earth-bound mortality.
An experience of the consciousness of personality is available to us all. As we pursue lives more aligned with the divine radiance in the center, our character grows as we become more authentic and more real. Trouble and neuroses ensue when we invest our lives in the delusions of ego-identity rather than the transcendent consciousness that is “wreathed with the halo of the numen.”
J G Johnston
Author of Jung’s Indispensable Compass
2/23/2021