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20: True and false personality

According to the System we are born without personality, which the Fellowship calls false personality. As babies we are in essence: intelligent but guileless. Personality is a mask through which we deal with the world and behind which we hide.

In Grimm’s fairytale of that name, Maid Maleen refuses to marry the man her father the king has chosen for her. Instead she is in love with the true prince. To prevent this marriage the king locks Maid Maleen and her maidservant in a stone tower with sufficient food for seven years. The true prince rides past and calls her name, but she cannot hear him because of the thickness of the walls.

In the terms of the fourth way system, Maid Maleen could be seen as essence seeking the fulfilment of her full potential, represented by the prince. The stone tower represents the protection from the outside world by personality that essence hides behind.

A catastrophic war follows in which the kingdom is laid waste apart from the tower itself. What prompts Maid Maleen to try to escape from the tower is that no-one comes to rescue her at the end of the seven years and the food is running out. Using the bread knife she and her servant finally work one of the stones loose and escape. If we are unable to take this step then we must starve in personality and essence will die. We become something that in the beginning we were not. 

That is not the end of the story, and Maid Maleen must eat nettles, use deception and risk death in order to come to her true stature as a princess.

In The Great Divorce C.S.Lewis describes a fictional tragic struggle between essence and personality in which personality wins. But personality is a construct, an act. In Lewis’s story, having defeated essence the personality disappears—there is nothing real left.

In the Fellowship we also had the concept of true personality. We were told that true personality is the result of school work, and enables us to function in the world and at the same time protect essence without false personality taking over. In The Fourth Way Ouspensky refers to useful parts of personality, parts that can support the work of awakening, but he does not call this ‘true personality.’ I have not found it called this in any of the fourth way books.

I believe that the distinction between essence and personality is useful. Sometimes we come across people so trapped in their imaginary picture of themselves, in the character they are acting, that it is difficult to find the real person behind the mask. For all of us, once we begin to trust someone and get to know them we begin cautiously to drop our mask, to become more ourselves. Even if we have to act through personality, it is possible to abstain from believing in the act. We may well have to use such acts, especially in difficult and challenging situations, but I have found that authenticity is usually a workable strategy. Seeing the gap between the person I should like others to believe I am and the truth frees me to be who I am. It is also what enables me, when appropriate, to apologise.

Is true personality only the result of school work? I doubt it. I think what it refers to is honesty, authenticity, and the courage to be what we are.

How do we get there? I think by letting go of self-importance yet being confident that we are valuable as we are.

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