Integration of the Personality
Articles By Christopher Tatham
It is one thing to talk about the integration of the personality and quite another to achieve it. This achievement is not accomplished by the integration of the known self but must also involve an understanding and clearing of the Unconscious. Many people can never achieve integration because they cannot first of all achieve integrity. Even if they are able quite honestly to secure self mastery so that neither the emotional life nor wrong thinking can betray them, they still have not established integrity within that subconscious realm where so much that is detrimental lies.
For instance it is quite possible that as a race the Americans suffer less from repressions and an acute sense of inadequacy than the English do, it certainly would appear as though this is likely, but a national trait is not necessarily that of every individual, and the sense of inadequacy can well be overlaid with a cultivated self assurance which leaves the earlier experience anything but dissipated.
Quite clearly, the advance we are looking for demands not only a right self-assessment but also a complete cleansing of the past; there must be absolute self-forgiveness if there is going to be real integrity, and without integrity the personality can never be completely unified. When this unification has been sufficiently secured the known personality is, we are taught, to be dedicated to the service of the Soul. We are then told that the personality gradually loses its existing quality and that out of the material so presented to it the Soul reconstructs a new personality through which it can adequately express itself.
It might seem that the personality so re-formed would exist and function in the natural course of events upon the same level, but this clearly is not the case, and to employ the word "personality" at all for that which is re-created by the Soul may be perfectly accurate, but to imagine that this new Soul-created personality exists on the same level as the old personality is a mistake. The old personality, now integrated and "justified", becomes the vital, living, highly trained instrument through which the Soul can function at will in this material world. Itself it lives and moves as integral facet of the Soul, accomplishing Soul purpose in this world. The measure of that service will be conditioned by the innate capacity of the instrument and its essential ability to enter into conditions in this life to which, by virtue of its own experience, it has peculiar access.
Many people are continually looking for "the Superman", looking, that is to say, for a human personality functioning as normal personalities do, but with tremendous effect. This effect would be due to the fact that the personality had been totally recreated by the Soul out of the material submitted to it. They envisage a personality returning to "primordial flux", and a wholly new thing being created. Their only hesitation lies in the fear that such a wholly new personality, not bearing the scars of past experience (having no past experience), would fail to carry those credentials which would enable it to enable it to enter with understanding into the suffering of others. It would, in fact, have no credentials.
The truth is of course that this new personality possesses the qualities of the old, only purified. It recalls old experiences but is now purified from any possible guilt-sense it might have retained. Its credentials lie in these inherited and perfected qualities. This new personality is completely unified with the Soul, and as long as life lasts will function as the Soul's instruments without hindrance in this world. It is the Soul's ordained means of Self expression in this world of human affairs. It can do the most marvellous work by those limitations which are inherent even in a purified and Soul inspired instrument.
There is the whole world of difference between what one looks for at one stage and what one looks for at another. One comes to recognise that the condition demanded for the freedom of this instrument is that kind of cleansing that takes place into account the past in all its significance, as well as the present. Only such self-understanding and some recognised and authoritative act of Redemption can make of the redeemed personality a purified and redeemed instrument.
Keywords: Integration of the Personality, Unconscious, primordial flux, Christopher Tatham, Intuition, Intuitive, article, Articles, UK, South Africa, Cape Town,
