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Esoteric Psychology II - Chapter II - The Ray of Personality - Some Problems of Psychology
We will divide the problems of psychology into the following groupings:
  1. The Problems of Cleavage, leading frequently to the many ways of escape, which constitute the bulk of the modern complexes. [405]
  2. The Problems of Integration, which produce many of the difficulties of the more advanced people.
  3. The Problems due to Inheritance, racial, family, etc., involving the problems of inherited diseases, with consequent crippling of the individual.

With this third group I shall deal very little. There is not much to be done save to leave to time and greater wisdom much of the solution, coupled with an effort to bring amelioration to the individual thus afflicted, to supply glandular deficiency, training in self-control if possible, and the bringing of the physical vehicle to as high a point of development as may be possible within limits. The time is coming when every infant will early be subjected to certain tests and become the recipient of skilled care so that the apparatus of contact may be as usable as possible, as adaptive as may be, and as sound as it can be rendered. But I would here remind you that no physical equipment can be brought beyond a certain point of development in any one life - a point determined by the stage reached under the evolutionary process, by racial factors, by the quality of the subtle or subjective nature, by past experience and by soul contact (distant, approaching or already made), and by the mental equipment.

For the right understanding of our subject, and of my method of handling it, I would like to lay down four fundamental propositions:

1. That in time and space, man is essentially dual, consisting of soul and body, of intelligent life and form, of a spiritual entity and the apparatus of contact - the body nature whereby that entity can become aware of worlds of phenomena and states of consciousness of a nature different to those on its own level of awareness.

2. That this body nature consists of the physical outer form, [406] the sum total of vitality or the etheric body (which science today is rapidly coming to recognize), the sensitive, emotional, desire body, and the mind. Through the physical body contact is made with the environing tangible world; through the vital body the impulses come which produce direction and activity upon the physical plane; through the sensory vehicle the astral or emotional nature originates the bulk of those desires and impulses which direct the undeveloped or average man, and which can be called desire-impulses or the wish-life of the individual; through the mind comes eventually intelligent understanding and a life directed by purpose and planning instead of desire.

3. That human unfoldment proceeds by a series of integrations, of processes of coordination or synthesis, involving as they do (particularly when the intelligence is beginning to control) a sense of cleavage and of duality. These integrations, as far as humanity is concerned, either lie far behind in the past, are proceeding at this time, or lie ahead in the future.

  • Past Integrations.
    Between the animal body and the vital body.
    Between these two and the sensitive desire nature.
    Between these three and the lower concrete mind.
  • Present Integrations.
    Between these four aspects thus producing a coordinated personality.
  • Future Integration.
    Between the personality and the Soul.

There are other and higher integrations but with these we [407] need not here concern ourselves. They are reached through the processes of initiation and of service. The point to be remembered is that in racial history, many of these integrations have already taken place unconsciously as the result of life-stimulation, the evolutionary urge, the normal processes of living, experience through contact with the environment, and also of satisfaction leading to satiety of the desire nature. But there comes a time in racial unfoldment, as in the lives of individuals, when the blind process of evolutionary acquiescence becomes the living conscious effort, and it is right at this point that humanity stands today. Hence the realization of the human problem in terms of modern psychology; hence the widespread suffering of human units everywhere; hence the effort of modern education; and hence also the emergence in every country on a wide scale and in increasingly large numbers of three kinds of people:

  • Those conscious of cleavage.
  • Those achieving integration with much pain and difficulty.
  • Personalities, or integrated and therefore dominant people.

4. That at the same time in every country, men and women are proceeding towards a still higher synthesis. and achieving it: - the synthesis of soul - and body. This produces a sense of destiny, individual and racial; a sense of purpose, and of plan. It produces also the unfoldment of the intuition (the sublimation of the intellect, as that was the sublimation of the instinctual nature) and the consequent recognition of the higher ideas and idealism, and of those basic truths which when disseminated among the thinking people of the world, will produce great mental and material changes, with their transitory accompaniments and upheaval, of chaos, experiment, destruction and rebuilding. [408]
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