Part One: The Functions of the Person

The Center of Intelligence

The person is the thinker. He thinks, makes decisions, discriminates, checks, and verifies.

For most people, the thinker is unconscious. This means that even though people are thinking all the time, they have no idea who is thinking. In moments of lucidity, the average person does experience a degree of relatively conscious thinking. However, this merely means that the function of the person is conscious – he is not conscious of his own identity. Due to the fragmented state of their person, people are incapable of separating him from the subconscious mind. This is why they think all the time; the person is neither able to control the mind nor to arrest the endless flow of thinking.

On our path, we emphasize over and over again the need to make the person conscious on the level of both his function and his identity. Only the conscious person can support our evolution, allowing us to attain a silent mind and to bridge pure consciousness with living in the world.

The Emotional Center

The person experiences himself through emotional states or moods. These moods can be more neutral or more intense. For instance, the person can be melancholic, sad, bored, restless, lonely, or he can be serene, calm, joyful, playful, entertained, and so forth. Some of these states are triggered by the content of the subconscious mind (which also processes and filters our interactions with the world), and some of them manifest directly from the subconscious of the person. Different people have particular tendencies towards specific moods, depending how the particular person has evolved in himself and through his life experiences. For instance, some people’s moods tend to fluctuate a lot, while others experience moods or emotional states in a more stable way. However, one thing is certain – the person is always experiencing one emotion or another, with the exception of when one is deeply absorbed in meditation, and only the experience of pure subjectivity remains.

The Seat of Human Character

The person is the center of human identity; it defines who people are. It is also the basic sense of self for both humans and other creatures.

What makes one person different from another?

It is how their person has developed as an outcome of their life history, their degree of intelligence, and other personal predispositions, plus how their person has responded within itself to those life experiences and to their own mind. Although most people are actually very alike, each one is an individual, and therefore slightly different. This difference boils down to their human character, meaning their mental, emotional, and moral qualities. Human character develops in the context of personality and its various tendencies, but it is not the same as personality. It is more like the stronger tendencies in personality which have, through repeated use, been assimilated into the sense of self of the person. As an example, experiencing fear does not make you a fearful person. You become a fearful person through indulging in the emotion of fear in your personality. Similarly, having insincere thoughts does not make you an insincere person – you become insincere by indulging in insincere tendencies and playing mental or emotional games with others and yourself. Accordingly, it is the perpetuation of different qualities in your personality that eventually forms the character of the person. In other words, how you respond to what manifests in your personality over time determines who you become as a person.

The Center of Personality

The person is the headquarters of personality. Personality is our psychological dimension that manifests in the form of our thoughts and emotions. There are three centers of personality – subconscious me (the center of the subconscious mind), feeling me in the heart (responsible for the experience of higher emotions, like love or emotional pain), and emotional me in the solar plexus (responsible for processing basic emotions related to our survival, like fear or anger).

Even though the three centers of the personality can function relatively independently from the person himself, as its headquarters, he ideally gives personality a higher degree of coherency. The problem is that when the person is unconscious, he cannot give proper feedback to personality, because he cannot separate himself from it. This is why psychology, as we know it, is so limited. For instance, how could Freud understand our psychology on a deeper level if he was unable to realize the person? For him, the person (ego) was a function, not an identity; even though he did initially refer to the ego as the sense of self, but it was more in the sense of an intuitive feeling than one of knowing the person as self.

The person is the one who gives feedback to the mental and emotional information arising in the subconscious mind (which is also processed in the emotional centers) based on his intelligence and sense of right and wrong. However, to be in a conscious relationship with personality, the person has to be firmly established in his pure subjectivity, or else his position is simply too unstable. As our soul awakens and the person is actualized, personality naturally becomes more transparent and quiet. This is when the personality can finally be experienced for what it is – the outer layer of the soul, her extension through the person into our psychological dimension.

Part 2: Transforming the Subconscious of the Person

Transforming Our Human Character

While we experience many tendencies in our personality that arise in the sphere of the subconscious mind, the character of the person is defined by the subconscious of the person. Some of the qualities of our character are closer to the conscious part of the person, and others lie dormant in his subconscious. This is why we are sometimes surprised by the behavior of people whom we thought we knew, because they can suddenly behave as if they are another person. For instance, someone can be very nice on the surface but, when his emotions are triggered or he is challenged, his unpleasant qualities may come to completely dominate his psyche. This can be quite shocking. Some people are able to exercise more self-control and repress their negative tendencies, but they are still affected by them.

For instance, during my many years of teaching work, I have come across a number of students who appeared to be sincere, devoted, and grateful, but then quite suddenly became just the opposite. One cannot rely on the integrity of an unconscious person because one simply cannot know who they really are. This is one reason past teachers tested their disciples in all kinds of ways before fully revealing the secrets of the inner path to them.

The human character continues developing during the course of our whole life and, while the collective person has very little capacity to change, people who are more evolved can transform to differing degrees, so long as they activate their higher intention. The collective person’s character is entirely defined by his past, including his upbringing, culture, society, and life experiences, together with the minimum of free will he is able to exercise in his relationship with the world. An additional factor in establishing the base for the development of our character is how we are able to reconcile superego with our more immediate desires and basic tendencies.

We often speak of the important qualities of a seeker, such as sincerity, strength, perseverance, patience, self-love, gratitude, and the capacity to renounce negativity and cross personality threshold. These qualities are not necessarily present from the start but develop along the path as one matures both spiritually and as the person. For the human character to form on a higher level, the purification of both the subconscious mind and the subconscious of the person are required. But purification needs to be supported by the conscious development of the person based on the principles of higher wisdom and intention. Even those who have awakened their pure subjectivity can manifest very negative tendencies, because of continuing to have unresolved issues in their subconscious.

One does not have to be ‘perfect’, but one’s character does need to have been forged to display a higher level of integrity, so that it can support our inner path and resist the negative influences from both the collective mind and our own subconscious. For that to happen, one has to interact consciously with the subconscious mind and with the subconscious of the person. One has to examine one’s thoughts, emotions, and intentions and, while embracing relative imperfection, renounce what – based on one’s discriminative wisdom – is clearly wrong.

Working with the Emotional States of the Person

Whether an emotional state arises by being triggered within the subconscious mind, or directly from the subconscious of the person, it is the subconscious of the person that, by force of habit, mechanically identifies with that mood and gives it continuity. This process is often automatic, and one therefore needs to work with one’s tendencies to experiencing negative emotional states. For instance, when people have depressive tendencies nowadays, they take anti-depressants instead of going to the root of the problem. In some cases, a negative emotional state points to something that needs to be changed in one’s outer circumstances. In other cases, an excessive dependence on the outer world needs to be addressed.

For instance, if one is feeling lonely, one has to use the feeling of loneliness to empower one’s relationship with oneself and activate more self-love. If one is sad or heart-broken, the excessive emotional dependence on others needs to be addressed, or the feeling of pain needs to be used for one’s own emotional deepening. If one’s person tends to gravitate towards fear or anxiety, a certain discipline is needed to control the arising of thoughts which are triggering such emotions, or one consciously needs to replace fear with trust. If one tends to feel lethargic or depressed, one needs to change something in one’s life and bring more passion and enthusiasm to one’s relationship with the world.

There are many scenarios where the negative subconscious of the person can be changed psychologically by working with negative emotions or emotional moods. The challenge, however, is that attempting to identify psychological reasons for the tendency to experience negative emotional states may alone be insufficient to change them, because they have been already deeply infused or integrated into the subconscious of the person. In addition, some negative emotional states within the person cannot be avoided, as they are part of being human. As examples, there is nothing wrong with occasionally feeling sad, lonely, or bored.

However, those who are on the path to self-realization need to learn how to work with the subconscious of the person in order to radically eliminate commonly experienced negative emotional states. To attain this, one has to establish pure subjectivity and awaken the person by realizing his identity. Furthermore, the realization of human me empowers our ability to work with the subconscious of the person. However, it is obviously the conscious part of the person who is directly doing this work. As we know, the person is responsible for guarding both personality-threshold and the thought-threshold. This means that he must decide how much energy to give to the subconscious mind, and also decide when too much is being given. If one tends to experience the type of thoughts that results in negative emotional states in the person, it is the person who must put a stop to these thoughts. This requires discipline, strength, wisdom, and determination, as the subconscious mind can be very convincing in rationalizing negativity.

While the work with the subconscious mind is more straightforward and tangible, the work with the subconscious of the person is much more difficult. As we have explained, the negativity in the subconscious of the person is, to large extent, autonomous from the subconscious mind, as it has been already integrated into who the person is on the subconscious level. Here, we have a special situation in which the conscious part of the person needs to work with his own subconscious. In this sense, the conscious person becomes the guardian of his own subconscious-identification-threshold. Such work is naturally much more internal than the work with the subconscious mind.

In doing this work, we first need to become conscious of the subconscious of the person. The fact that one has awakened the pure subjectivity of the person does not mean that one is automatically also conscious of his subconscious. A special type of introspection is required to get in touch with the subconscious of the person. This can include the following:

• How does my person feel now?
• Do I experience fluctuations in my person’s mood, or is the emotional state of my person fairly constant?
• What kind of moods am I more prone to experience?
• Which of these moods are triggered by my thoughts and interactions with other people and the world, and which ones manifest independently?

After we have become conscious of the negative emotional states of the person, the next step is conscious disidentification from those states, so that the conscious part of the person separates himself from his subconscious part, creating a certain distance from it. Then checking himself:

• Am I sad, or rather do I feel sadness?
• Am I depressed, lonely, bored or, rather, do I feel these moods in the subconscious of the person?

After disidentification, the next step is to stop giving energy to negative emotional states, as if ignoring them. As we stop giving attention and energy to these states, they sometimes just disappear of their own accord. However, often they have such a strong hold over the person that the subconscious part of the person refuses to release its hold over the conscious part of the person, and so continues to pull him down into negative moods. This is mainly due to the fact that the person, on an unconscious level through force of habit, chooses to experience himself through the lenses of his own negative subconscious. In other words, he has not managed to separate himself from his negative subconscious and is unknowingly still fueling it. Something more needs to be done – and that something more has to be done by the conscious part of the person.

How the person feels is being imposed on him by his subconscious. His feelings are dictated by how his subconscious interprets situations. It is this interpretation that needs to be challenged and changed. When you feel lonely or sad, are you really sad or lonely? How do you know? From the standpoint of your soul, you are neither sad nor lonely – you are just yourself. That impulse to indulge in feeling bad is based on the person’s addiction to negativity. This addiction needs to be broken by diverting attention to the positive.

It is the conscious part of the person who needs to make a choice to renounce negative emotional states and then identify with the light and bliss of the soul. Of course, this is only possible for those who have awakened their pure subjectivity; ordinary people do not stand a chance of succeeding at this since their existence is entirely based on their personality. But, for those who have access to their pure nature, they have the choice to bask in the serene bliss of their soul rather than being pulled into the negative moods of their subconscious. If you think that you feel sad, try to appreciate fully the light within you. This can be done through, for instance, identifying totally with your pure consciousness, human me, your heart, the absolute, fundamental me, or the inner knower. If you feel your human me fully, are you still sad?

Another tool that can be used to release oneself from negative emotional states is more direct – empowering the light of the person himself through the base subjectivity of his human me. Here, the person cuts his link with the negative subconscious mood by embodying himself while gently self-absorbing in human me. In other words, the person merges with human me and begins to experience himself from within human me’s angelic subjectivity. This is what we call the realization of the human knower. And, finally, the merging of the person with the inner knower allows the person to realize his highest bliss and freedom from emotional negativity.

Blessings,
Aadi

For a definition of the terminology used, please visit the Glossary page. Click here for a printable version of this article.