FURTHER NOTE ON FALSE PERSONALITY

In a discussion on the paper about the difference between False Personality and Imaginary 'I', I noticed one serious mistake. It was said that Imaginary 'I' is an illusion from birth. A small child has no Imaginary 'I'. Surely you all know that a small child never says 'I'. He uses his namehe speaks of himself in the third person. He says, for example, "Bobby wants this", or "Baby wants this". Surely there is no question of Imaginary 'I' in the innocent state of a small child. The beginning of Imaginary 'I' comes when the growing child says, instead of "Baby wants this", "I want this". This is the beginning of Imaginary 'I'. A small child does not feel himself as Imaginary 'I'. The formation of Imaginary 'I' comes later. We have to learn to speak of ourselves in the third person. For example, in my case, I have to come to the point in my internal development of consciousness, through the work of separation, of saying: "Nicoll wants this", not "I want it". The formation of Imaginary 'I' belongs to a development which is acquired. You know the Work says that we are all born amongst sleeping people, also in a small sense we are all awake at birth. We are born into a world of sleeping people who say 'I' all the time without having the slightest realization of what they mean, so a small developing creature begins after a time to imitate the sleeping people round him, and at a certain moment says: "I wish this". Before that point, it is, as it were, innocent, but once it begins to say: "I wish this," it has become infected by the sleeping people by whom it is surrounded and begins to think that it exists as 'I'. You must remember that the development of Personality is that which is acquired by contact with life in early days, so both False Personality and Imaginary 'I' begin to take charge and from that point the growing person begins to have an entirely false relationship to himself. Amongst all these things that are acquired by imitation and examplein short, by the environmentare first of all and most important of all Imaginary 'I' and False Personality. The child begins to think that it has an 'I', a real permanent 'I'. Have you ever noticed when a child begins to say 'I' for the first time? And have you also noticed in what way it says 'I'? As far as I have observed it is always imitative. The child begins to imitate one or the other parent or the nurse or anyone who stands closely to him. But, as you know, this is necessary because Personality with all its sins and faults and wrong connections has to be made in an ordinary growing person because this formation of Personality in general constitutes eventually what we as adults in this Work have to work against and separate from gradually. As regards False Personality, it gives rise to very many wrong emotional reactions. False Personality is based on pretence, especially on imagining that you know something. The realization of our ignorance of even what we know can begin to undermine the tremendous

power of the False Personality. It is unnecessary for me to say that False Personality always wishes rewards, medals, reputation, and all the rest of it. It strives to get the better of other people. It is ambitious. It tries to keep itself going at all costsand all this is pretence. And behind this pretence lies an enormous ignorance and helplessness which I call the dark side of a personi.e., the side he will not accept and will not admit into consciousness. To be amongst people with very strong False Personality is real torture for a man or a woman who has separated to some extent from the domination of his or her False Personality. When the False Personality is dominant it arouses all sorts of selfemotions in the Emotional Centre which can never lead to anything real. Two giants, the Work says, walk in front of us, called Vanity and Pride, and arrange everything for us in advance. This is the action of the False Personality on us so that we cannot, while we are under that domination, help leading false lives. G. once said that the whole of the external world, all that is going on now, all that you read in the papers, is maintenance of False Personalityi.e., it is all a maintenance of what is unreal, invented. False Personality dominates our emotional reactions more than anything else does. O. once said: "If you can manage to turn all emotions arising from the False Personality against yourself, it will have a very different effect." He added: "Find in yourself what you hate in others and turn it round and begin to object to yourself and to hate yourself if you can. You can only see yourself through turning your emotional reactions round about and directing them towards yourself." Later on he said: "Real work is on the Emotional Centre. All that this Work teaches which must enter the Intellectual Centre first of all and be registered there finally becomes concentrated on the state of your Emotional Centre and its mechanical reactions." When you do things from False Personality you are doing them externally. In such a case there is nothing internal in you that corresponds to what your False Personality is saying or doing. You are, in other words, pretending, inventing, keeping up something which is not you. Real Personality is different from False Personality because a man may have acquired a perfectly good knowledge of how to make something in which case he is more sincere. He has something real. He may, for example, be able to paint very well. He has acquired this. But he may pretend to paint much better than he does or, in other words, he may pretend to a knowledge that he has not really got. All Personality, whether false or real, belongs to the acquired side and this acquired side must be built up as strongly as possible. That is why the Work says you must have a good Personality and that is why G. once said: "I can always talk to a man who knows something, such as a man who can make good coffee." Next let us speak about behaviour from False Personality. A typical situation, constantly stressed in esoteric psychology, is always about doing a thing externally, without any internal side in yourself corresponding

to what you are doing. For example, you may affect outwardly a belief that inwardly you are contemptuous of and despise. You pretend to a belief in which you do not believe. This means that nothing can grow in such a person's inner world. If the internal sidethat is, the more essential and real sideis negative to this external side that manifests itself outwardly in life, if what he privately thinks wholly contradicts what he publicly professes, and if at the same time he cannot give up his external outward behaviour, a man is esoterically dead. He is governed by his False Personality and its ambitions and cannot give up this side and will never face himself internally, and in that case he is incapable of any inner development. Psychologically, esoterically or spiritually, this man is a living lie and he will never face the lie that he is. There are so many parables and sayings about this in the Gospels in connection with the Pharisees that it is unnecessary to say anything further except that the Work teaches that personal work on oneself depends entirely on inner sincerity with oneself. If False Personality is very strong there cannot be any sincerity with oneself, and one's life, although it may be a great success outwardly, is from the higher standpoint of esotericism a complete failure because there is nothing real there, nothing genuine. For that reason we have in the practice of this Work, which is based on self-study, through self-observation, to begin to notice the action of False Personality which always creates for us unreal life and takes away from Essence or our real side all possibilities of growth and causes us to have a thousand and one cares and anxieties which are quite unnecessary, which only make us more and more unhappy and constantly involve us in situations and problems that have no real existence. To be amongst people in whom the False Personality is to some extent in abeyance is to be in an entirely new world. This experience, which is possible for you all, while you are in it causes you to wonder what on earth you have been doing all this time. And certainly, to use the expression "what on earth you have been doing" is correct because what you have been doing is in or on the "earth" of yourself, the most outward, external side of you turned towards the world. Now the inner part of a man is his will and his understanding. If the ideas of this Work no longer rest on the surface of yourself but begin to penetrate, if you begin to see for yourself the truth that they conduct, you move inwards towards the more internal side and so move away from the False Personality with all its inventions, pretences and forms of internal considering. When you realize that there is nothing that you can condemn in another person that is not in yourself as wellin fact, when you realize the meaning of the phrase: "Thou art the man" you move inwards, to a more real existence, and begin to see everything in terms of a deeper meaning. Suppose we take moral arrogance or the temptation of power. Have you ever observed these two factors in yourself in connection with False Personality? You may think that you have no moral arrogance, for example. That impression of truth which

leads, not to moral arrogance, but to the realization of the kind of person you really are, will give rise to mercy and to a much wider range of affection and quite possibly to a better state of bodily health. It is the same as regards the increasing temptation of power which encourages False Personality, but this is not the truth, esoterically speaking, although thousands have mistaken it for such and followed this path which leads to so much deliberate and also unconscious cruelty, and I mean by cruelty not only to others but to yourself, to the sides of you which can grow. Do you think that following moral arrogance and the love of petty domestic power will lead you to realization of your own nothingness? Can you conceive that such a path will make Personality more passive and enable all these unnourished, unwatered, real sides of you that belong to the Essence to grow and so change your level of Being? One of the teachings of this Work is to make Personality passive. In order to do that you have to see and observe what keeps Personality active in such a way that you always feel you are right. As long as False Personality dominates Real Personality the latter will be under the wrong leader and go in the wrong direction. False Personality ascribes everything to itself. It is certain that it can do. It is just here that moral arrogance and the temptation of power enter. But if the more internal part of you begins to become conscious, begins to become awakened through genuine self-observation sincerely done, you will begin to avoid these very ordinary temptations and instead of feeling a loss you will feel a gain. How difficult it is to talk to a person who, without knowing it, is full of moral arrogance, who, without knowing it, thanks God that he or she is not like other people. I have told you often that the simplest psychological mechanism in us is to see evil or shortcomings in others and never to see them in ourselves. Here belongs the great idea of the Work that we have to become far more conscious of ourselves. The only path that leads in that direction is that of selfobservation which changes our whole idea of ourselves and so destroys False Personality.