A LONG THOUGHT

ON IMPERSONALITY

 

 

My realization is about the importance of unconcern, invulnerability, indifference to unessentials, self‑forgetfulness, directness, simplicity, spontaneity, and independence of the opinions of others.

 

I meditate on what it means not to be the centre of one’s circle. To the extent that I put my personality in the centre, to the same extent everything real and essential must stand aside. As my false personality stands back, however, the work, service, and impersonal love can take the central position.

 

Impersonality means freedom from self‑importance, self‑centredness, conceit, delusion, self‑ glory, boasting, fanaticism, vanity, desire for recognition, self‑assertion.

 

Impersonality is one of the twelve essential qualities which the causal self must acquire. True impersonality is not possible until I have acquired essential consciousness and have entered into unity. Only anyone who is imper­­­sonal knows what true love is. That is one of the paradoxes of the essential stage, as is so-called divine indiffer­ence. We must content ourselves with these hints and realize that we cannot understand it in our present state.

 

Before the essential stage, there is a risk that attempted im­per­sonality will entail irresponsibility, an attitude of aloofness, and escape from reality. The esoterically ignorant misunderstand such a word as impersonality, since what is intended is beyond their experience. Long before the aspirant can acquire impersonality, he must have liberated himself from emotional attraction and repulsion, liking or disliking anybody in the esoteric group at his own stage of development. Whenever there is a tendency to personal repulsion in any respect, then the contact with unity is severed. Whenever there is a tendency to per­sonal attraction, then there is no objectivity, no impersonal attitude any more, and judgement is falsified. The aspirant is not free from these kinds of consciousness. He experiences them all but is not affected by them. They have lost their power. All such things as make you prefer some­one in the group to another must be superseded by the conscious­ness of community and the work for common objectives.

 

The concept of law contains the attributes of immutability and impersonality as the two most valuable ones. The more I study the laws of life, the more can I understand the necessity of impersonality. For instance, the law of reaping demonstrates to me how impersonal, absolute justice rules in life.

 

Life in higher worlds is no selfish slug­gard’s life, for with such a life there will be no evolution. On the contrary, the higher life is a self-forgetful impersonal life of a 24-hour-a-day effort for the wel­fare of all. The group-life, the group wish has become the individual’s life, and his individual wishes are definitively eliminated. From this we see how far from understanding hierarchic life the mystics are when they think that their wallowing in divers “spiritual feelings” is true life. For the disciple, all such things, which can be called refined egoism, have long since ceased and he has intered into the impersonal life.

 

The disciple is taught to observe a divine indifference to the views of other people. This does not imply that common indifference which eschews everything unpleasant, is impassive to other people’s sufferings, feels superior. On the contrary, it is connected with a realization of responsibility for everything. The disciple receives everything offered, learns whatever it may teach him, not being put off by a personal reaction. This implies elimination of prejudice, of individual idées fixes, of aimless personal habits, of the idiosyncrasies of the first self.

 

Most aspirants have individual development as their aim. This is not necessarily a sign of egotism but might as well indicate a desire to be able to serve better. By working for others you have the experiences that make you develop the most rapidly. Then the personality steps back before the task and thereby the self ac­quires the impersonal attitude most easily.

 

It is not a matter of “I am going to help”. There is somebody who needs help through me. And that is an essential difference. I am the instrument. Whenever the separative self enters into the matter it spoils everything, more or less so, and grows more and more important and so less and less useful. So subtle is self‑deception that you may think you are important because you are an instrument. In unity there is no separative self. Separative self abolishes unity, separates you from unity. It is this impersonal self that man has such difficulty in acquiring.

 

The esoterician differentiates between two kinds of love. Emotional attraction contains a personal element – admiration, sentimentality, devotion – that easily confuses personal issues with factual issues. The essential will to unity acts magnetically in an impersonal way: evokes understanding through attraction to the factual issue. Those are two entirely different types of energies: the energies of the first and second triads.

 

What is called divine or spiritual love is, put more exactly, essential consciousness with essential energy. It is an impersonal energy. True love or essentiality is impersonal, objective, and imperturbable. Egoism and sentimentality of any kind are alien to it. The very faculty of impersonality is a condition of identification with the consciousness of other beings, inde­pendence, unconcern.

 

The more impersonal, free from attractive and repulsive emotions I am when observing things and people, the more objective and so more correct is my view, so called common sense, the more I discover.

 

The more knowledge, insight, and understanding I acquire, the more I am able to benefit consciousness development, the greater prospect I have of becoming an impersonal instrument of the planetary hierarchy.

 

In order to serve people in the right way I must love them with the impersonal love distinctive of the great ones. The condition of this is that I forget myself, my importance, that I live in order to serve, acquire the will to unity, and sacrifice myself.

 

My Augoeides: Lead me from unreality to reality, lead me from darkness to light, lead me from death to immortality.