Arya Samaj

Shishya · Posted: Mon Jan 01, 2007 11:56 pm Post subject: The Façade of Personality

The Façade of Personality
by
Arya Putra

Realizing our Essence is a matter of dematerializing our personality. (This phrase is a pun, but it is not just for fun, it is for the sake of Liberation.)

We need to free ourselves from our false personality, otherwise we will never know our True Self and we will never meet our Maker. Knowing our True Self is not something we can fake. Believing in religion is not enough. Unless we have a firm conviction in our Real Nature (DHARMA) we will never stay the course.

The course is the journey Home to Eternity. Everyone is on that journey, but too often we take detours, or get distracted from the Path, or imagine that there is some short cut to Moksha (Liberation). There is not.

We need to cut through all the nonsense and stop pretending that we can be happy or satisfied with temporary reality in the form of shallow personality and ego gratification. Our personality is shallow when it is based on materialism. Shallow personality is the result of ego gratification. In other words, when we pursue our egotistic goals and dreams, desires and expectations, images and preconceptions, we create a false persona that is empty and without any essence.

Dematerializing our personality means dropping our self-involvement. As long as we are involved with petty feelings and emotions we can never realize our Essence. We are petty when we over estimate our own significance or importance. This too is nothing but shallow personality.

Our Essence is All-pervading, and there is nothing greater than THAT. We experience that Greatness only when we are greater than our own ego. So long as ego is important in our mind, it is not possible to be our True Self and know our Essence. To be our True Self we have to stop being phony. We have to stop being in our shallow personality. This is a mental practice but it shows in our behavior and actions.

We become great (greater than ego) when we become humble. We become humble when we become truly wise. We become truly wise when we learn the lessons of life and stop repeating our mistakes. It is a mistake to listen to our ego and fall into the trap of shallow personality play.

We must stay focused and constantly engaged in raising consciousness. We need to expand the depth of our knowledge and experience; we do not need to expand our circle of friends and acquaintances. The company of the Wise and noble is essential, but the company of shallow friends and distant relatives is a waste of time (our most important resource). Shallow friends are those who feed into our mind games but have no real desire to train their mind to learn the Wisdom of Consciousness. Distant relatives are those people (whoever they might be) who are deliberately distancing themselves from the Truth, who do not relate to what is Real, and only relate to themselves and others on the level of shallow personality.

We must ‘Make the whole world noble’ but we have to do our own homework before we can help others do theirs. If we don’t have our own act together there is little we can do to effectively help others. ‘Getting our act together’ simply means buckling down with ourselves, getting off our ‘high horses’ of ego, and sticking with our good program of self-improvement, cooperation with the Wise, the practice of common sense, and performing our duty to our family and community in the spirit of renunciation (egolessness).

OM