difference between the will and the personality

[Steppingfeet]

I was wondering if anyone could help explain this short passage here:

52.7 nstead, we appreciate and recommend the use of your second verb in regard to the use of the will. Acceptance of self, forgiveness of self, and the direction of the will; this is the path towards the disciplined personality. Your faculty of will is that which is powerful within you as co-Creator. You cannot ascribe to this faculty too much importance. Thus it must be carefully used and directed in service to others for those upon the positively oriented path.

There is great danger in the use of the will as the personality becomes stronger, for it may be used even subconsciously in ways reducing the polarity of the entity

the Will I can understand as a way of directing 'mental force', but I would have thought that the Personality becomes more balanced as one progresses, and actually diminishes as a factor.

Plenum, my basic response would have been what I had previously wrote in Gemini's thread on this subject, so I'll paste below.

Before doing so, however, I would offer in regard to your question about personality this thought. I tend to consider the "personality", or as the Confederation calls it, "personality shell", to be the outer-most, transitory, least substantive portion of the soul's identity. It is predicated upon and made possible by the illusion of separation. The "personality" is that which Ra says is lost upon death as it is a surface illusion of the mind.

I also tend to see the lower triad of energy centers - red, orange, yellow - as constituting or containing the personality: the complex of conditioned patterns of the past that, taken together, create the false notion of a separate, individual self.

The goal of course is not to negate, deny, suppress, or reject these energies of personality, but rather through conscious awareness and loving acceptance, render them transparent, allowing that which is no longer needed to fall away. Thus do these energies of personality no longer hinder or obscure or otherwise block the energy moving upward through the chakra system.

But there is danger, as Ra says, as the will grows stronger that unconscious, unrecognized, and/or unaccepted aspects of the personality will hijack the will, so to speak. And this is where I would insert first a section from a book by Ken McLeod titled, "Wake To Your Life: Discovering the Path of Buddhist Attention", and then my interpretation of that selection.

Page 88, Ken McLeod:

Finally, there is one pitfall in meditation practice that you must avoid. Meditation practice raises the level of energy in your system in the form of active attention. The higher level of energy inevitably brings you into contact with reactive emotional patterns. If you now become selective and repress emotions, pushing them out of attention, two things happen.

The higher level of energy in your system flows into the reactive pattern, making that stronger. Both the reactive patterns of the emotion and the repression are reinforced. You end up splitting in two. One part of you is capable of attention and response. The other part becomes increasingly rigid and inflexible. It takes over unpredictably whenever the repressed emotion is triggered by events or situation. Typically, a person becomes more arrogant, self-indulgent, obsessed with power, money, sex, security, or other fixations, and acts in ways to control or amass the object of obsession.

Long-term practitioners and teachers who protect areas of their lives from their practice frequently run into this problem with unfortunate and sometimes tragic results. We run the risk of a similar fate if we protect any area of our personality or lives from the increased awareness that develops in meditation.

To guard against this problem, always have at least one person, a teacher, colleague, or friend, with whom you discuss all aspects of your practice and your life. The person needs to be someone you trust and to whom you will listen regardless of the state of mind you are in or what he or she says. The only way to be sure that you will not protect an area of your habituated personality from the effects of practice is to have such a person in your life.

My basic interpretation of this follows.

Our will is a tool, a "faculty", and it can be employed by any desire within us, from red ray on up.

Say for instance you have a desire for fame, for being defensive, for dominating another, for being dominated by another, for money, for pleasure, for glory, for aversion from that which is uncomfortable, etc.

These unrecognized, unintegrated, unconscious desires literally *live* within you. They continue to desire & continue to operate. They are in motion. They are self-sustaining. And As more energy becomes available for the separate system that is your personality shell, these desires (outside of your conscious purview) may co-opt your consciousness, so to speak, by grabbing hold of the power of the will in order to achieve the object of their desires.

In the process of co-opting your will and using it towards the end of the particular desire or complex of desires, *you* will be carried away on a mission to achieve the desired end. Likely that desired end will not be about serving others with love and transparency but will rather serve to depolarize you by moving your overall vibration in un-polarized or negatively polarized directions.

Thusly it is well, as Ken McLeod says in the quoted section above, to open up every aspect of your life to the light of your consciousness and presence. These desires operate outside of your awareness and can be successful in hijacking your faculty of will only in your absence.

With love and light,
Gary