Article - Personality Rejected

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Personality Rejected

To impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence - rather than cling to personality - is the lesson of to-day. (Mis 310:7).

From conception to the grave, we are bombarded with sensual inputs that often fill our minds with a whirling mass of data demanding evaluation. Suggestions of pleasure and pain confront us at every turn as if to plead their cases for our acceptance. The thoughts that impress us are the building blocks that form our personality - thoughts based wholly upon our perception of material evidence. Regardless of whether this personality is attractive or repulsive, whether it presents beauty or ugliness, or whether it appears aged or youthful; it misrepresents man. Personality's premise that an accumulation of personal decisions can represent what God made infinite is a self-evident absurdity. "The infinite Principle is reflected by the infinite idea and spiritual individuality, but the material so-called senses have no cognizance of either Principle or its idea" (SH 258:19).

"Personality is not the individuality of man" (SH 491:25). To perceive man properly, one must see beyond the superficial declarations of personality and look deeply into what spiritually characterizes God. "Spirit diversifies, classifies, and individualizes all thoughts, which are as eternal as the Mind conceiving them; but the intelligence, existence, and continuity of all individuality remain in God, who is the divinely creative Principle thereof" (SH 513:17). Man's real identity is not dim and distant: it is never lost in oblivion or unavailable to the receptive heart because God's original idea of man has not changed. Our real identity is an innate quality of being; but in order to recognize it, all self-recorded history and personal modes of coping with the world must be put under foot. Then, right where the blockade of personality once stood, we await Mind to identify itself. Scientifically, we all express the individual ideal of Spirit and, therefore, commune with each other through Mind, not matter.

Mrs. Eddy wrote in Retrospection and Introspection 21:13

It is well to know, dear reader, that our material, mortal history is but the record of dreams, not of man's real existence, and the dream has no place in the Science of being. It is "as a tale that is told," and "as the shadow when it declineth." The heavenly intent of earth's shadows is to chasten the affections, to rebuke human consciousness and turn it gladly from a material, false sense of life and happiness, to spiritual joy and true estimate of being.

We must dispense with personality - material mind and body - and see man as God's conscious identity.

George Denninger ©

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