We know that the physical body is a mere vehicle on which the Personality or Psyche rests and acts. Moreover we know that man’s higher aspirations extend beyond the material towards the spiritual. This complex human being must now be analyzed in a schematic way reflecting the eternal “Know Thyself”. The following extracts are strictly focused on ‘the one thing needful’ that is to understand the structure of the human psyche, consider its characteristic deformations then follow its path of redress.

 The text used is following the definitions given by the Christian Esoteric Tradition of Oriental Orthodoxy but could also be found in the Islamic or Hindu or any authentic Tradition as the author states below. The book from which the excerpts are made is ‘Christianity: Dogmatic Faith & Gnostic Vivifying Knowledge’ written by several students using the pen name of George Heart, under the guidance of an accomplished master of the Tradition. The text is moreover based on the esoteric teaching given in Boris Mouravieff’s ‘Gnosis’[i].

Structure of the Personality:

“We must state that all Ancient Traditions, whether originating in China, India, Assyria, Hebraic Palestine, Phoenicia, Ancient Egypt, Greece or Medieval Europe, are all in full agreement about the detailed structure of the human psyche…

Such is the triple structure of the mortal human psyche, also called the Personality which we will adopt in our studies to understand Man and his possible evolution. We did so because all post Cartesian psychological works have failed to provide us with any coherent basis for our studies. Let the reader accept it with us as a working hypothesis: We hope the results will justify our choice.

Though according to Tradition the Personality is a well-defined organism, this is far from being true for each one of us in his normal life. We never experience the presence of such an organism within us. Thoughts, sensations, angers, instinctive aggression, urges to move, all these mingle inside us and we never even think that all these spring from a specific psychic body. Our body pains, our physical pleasures still add to this complexity. The main reason for such a confused state of affairs is that our attention is constantly held by exterior facts and events and we never discriminate between external stimuli and internal mechanical responses and counter reflexes. Our personalities are nothing but the intersection between external events and our dim awareness of ourselves. When all this ceases we drift in a restless sleep with or without dreams. Whenever, on the other hand we turn our attention inward, after having lived so long and spent so much time hypnotized by the external world, we are unable for a very long time to identify any clear ‘element’ inside ourselves. If we persist beyond this initial inability to see anything, our continuous efforts at internal observation will lead us to distinguish the three currents of our psychic life which we set out to find: intellectual, emotive and instinctive-motor, which correspond approximately, without any clear delimitation to our thoughts, our sentiments and our senses and sensations.

The reader must remember that these three currents are interconnected in a complex way. Never do we have pure thoughts, absolutely free from affectivity and instinctive elements. Nor do we have pure sentiments and even our actions are always mixed.

There exists a very practical and at the same time simple and clear schematic figure that illustrates almost perfectly the structure of our psychic organism.[1]

Fig.1

Figure 1 Represents the three psychic spheres, the psychic functions of which, taken in their large ensemble are as follows:

·        The intellectual center registers, thinks, calculates, combines, investigates, etc.

·        The emotive center has for domain the sentiments as well as the refined sensations and passions.

·        The motor center directs the five senses, accumulates energy in the organism by its instinctive functions and presides, by its motor functions, over the consumption of this energy.

Fig.2.

Figure 2 Shows that each center is divided in two parts: positive and negative. Normally, these two parts act in conjunction: they are in fact polarized, as are the double organs of the body which act in concordance in the accomplishment of the same functions. This division of the centers allows them to establish comparisons, to envisage the two facets of the problems presented to them. The positive part considers so to speak the upside and the negative part the reverse side of the problem, while the center as a whole operates a synthesis and draws conclusions which are inspired of ascertainments (French constatation[2]) made by each of the parts. Such for instance is the process of critical analysis.

It would therefore be wrong to consider that by naming the parts of a center positive or negative, we thus impart to them a beneficial or harmful character respectively; this would be as inapplicable as, for instance, our mention of the existence of positive and negative charges in elementary particles comports any value judgment.

With some reserve, we may say that the positive part of the motor center corresponds to the ensemble of instinctive functions of the psycho-physical organism of man and its negative part to its motor functions. In other words, the motor center is, in the largest meaning of the word, the director of our body: it must equilibrate the energies which are accumulated by its positive part and those which are consumed by its negative part. This symmetry, this polarity is found in the two other centers. Constructive, creative ideas are born in the positive part of the intellectual center, but it is the negative part which measures up the idea; and on the basis of this polarity, the center in its totality judges.

The same with the emotive center, the negative part opposes the action of the positive part while at the same time it complements it and thus allows the center to discriminate, for example, between the agreeable and the disagreeable.[3] Thus each center answers perfectly, in its domain, to the needs of man’s internal and external life.

Fig.3

Figure 3 Shows that these centers are not only divided into a positive and a negative part, but that these are divided in their own turn into three sectors. What is the meaning of this complexity? We simply say that in each center the two other centers are represented. Since each center includes a polarized positive upper part and a negative lower part, ambassadors from the positive upper parts of the other two centers are sent to the positive upper part of each center, and vice versa for the lower negative part of each center. Therefore, in each center there will be in the upper positive part a sector that will display the pure unmixed characteristics of the original center. The other two sectors of this same positive part will not display the pure characteristics of the center because they have been mixed with the characteristics of the other two centers that were carried to them by means of a resident ambassador, and similarly for the negative part of the same center. Let us illustrate what we have just said by discussing the example of the upper part of the intellectual center. This upper part will contain a sector that will display the pure intellectual positive characteristics of this center. The second sector which has received a resident ambassador from the positive emotive center would normally display the intellectual positive characteristics altered because they are mixed with the emotive characteristics. The remaining sector will display those same positive intellectual characteristics altered by their mixing with the instinctive characteristics that were carried to them by a resident ambassador from the positive sector of the motor-instinctive center. The reader will understand easily now that the negative or lower part of the intellectual center is divided in the same way, though its two mixed sectors will receive two resident ambassadors from the lower negative parts of the emotive and motor-instinctive centers respectively. What we have described regarding the intellectual center applies also to the other two centers. Figure 4 provides the reader with the schematic figure that shows the exact location and name of each of the eighteen sectors of the Personality.

Fig.4

This elementary description of the mortal soul, Man’s Personality is far richer than what we can conceive. We have only barely mentioned the intricate connections that exist between the three centers. One of the most important consequences of this system is that none of the three centers can act in an autonomous manner, since by means of the ambassadors of the two other centers, the whole is put simultaneously in motion. Positive psychology together with psycho analysis, have both agreed on the fact that each one of us is composed of a great number of I’s. Such is the theory of the multiplicity of the I, and it is quite easy to understand that the angry Mr. X is quite different from the serene Mr. X, or the sad one, or the irritated one, or the pondering one, or the weak one, or the incompetent one, etc...

The Tradition states that each of these I’s correspond to one of the eighteen sectors, each acting alone. It may also be composed of two of these sectors; and finally of three of these same sectors bound together. The Tradition thus allows us to identify the nature of each of the I’s that compose Man, while positive characterology still errs and does not go beyond classifying traits of character. Working on this definite composition of the multiple I’s of the human Personality and adopting it as a hypothesis for work that will prove right or wrong, would certainly enrich positive psychology.[4] Characterology has failed to give a coherent dynamic definition of Man’s character. But Traditional science defining character as a series of stereotyped responses to the same stimuli states that a human character is nothing but the assembly of Man’s multiple I’s into well determined federations that almost never alter. At the same time, it also accounts for the almost infinite number of possible human characters by the almost infinite modalities with which Man’s multiple I’s can assemble into federations. But there is much more, for while positive psychology looks to Man’s character as a solid rock that can hardly change, traditional science by the very means with which it defines character as federation assemblies,  points also to the way with which these federation assemblies can be dissolved into their constitutive elements. Man will thus be able to acquire firmness, the ideal male character and woman malleability (French douceur), the ideal female one. This is one of the many ways which Tradition offers Man to transmute himself.”

Divergence from the norm due to psychic deformation:

The two main psychic deformations characterizing our contemporaries have at base an inoperativeness of the emotive center, to the benefit of a hypertrophied activity of the Motor/Instinctive and Intellectual centers.

For someone of a more predominantly Intellectual formation in the present era this reflects a personality which is totally captivated by the world and its pleasures and that can set its mind on justifying and legalizing whatever it wills that does not categorically fall outside the punitive law. Being essentially a cheater, for it morality is not of the essence but only legality counts.

For someone of a predominantly Instinctive formation, the psychic deformation as the bestial instincts are given free reign can lead up to amorality (the total lack of a moral sense), criminality and recidivism. The reason is that whereas for the predominantly Intellectual person the negative part of the Intellectual center draws the line of danger, the predominantly Instinctive person when having a less refined Intellectual formation often oversees the negative possibilities of the criminal act while strictly valuing the positive.

We can deduce that the Emotive center is Man’s sole moral compass. We know that in Ancient civilizations man’s emotive faculties were educated throughout his growth and development. Moreover we know that in the Middle Ages emotiveness was the very essence of the knight who represented the elite of that society, much as intellectuality is the essence of the present scientist and technocrat. The question we must ask ourselves is what if any is the source of emotive education in today’s society? The answer is none; our emotive growth is left to hazard. This is the crux of the problem that must be immediately addressed.

Man’s psychic redress through the act of repentance:

To talk of man’s psychic redress through repentance we must first complete the schematic diagram which was commenced above regarding the structure of the psyche, in which we demonstrated its actual deformation. If repentance is of the psyche then this psyche must be able to assimilate itself to the higher Self, the Spirit. We have used the text taken from the same book and summing up the matter. This text was chosen as it was thought that the western reader whose upbringing is implicitly or explicitly founded on a Christian background would find the Christian language of the text easier than that of other Traditions. Readers from other backgrounds can use the word SELF as utilized in the eastern Traditions as a substitute for the names of the Christian divinity used within this esoteric context of evolution.

The following brief excerpt from Frithjof Schuon’s[ii] ‘Esoterism as Principle and as Way’ sums up this unity of Principle within the diversity of languages: “What characterizes esoterism to the very extent that it is absolute, is that on contact with a dogmatic system, it universalizes the symbol or the religious concept on the one hand, and interiorizes it on the other… Christianity universalizes the notion of ‘Israel’ while interiorizing the divine law; it replaces circumcision of the flesh by that of the heart, the ‘Chosen People’ by the Church that includes men of every provenance… The mainspring of Christianity is that ‘God has become man so that man may become God’: this means, in Vedantic language that Atman has become Maya so that Maya may become Atma… In Buddhist language: Niravan has become Samsara so that Samsara may become Nirvana… The function of the historical Christ is to awaken and actualize the inward Christ; like the Logos which Jesus manifests humanly and historically, the inward Christ or the Heart-Intellect[5] is universal and thus transpersonal”

The Immortal Soul or Spirit:

From ‘Christianity: Dogmatic Faith & Gnostic Vivifying Knowledge’ we read: “After what we have said concerning the structure of the Personality, we must now pass to that of the Immortal Soul.

Fig.5

In figure 5 the reader sees that the Immortal Soul is represented by means of two added centers. But the latter, unlike the three centers of the Personality are undivided. Why two? First of all we shall give each of these two centers a conventional name, the one at the level of the heart or the Emotive center, we shall call the Superior Emotive Center, in contradistinction with the Inferior Emotive center. The second one, which has been drawn at the level of the head or the Intellectual Center, we will call the Superior Intellectual Center in contradistinction with the Inferior Intellectual Center. The reader must remember that in the second chapter of Genesis God creates Adam , then breathes into his Two nostrils a double spark of His own fire and, says the text: Adam became a living soul. Which means that God, by adding that double immortal soul to the three centers of the mortal soul, gave it life. We can conceive of a man endowed only with a physical body and a mortal soul: such a man should be considered dead though he be alive. It is the immortal soul which when added to the Personality, does theoretically allow evolution. The reader will still remember, we hope, the principle upon which salvation is built: the Personality must integrate itself consciously to the Immortal Soul. The absence of the Immortal Soul therefore renders salvation absolutely impossible.

The text of Genesis indicates first of all that the Immortal Soul derives from God and God alone. As to the fact that it is double, this is clearly indicated by the fact that in each of Adam’s two nostrils a breath of God was insuflated. The Early Fathers of the Church confirmed this double structure of the Immortal Soul and called the two Superior Centers the two eyes of the soul, that is to say the two eyes of the Personality or the mortal soul, without which it becomes blind (editor: Islam offers a similar analogy). We are all blind because we have chosen to look to the world, not through these two divine sparks, but through our incessant running after money, sex and power.

We still have to identify more closely the essence of these two Superior Centers: The One at the level of the Heart is said to be a spark from Jesus Christ, the Second Logos and Son of God. While the One at the level of the head is said to be a spark of the Holy Spirit, the First Logos with Whom Jesus Christ is consubstantial. The reader might resent the difficulty of this dogmatic language, but in such matters it is impossible to add or subtract any single word. Salvation is no small problem: it realizes the divine promise to overcome death and Live forever. In fact, death is not the death of the body as we all tacitly believe. A man can live in a coma for years, we cannot consider him dead, for we hope that the return of the Personality (consciousness in medical terms) to the body will bring this man back to life. Therefore it is the Personality or the mortal soul that Saint Paul meant when he wrote saying: ‘We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed’. We can now easily transpose Saint Paul’s terms as follows: Not all mortal souls will die and be dispersed, some of them that have assimilated themselves to the Immortal Soul will

never die, while the rest will be dispersed… Concerning Saint Paul’s words ‘but we will all be changed’, they simply assert the fact that all of us will leave this physical body and this is the only absolutely true certainty.

Each of these two centers, which make but one, have been drawn in fig.5 containing no divisions. This means that when Man listens to their call and entrusts himself to them, he is objective and conscious with no traces of doubt. As if he were seeing, hearing and acting through God. On the contrary, a most distressing state is the state of that other man – and we are all that other man – who lives by the Illusion of the world and believes uncompromisingly in its pseudo-reality. The reader can easily understand why the Immortal Soul is also described as being the Impartial Judge, the King of Justice, the Heroic Champion of Truth, the Objective Seer, the Self Conscious, and the rest of those superior qualities that our Personality unjustly claims for itself.

This same schematic figure shows also that the connection between the Immortal Soul and the Personality can only take place via Man’s heart, the so-called Inferior Emotive Center. And here we must draw the reader’s attention to a supremely important point, without the comprehension of which, he will not understand the connection between the world of the Spirit or Immortal Soul and the world of Illusion and the Personality.

Something mysterious is thus present inside the Adamic heart that is akin in its nature to the nature of the Superior Emotive Center. And because, as Plato says the similar is known by the similar, we can affirm without erring that in our hearts exists an affinity that attunes us to the call of the Superior Emotive Center. We can also call this mysterious part a reception post, perfectly attuned to decipher the messages that come to it uninterruptedly from the Superior Emotive Center. And we can also call it the moral conscience, that internal and infallible sense that discriminates luminously inside us between right and wrong. Saint Paul referred to it as that rectitude of the reason that allows all Adamic men, whether Greek, Roman or Barbarian, to know and worship God. We can mention to our readers several other functions, the moral conscience can perform. By blinding it we will cut ourselves forever from any possibility of salvation.

This part of our Inferior Emotive Center that receives God’s appeals can also be called the sanctuary of the heart. What hope is there left for Man, when his sanctuary becomes the Devil’s abode?

If such were not the case and our hearts did not contain any post of reception for the divine messages, then the spiritual world and the Personality would remain forever irremediably cut from one another.

That same schematic figure is lastly the key to understanding what Jesus said about His own relations with the Father. Jesus has said whoever knows me, knows the Father. Whoever sees me has seen the Father. There is no other way to the Father but through Me.

The Technique of Salvation:

A) Sin

… Avidity and rapacity together with the web of considerations, meant to justify our acts, are at the core of all our sins. Behind the mask of dignity, decency and righteousness, which we all put on, there is only a greedy love for money, sex and power. To this we must add that exaggerated self-confidence which makes us feel almost like gods and which triggers a furious anger against the events or the persons that threaten to indent our pride. By so doing, we have cut ourselves definitively from the calls of God that come from the Superior Emotive Center.

Salvation as we have said is the long and painful process of purification that will enable us to re-enter into contact with God. The path of repentance is the painful way, which the mortal soul must indispensably tread if it ever longs to go back to the terrestrial paradise.

… we must affirm that successful, proud men live and die shrouded in their unconsciousness without ever questioning life and totally oblivious to death; it is only those who have received traumatic shocks and run through repeated moral bankruptcies who can be roused to question the “hows” and “whys” of life in order to find an issue out of their sufferings. Such men will start to think deeply. They will see under a new light the riddles that religion had always presented to them and to which they had remained almost blind. Before, they had lived their lives glued to the world, blind to everything; now, they detach themselves a little from this same world. This detachment from the world is the first step on the way to salvation. We live in general in an illusory world, supremely content with our lives and submerged in self-conceit. Those who suffer start digging for the truth and become haunted with knowing the true meaning of suffering and death.

B) Repentance

We have stated more than once that salvation must take place by assimilating our mortal soul to the Immortal one. This seemingly easy task is in fact a lengthy, tedious and systematic procedure. Man must

detach himself from the world and unless he is just, only failures and disasters will induce him to do so. He will then start, while looking for a way out, to discover the truth of the illusory world in which he was so happily living. Philosophically speaking, the main sin from which we should all repent is that dim and foggy awareness in which we spend our lives, glued to ephemeral wishes, stubborn whims and above all absolute oblivion to death. The hypnotic state of consciousness in which we all live, satisfied like ravenous pigs, is our unforgivable sin, as long as we do not repent.

We give here quite a different meaning to the mystery of confession (or sacrament of repentance) from the one with which we are all familiar and which consists in confessing to a priest our disobedience to the orders of God. The Church used to provide the Christians with a list of standard sins, divided into mortal, like killing for example or venial like lies.

True repentance aims at something much more dangerous. Since our fall during infancy, we have indulged into the creation of a powerful arsenal of intellectual considerations which all aim at justifying whatever wrong we have done and prepare the ground for whatever wrong to come.

We have forged formidable arguments and counter arguments that allowed us to defend ourselves against any accusation, whether coming from inside or outside, and what is worse, we have come to believe in all this forged world of ours, created by us and for us. We have built a universe of lies against which all the waves of truth break away. In one word we have cruelly and repeatedly severed the solid and compound link that joined us to God. We have elegantly and laughingly killed our moral conscience. We have destroyed forever God’s sanctuary within ourselves. The reader can now understand us when we say: What is the value of confessing our sins to some priest before going to Sunday mass, when we live and will continue to live in this artificial sphere of cheating and lies?

Our auto justifications, the accusations we throw against circumstances and ‘evil’ friends year after year have ended by making us see whatever surrounds us in a biased way. Events and persons are colored by our hatred, love, sympathy, contempt, etc… And we believe that we are absolutely objective in spite of everything. Our whole life is a series of erroneous conceptions of things, men and events.

True repentance will only be realized if we can get rid of these accumulated errors of conception, illusory judgments and pseudo objectivity. Confessing sins listed on some paper to some priest is desperately far from what is really required.

C) True Conversion

Talking to the Jews – and we are all these very same Jews – Jesus said: “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of all lies”

These words describe this general sphere of lies in a perfect way, which though intangible is quite real. Again we say that repentance is not a matter of asking forgiveness for a small or large number of sins soiling a life which in itself is considered to be basically clean; it is on the contrary a question of transmuting our life as a whole, of reorienting it in a completely different direction. All this is perfectly expressed by the Greek word for repentance Metanoya, which means, broadly speaking, going beyond our usual way of conceiving the world and its meaning, going beyond the artificial role we learned to play and to which we hold so tenaciously, going beyond our understanding of ourselves, of the meaning

of our life and of our conception of death. The word Metanoya implies an integral conversion of Man, in the sense we give to converting lead into gold, for example.

Metanoya therefore defines the ensemble of the tedious efforts that will shatter the sphere of lies and illusions in which we live. The reader must also be fully aware that it is not only a question of understanding in a new way: Metanoya aims before all else at changing our state of consciousness.

We are usually conscious of a world that perfectly suits the grandiose image we have of ourselves; we push away and destroy whatever troubles the peace of our petrified pride and we call this miserable parody the real world. Yet we claim that we are perfectly awake and realistic.

Metanoya – repentance – j is a complex process:

Its general aspect consists in the gradual shifting of our interest in life. We are all born, consciously or unconsciously running after money, sex and power, though when brutally confronted with this fact, we deny it and affirm that of course money, sex and power matter, but are certainly not what we live for. In fact the various aims that constitute our very horizons, must gradually give way to a living interest.

We have stated already that Man awakens to new and distressing questions, to which he was previously oblivious, only after having miserably failed: What is the meaning of this ephemeral life of sufferings? Why does all this happens to me and not to anybody else? How can I go back to the peace in which I lived? And, with the passing of time and the deepening of the crisis: Is there any way out?

On such a basis and on such a basis only will Man be slowly driven to search for the meaning of Life and Death. And he will not even be aware that he is delving deep into problems of philosophy, religion, metaphysics and morals which he previously used to consider as quite unreal and boring. His increasing passion for knowledge, his deceptions and renewed hopes to find a solution will attach him definitively to this new realm. In the language of the Christian Tradition, this Man dwells no more on the material objects and interests which hypnotize all men in the world, but dwells, on the contrary, on more subtle subjects. He is, himself acquiring something of the subtlety of the Spirit. This phase is intermediary between carnal interests and spiritual ones. The reader will now understand that this transitory stage is a sine qua non condition of the possible union between the mortal soul and the Immortal Spirit. In order to accomplish tangible progress, such a man must consolidate the newly acquired results. His new shelter, that is to say, the sphere of true knowledge in which he now lives must be freed from any carnal drives, otherwise it will crumble. If he fails, such a man will openly mock all the Ideas, Philosophies and Religions which he had started to respect. He will deceitfully affirm that nothing of this sort ever existed and will drift away in nonsense.

We can now see that the process of conversion comports many dangers. The love for knowledge and rectitude has a high price: Perseverance and toiling. That, which was at the beginning something external to Man, will in the end turn into his very fiber.

In this way Man will become unshakably anchored in this new and pure sphere that he created by his own efforts. His material interests, his fight to earn his living, his ambitions and expectations will not disappear altogether: They will take the place they deserve in his life; they will become a means and not a goal.

At the same time this man will attract himself, so to say, to the Immortal Soul inside him. What he has painfully gained has transformed him and has woven an almost unbreakable bond between him and the Spirit. He has voluntarily and consciously recreated the love of truth and the moral conscience he had destroyed long ago, when he sold himself to falseness and forgeries. He will also appreciate the true value of all what he has so painfully acquired. The problems that had roused him to this evolution have never in fact been solved or disappeared: They have simply lost almost all their importance for him. With the passing of time, the problems that he had lived tragically have become insignificant. And he finally says: If I had remained deeply buried in my superficial, bourgeois satisfaction and self-conceit, I would have lived and died without having ever suspected the presence of such a pure and exalting Realm; what I lived as a real life has proved to be a trifling comedy woven in ignorance.

He would have unmasked the meanness and the hypocrisy behind the world’s facade, and he would have understood why Jesus said in the Gospel according to Saint Thomas: “Those who have really unmasked the world do not deign to even spit on it.”

This man is very close to salvation. He has rid himself of that sphere of lies, from the interior of which he saw himself and the world. He is now objective in a way we cannot conceive.”

With this we close the present article in preparation of the coming article that will discuss how this repented person is called upon to complete his transmutation and become the active principle, the New Man, at the end of this transitional period between eras.