Clarification of the Personality
This is the process of the clarification of the personality: Each time you understand an issue or an identification with a past conflict or a now unnecessary defense, you discharge feelings associated with the issue and work through the feelings and the beliefs about it. As you have seen many times, working through an issue—which involves ceasing to be identified with it—typically allows the arising of an essential state. In this process of working through an issue related to any essential quality, the personality confronts the part of its structure that substitutes and compensates for the lack of that true quality. For example, issues around essential strength will uncover the false strength of the personality. When this compensation is seen through and the essential strength is freed, there is no more need for the personality structure of the false strength. Thus, the arising of each essential aspect will shed light on a certain element of the ignorance in the personality. When you are inquiring, the presence of an essential state allows you to become very specific about your issues. In the process of inquiry, the personality becomes clearer and purer each time a quality of essence is realized and the issues around it are understood.
Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 6
Clarification of the Self from all Rigid Ego Structures
Many seekers of spiritual development come to believe that having profound experiences, like the ones discussed above, is enough to bring about total liberation. This is a vestige of the oral self, believing that one good nursing is all that one needs. The situation is much more involved; permanent realization requires a great deal more than the arising of the experience of self-realization. The difficult work is that of the clarification of the self from all rigid ego structures, and this does not happen automatically by the mere experiencing of the state of self-realization. We need to become aware of the various ego structures and their associated affects and desires. We need to understand them to the extent of completely seeing their mental nature, and hence, their lack of ultimate reality. We need to see, understand, and be released from, the various misunderstandings, tendencies, and attachments of the self that orient it away from its inherent endowments and cause it to stand in its own way. This is a deep, slow process of maturation, but it is greatly aided by the arising of various experiences of self-realization. As the student clarifies the various structures of the self, Being—in its various manifestations —becomes a permanent center of experience and eventually the constant
ground and fabric of the self.
The Point of Existence, pg. 437
Clarification of the Soul is the Development of the Personal Essence
This process of clarification—which is the clarification of the soul—is the development of the Personal Essence, what we call the Pearl Beyond Price. The development of the Pearl is a process which keeps moving towards further clarification until it becomes the Supreme Personal Essence. Each essential state has become personalized as the personality has become clarified, as each essential aspect has become you. You yourself become the personal essential reality, and thus, this reality can be integrated at the level of the Pearl. When you experience Compassion, that Compassion becomes you. “I, personally, am Compassion. I am Value, I am Truth.” When you own it, it is no longer you experiencing it, but you know you are it. The personality becomes so permeable that it is completely merged with the aspect. This is what I call the personalization of the essential state. As the essential aspects are personalized—Compassion, Merging Love, Will, Peace, Value, Identity, and so on—you will reach a further, a more boundless personalization, which is the personalization of the Supreme. The surprise is that this is what you have been all the time. It’s never been otherwise. You’ve always been the supreme person, all the time, in your very substance, including the substance of the personality. That’s why you have always identified with it, that’s why you cannot disidentify from it: It is you. How can you disidentify from that? How can you get rid of that? It is ultimately you. Here we see that to try to disidentify from the personality and live from a transcendent identity is to leave the very ground of the reality that was never truly separate from personality.
Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 13
Levels of Clarification
So as we become clearer, inquiry goes deeper. Clarification brings understanding of our relative truth—the issues and situations of our life. Then it brings understanding of our essential truth—all the essential qualities and pure aspects that arise as a result of this understanding. And at a still deeper level, the increasing clarity reveals our absolute true nature, which is the ground of luminosity. This ground is both a transparency and a luminosity. And clarity is nothing but transparent luminosity.
Spacecruiser Inquiry, pg. 365
Recognizing Thoughts and Desires as Resistance
When the issues are clarified, it is easier to become aware of the movement itself, of the wheels in motion – not of what is being churned but of the actual churning itself. When you become aware that you are the machine in action you are completely convinced that the activity itself is what is churning up problems, only then is it possible for the wheels to stop… When the activity stops, you recognize that most of your thoughts and desires and efforts are resistance and what you have been resisting is the present moment, the now.
Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 11
The Process of Clarification Occurs Through Understanding
The thing that we experience as personality at the beginning, and for a long time on the path is actually nothing but the soul. The personality is our soul, but our soul imprinted and shaped by past experience. Our past experience shapes and forms our experience of ourselves and of our conscious and dynamic soul, and obscures its true nature by remaining as residual content in our true nature. These residues are the self-images, the internalized object relations, the reactions, the suppressed feelings, memories, and the many defenses we use to protect ourselves. The process of clarification is basically the dissolution of these residues through the light of understanding. This way the personality reveals itself as the soul developing towards individuation. The soul develops into the Supreme Pearl Beyond Price, which is the individuation of Being. This is the embodiment of Being.
Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 18
Understanding an Issue Leads to Discharge of Associated Feelings
Each time you understand an issue or an identification with a past conflict or a now-unnecessary defense, you discharge feelings associated with the issue and work through the feelings and the beliefs about it. As you have seen many times, working through an issue – which involves ceasing to be identified with it – typically allows the arising of an essential state. In this process of working through an issue related to any essential quality, the personality confronts the part of its structure that substitutes and compensates for the lack of that true quality. For example, issues around essential strength will uncover the false strength of the personality. When this compensation is seen through and the essential strength is freed, there is no more need for the personality structure of the false strength.
Diamond Heart Book Four, pg. 6
We Have to Deal with Ourselves
Becoming a mature human being doesn’t happen easily or instantly. Although there is grace and there is blessing, it is only to help you confront and deal with your situation. Grace won’t do the whole thing for you. It will give you more confidence, more trust, but you will still have to deal with yourself. The help of the school, the teaching, and the teacher are small things compared with what you need to do yourself. This is part of the educational process of the inner path. The path requires the clarification and the transparency of all that determines your experience and perception of yourself and of the world. Whatever questions you have, whatever you do not understand about yourself, you have to pursue. If you have any dissatisfaction, any discontentment, you need to pursue it. Teachings and teachers provide help, guidance, and orientation so that you don’t spend too much time dealing with the wrong issues. The teacher saves you time, energy, and effort. But the teacher can’t do it for you. The teacher gives you guidelines to help you do the practice and to help you deal with yourself. Doing it yourself does not mean twisting reality’s arm. You might find out that you can’t do it yourself. Maybe that’s part of the education. You might find out that you are just a little kid floating in a huge ocean. If that is the case, then you need to find out that you really don’t know or maybe you can’t do it. Or maybe growing up happens in a way totally different from what you thought. Maybe you find out that you have been wrong to start with, that the whole world has been a figment of your imagination. Maybe you thought all this time that you had to do things and then find out that they are done by themselves. That will be a big relief, but you still need to find out for yourself.