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It is diverse, original, exclusive, no two being the same.
Self-consciousness is one of the qualities it confers. Somehow our self-consciousness enables our recognition of other personalities.
It brings the endowment of relative free will necessary for moral decision making, spiritual choice, unselfish love, and our dedication to doing the Father's will.
It survives by virtue of the survival of our soul. But it is neither body, mind, or soul, it is changeless while, at the same time, being integrating, unifying, and supervising for the living system of its bestowal.
Personality is the activator of the three basic realities of our cosmic minds--the recognition of uniformity of physical causation, the recognition of the obligation of moral conduct and loving service of humanity, and faith-grasp of the urge to Deity worship.
Personality has the competence to examine goals and pass judgment on their value.
Only a personality can know what it is doing before it does it.
Personality causes the spirit to strive for the mastery of energy-matter through the mediation of mind.
Personality then, appears to be some kind of hybrid between pattern that we think of as inert and something else that can activate and influence our minds. However, if we remember that the Divine Counselor described personality as an unsolved mystery, providing we do not try to be too precise about defining personality, then the concepts we have covered can help us to gain an understanding of one side of ourselves.
The components of self that we have touched upon are all of divine origin. They consist in a combination of our personality endowment from the Father, plus attributes of Cosmic Mind from the Infinite Spirit. Together these influences help bring about that first moral decision that initiates our indwelling by the spirit-fragment from the Universal Father, our personal Thought Adjuster.
With all this marvelous equipment directly from Divinity, we might wonder why we humans are so intractable and perverse? So let's take a look at what is in the opposing camp.
We are animal-origin evolutionary creatures. As such, we have remnants of those endowments that originated along that evolutionary pathway that permitted the survival of our animal ancestors. Among the most important behavioral attributes we have inherited are the dominance behaviour character we see in most herd animals, the territorialism that is rife throughout the animal kingdom, the fight or flight response to danger, and the instinct to survive at all costs.
Dominance behavior in animals has been studied in what is sometimes termed the peck order in the fowl yard, but the same thing is seen with milking cows in a cowshed, or a group of horses in a paddock. Each animal in the group has a place on the social ladder, and every member is aware of which animal is higher and which is lower in the peck order. Any new animal introduced to the group must settle the score with every other member in order to establish its position on the ladder. In the wild, the male of the species can have a much harder life than the female. Its lot, on reaching maturity, may be to join in physical battle for the right to sire offspring, If it loses, it may find itself expelled from the safety of the flock or herd. And even if it wins, it is only a matter of time before something younger, fiercer, and stronger comes along to depose it. So win or lose, a short and violent life is its most probable lot. Although rooted in the survival of distant ancestral species, dominance behavior in the human herd is congenital in all of us, male and female alike.
Dominance behavior may be expressed in unusual ways. I remember being amazed at the results of a study of the physiological responses of a group of ordinary people taken both before and after entering their cars for their drive home from work. In some of these apparently normal people, their heart rate went from the usual 70-80 beats per minute range to something approaching the 200 mark before they were even on the road! And this was just the routine after-work drive home! They were not going out onto the race-track! One explanation is that the feeling of power associated with being in charge of a powerful weapon of possible destruction induces subconscious recall of the scent of battle. The ensuing adrenalin rush then brings about the extraordinarily high pulse rates. Strangely, it appears to be just as common in the female as in the male.
Territorial behavior is seen in the lowliest of creatures, from fishes and insects right through the animal kingdom, up to and including ourselves. For some, it may include an invisible space surrounding the animal, intrusion upon which calls for an aggressive response. Others may use scent of some kind to mark the boundaries of their personal territory. Groups of animals may have group territorial boundaries, intrusion into which calls for group action against the intruder. Human tribal communities often display this pattern. It is from these tribal communities that nations develop that continue with this behavior. In the human species, territorial behavior expresses itself in a multitude of ways, most of which carry the threat of conflict if there is an uninvited crossing of boundaries.
Probably all behavioral responses that are in direct opposition to those inherent urges in us to love one another and to live together in harmony, are actually rooted in the dominance, territorialism, and self-survival instincts inherited with our animal ancestry..
So stacked up against each other in the make-up of each of us is one set of behavioral urges that are of divine origin and nature, and a second set that derives from our tooth and
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