121 - The Art of Personality:
Sparking the growth of the personality -
an emerging construct unfurling in the cosmic symphony.

CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER

The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis.

Cogito ergo sum.

Descartes. (I think, therefore I exist)

- or is it : I exist because I think.?

I am that I become.

Moses. (not I am that I am)

When we say "I am," we are declaring that we identify with a notion of what we think we are. What we really are remains an enigma enshrouded in the dark unknown, "the secret treasure that loves to be known," according to the Sufis. Moreover, rather than "who I am," it is more relevant to ask "who am I becoming." "Whom I am" is only a static cross section of the dynamics of the evolution of my being.

That notion "I" is what Pir o Murshid Inayat Khan calls the ego, which he defines as a faulty notion of our self.

The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being. It is not that the false ego is our ego, and the true ego is the ego of God, it is that the true ego, which is the ego of God, has been reduced to a false ego in us.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

The ego is not to be confused with our personality, which is a real - though evanescent - ephemeral construct of human idiosyncrasies (qualities and defects). It is endowed with a non-spatial configuration of our imagination which translates thinking and emoting - a way of envisioning oneself versus circumstances and an emotional attunement - into an ubiquitous mental fabric in flux. This corroborates Descarte's statement that existence involves thinking or knowing - or the act of consciousness. Both our notion of ourselves, and our personality, are of the nature of the level of existential reality we call thinking.

While our ego is a notion, our personality is an - albeit ineffable - reality. It is of the nature commonly ascribed to mental activity, which is a valid mode of reality (though not configured or located in space) that fashions our subtle bodies, aura, and the countenance transpiring through the features of our face and our demeanor. Thus in the personality, fiction gets actuated into matter - mind over matter - the psycho-bio feedback recycled as a feed-forward.

If you go to further depths of matter you find what we call mind

David Bohm

Moreover this mental formation, emerging within the momentous global thinking of the universe, itself evolves by disintegrating and reconstructing itself recurrently in the forward march of becoming. This is like the sequence of notes we perceive as a melody, or the cliches of a film that we perceive as a continuity, failing to grasp the discrete units in the series. It is a continuity in change: perennity.

Buddhists emphasize the ephemeral nature of all formations, physical and mental. Illusion is seen as the error of hanging onto that which is elusive. But the Sufi, Jami, points out: The world may be illusion, but through it a reality transpires.

It is an evolving reality transpiring through vanishing outbursts, like a tide erupting as evanescent waves.

Such is the elusive nature of our personality, which is our realization configured in a formative process in a fluid structure. Our identification with it gels it to the point of psychological sclerosis, hence Buddha's deprecation of the hoax of identification. This is where our ego - which is what we erroneously identify with - hampers the unfoldment of our personality. Hence the meaning of Pir o Murshid's description of the real ego concealed behind the false ego which is the "I am" buried under the bush.

Our sense of what we could be if we would be as we might be frees us from this imbroglio. Hanging on to what our personality has become as it evolved though the past is illustrated by Lot's wife, who turned into salt because she looked back.

The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past.

Euler.

Thus we see the role of our quest for freedom from conditioning. It is triggering off creativity, which represents precisely the aim of ascetics, but in creativity, we are infusing our involvement in life with a dose of freedom, thus preventing it from incarcerating us in an inextricable rut.

So how can we enhance our creative activity in fashioning this mental vision that crystallizes as that psychological construct that is our personality? The clue is to be found in the activity of a composer. Consider your personality as a symphony taking shape within Pythagoras' "symphony of the spheres" formulating - albeit an incomparably unequal likeness of its excellence and bounty - yet an exemplar of that cosmic model and transcendent archetype.

The secret of the art of my science, the science of my art, nobody knows but myself. I am endeavoring to fashion a model for the human commonwealth in the language of music. For each theme an instrument, for each instrument a theme. Not just a melody with accompaniment. Each theme, enjoying initiative, yet each theme limiting its incentive in the interest of the whole. Such is the harmony of the stars..

J.S.Bach.

Indeed Newton confirmed that each star is impacting every other, and each is concurrently reacting to one another in harmonic interaction.

The lover of music attains sooner or later to the most sublime field of thought by completing his individuality, in which is hidden the purpose of man's coming on earth. The art of personality is like the art of music: it needs ear training and voice culture. To a person who knows life's music the art of personality comes naturally.

When a man looks at every soul as a note of music and learns to recognize what note it is, flat or sharp, high or low, and to what pitch it belongs, then he becomes the knower of souls, and he knows how to deal with everybody. In his own actions, in his speech, he shows the art that harmonizes with the rhythm of the atmosphere, with the tone of the person he meets, with the theme of the moment. To become refined is to become musical; it is the musical soul who is artistic in his personality. Spoken in different tones, the same word changes its meaning.

Hazrat Inayat Khan.

In fashioning your personality, you are projecting a sophisticated mental formation in the mind field of the universe. Once conceived, it is endowed with a sustained perpetuity like a symphony configured in the mind of a composer, regardless of whether it is or has ever been written down or performed.
