“Behind personality stands essence and behind essence stands real ‘I’ and behind real ‘I’ stands God.”

This is how Cynthia Bourgeault began her talk at the Association of Enneagram Teachers in the Narrative Tradition conference.  She was speaking of the trinitarian nature of the personality, essence and soul.  

Because each of these things means different things to different people, she elaborated by offering that this “cryptic saying” defines the trajectory of seeking.

She went on:

Essence precedes birth—raw material of soul  We are born with essence.  

Personality is all that comes to us from outside: family, education, enculturation; it is everything received outside of self.  Then, as if to ensure we don’t cast personality as the evil archetype of this play, she insisted that the development of personality is essential and is our life task:  Each of us must stake oneself in world and do life: personality is necessary.  

We must be a good householder and show up in the self-preservation arenas of life and within our relationships with an intention to contribute to this world.  This work has no place for tramps and dreamers who don’t know how to produce. We need our personality to work in the world.  

She also offered that personality is a crucial ingredient in maturation of essence as our essence can’t grow without personality.  The personality becomes food for the maturation of essence.

We need a systematic feeding of personality into essence so it grows.  We have to grow our personality and feed to essence.  

Can you feel the organic nature of our unfolding in which every moment is sort of a composting of personality into essence into soul?   

Personality as both defense mechanism and compost for maturation 

Within this, there is a recognition that the personality grows as a defense mechanism that prevents us from taking the wounds and arrows that life slings at us.  The defense mechanism is inevitable and necessary for survival.  The work is simply recognizing the subtle ways it shows up to protect the personality and working with that awareness. 

She believes that spiritual transformation is not a matter of going back to a glorious state of unconscious innocence…the idealization of this earlier innocence is what Ken Wilber calls the pre/trans fallacy.  Many spiritual movements have a tendency to consider this earlier wave of development as more desirable when in truth, we were unconscious and responding to instinctual needs! 

So, the work isn’t about getting back to an illusory shangri-la.  It is about waking up and using the personality as compost for the maturation of essence.  The essence that needs to grow becomes raw ingredient in dynamic process that will eventually reveal soul or real “I.”

Tallow, Wick and Flame

Picture essence as the wick of a candle and personality as tallow and soul as flame.  The tallow is the fuel that allows burning of flame..only when tallow and wick come together, do you begin to realize what is the real thing…the flame.  

Yet, when you stand back, you recognize that there is really not a “thing” you can put your finger on.  Rather, it’s a process.  It’s a dynamic equilibrium that results from interaction between tallow and wick and flame.  We are developing tallow and burning tallow.  All three are needed and all three are in relationship with the other.

It is only a candle when it burns.  So we might ask, what is being burned?  

And, what is real “I” behind essence?  ”I” am not the illusory “I”…the illusory self. Rather,  I AM this one walking behind me who I do not see.  Some call this I AM-ness, God.

There were countless times during the conference that many of us wanted to push a sort of “pause” button so we could allow these questions to simmer inside of us and let insights reveal themselves. 

We did walk away with this in our bones:

Personality is not a mistake, nor a problem to be solved.  Rather, personality is a resource bank of raw material for maturing of essence that grows into soul.  

We need grown up human beings to do the work the planet need us to do.  And, in order to do what we are called upon to do we have to grow up.