True and False Personality

Charles Carleton Massey · Confusing Words Series · 12 pages

An essay by Charles Carleton Massey, taken from Five Years of Theosophy, the 1885 collection of essays selected from The Theosophist. Massey opens by declining the most metaphysical version of his subject: the doctrine of the trinity or trichotomy of man, which distinguishes soul from spirit, comes with such weighty and venerable authority that he is content for the moment with confirmations intelligible to all, forbearing the abstruser questions that have divided minds of the highest philosophical capacity.

The question he names but sets aside is the sharpest one in the field: whether the difference between the two personalities is one of states or of entities — whether the phenomenal or mind consciousness is merely the external condition of one indivisible Ego, or has its origin in an altogether different principle, the spirit being of divine birth while the senses and understanding, with the consciousness or Ahamkara belonging to them, come from an Anima Mundi or what the Sankhya philosophy calls Prakriti. His stated hope is modest — that anything offered here might throw a faint suggestive light on the bearings of that problem — and his practical aim is to make apparent the irreconcilability of all that characterises the temporal Ego with the conditions of the superior life, so that a reader will incline to regard the latter as the Redeemer that has to be born within us.

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