Personality / Three Basic Types: Reason -- Will -- Emotion

By The Pathwork Guide

Greetings in the name of the Lord. I bring you blessings, my dearest friends. Blessings for all of you. My dear ones, we see with great joy that many of you are progressing very well on the road that you have chosen. And a few more have decided for this Path of liberation. Each soul who makes such a vital decision creates much rejoicing in the spirit world, a rejoicing that you too must feel in your heart sooner or later, be it only after the first few obstacles and resistances have been overcome. You can be sure that the final decision to walk on this Path of self-development, as well as each victory on this Path, creates a special blessing for you, whether or not you can feel it at the moment. Yet this blessing is a reality.

Many of my friends have prayed for help and for strength on this Path. But most of you do not recognize it when this prayer is answered. For this prayer is often answered in a form that seems unpleasant to you: in a conflict, or a in a friction, or in something that induces you to feel unjustly treated. You do not realize that this event, which causes you temporary pain, is an answer to your prayer -- the prayer in which you ask for help to recognize yourself and your conflicts so as to purify yourself. How can you do so unless your inner conflict materializes outwardly? For only then can you become aware of what is hidden within you that deviates from Divine Law. This deviation is negative, and therefore must materialize as something that you feel in a negative way. This simple logic is often overlooked, my friends, and you persistently take the frictions in your life as though they had nothing to do with you. So I beg of you, consider the outer conflicts that come to you as an answer to your prayer. Instead of becoming defiant and hurt, turn inside, turn around, no matter how wrong you think the others may be. Ask Yourself, ask your Father in Heaven: "Isn't there some grain of truth somewhere that I do not see? By recognizing it I will continue to learn and to develop." And a wealth of further recognitions must come to you, and these will cancel out all the disharmony, all the feelings of injustice, of sadness, of defiance, or of any other kind of misery. When you feel unjustly treated or when you feel hurt, then turn in the direction of your own inner reactions, my dear friends. Then you will see that your prayer was indeed answered. And when you see the core of your inner error, then all the friction between you and your brothers and your sisters will disappear like snow in the sun. And then you will be able to unite with understanding and with love. We in the spirit world pray for you, that you may be given this understanding and this love, our friends, our brothers and our sisters in the body who are courageous enough to do the one thing that matters: turning inside for self-recognition and for self-purification. There is no other reason for life on earth than to follow through on the road that you have chosen. The more wholeheartedly you go about it, the more sincerely you prove your good will and the greater the efforts you make, then the safer it is for you to assume that you will not have lived in vain. No matter when you begin, there is no "too late."

Many of you are filled with the sincere desire to unite with God. But before you can do so, find the many opportunities offered to you in which you can unite with your fellow human beings. In this way you can practice humility and love. In this way you can leave out your pride and your ego and prove that what you mean is serious. Here and now, right where you stand, you have plenty of opportunities to find God.

And now, my dear friends, we will continue with these lectures, which are meant to help you to find your inner wrong conclusions that have created so much trouble in your life. What I say to you in each of these lectures is supposed to give you further help and a clue to finding yourself. In other words, to find what you truly are and who you really are.

There are three basic types of human personality, in addition to other subdivisions which I have discussed in the past and which I shall discuss in the future. The divisions I want to discuss now are the human personality type who governs his life and his reactions mainly with reason; the second type, who does so mainly with emotion; and the third, who does so with the will. In other words, you have the personality of reason, the personality of emotion, and the personality of will. In your self-search it will be useful to find out which of these types applies to you. Before I go on I want to add that these three types never occur in a completely undiluted form. In fact, there is always a mixture. In some cases, the predominance of one is more obvious. In others, the mixture is more involved and therefore more difficult to detect. In the ideal personality, each of these three aspects has its rightful place. In the harmonious person each of these three aspects functions in a perfect way. But since there is no completely purified human being, then these trends are often directed into wrong channels, aside from their imbalance, or their predominance. For instance, where reason should prevail emotions do, and vice versa.

Let us begin with the personality of reason. The person who conducts his life mainly through the reasoning process is often apt to neglect his emotions. He is afraid of them. He thwarts them. He cripples them. Therefore, he cripples one of the most important instruments in life, the intuition. He who is afraid of his emotions cannot trust his intuition because it is blurred by his distrust of it, by his fear of the supposedly intangible nature of intuition. Often the reason person secretly looks down on the emotion person. He is proud to be so firmly steeped in the reasoning process. And his will is used mainly in the service of deductions made with the reasoning process and seldom in an emotional or intuitive way, as it should be. The reason person is often a so-called intellectual. He is often a scientist. He is often an agnostic, or even an atheist. He often tends toward the materialistic side of life. However, it would be wrong and a crass generalization, as well as an oversimplification, to state that all, or even most, reason types are spiritually less developed or less aware than, say, the emotion types. This is not so. There are many highly developed and spiritually awakened reason types, as well as emotion types. Only in the approach do they differ. The reason type will find it more difficult to experience the Divine within. The emotion type will encounter other difficulties. Furthermore, the reason type will have great difficulty with an intuitive judgment of others, as well as of the self. The will -- which is a necessity in life for all -- will be used one-sidedly by both types. The reason type uses the will premeditatively, often over-cautiously; while the emotion type is carried away by his emotions and he uses his available willpower unconsciously so that it throws him in a direction of which he is unaware. The harmonious personality would find the healthy middle way between the two and use his will alternately, depending on the situation. The will should be a servant both to reason and to emotion.

The reason type goes through life missing a great deal of life experience, mostly out of fear and pride. He fears that the emotions might lead him to an experience that he may not be able to cope with. The fear of uncertainty and the fear of risk go with the emotional life, while reason has everything in its place. One knows at all times where one is, while the emotions leave one at sea.

The second category, the emotion type, is equally one-sided. He often prides himself that only he is capable of feeling, but not the others. He secretly looks down on the type he derogatorily labels "the intellectual." Yet, the extreme of this type is not one iota less removed from harmony and from divine law than is the extreme of the former. It is true that the emotion type tends to have a good intuition and is sometimes less afraid of feeling and of inner experience than is the reason type. So, what are the drawbacks of this type? The emotion type, contrary to the reason type who holds life's reins too tightly, often loses his grip on life's reins altogether. The overly emotional person completely loses sight of the fact that reason is also God-given. He is just as arrogant as the reason type, who looks down on the emotion type. The emotion type is often so carried away by his uncontrolled feelings that he rides on the crest of a tossing wave. Thus he not only loses control over the self, but he becomes blind to that which is often most important for his life and for his development. Due to his over-emphasis on the emotional side, he neglects the equally important reasoning functions, which are supposed to serve him to think, to discriminate, to select, and to weigh. Only through using his intellect will he be able to curb the wild emotions that flow without purpose or direction, without necessarily being impure as such. Only then can the will be used properly. Otherwise, the uncontrolled emotions cannot fail to bring havoc into this person's life, as well as into his surroundings. The temptation to give in to the emotions is at first manageable. But the more one gives in to them, then the more difficult it becomes to resist this temptation, until the person is simply carried away by the torrent of his uncontrolled emotions which destroy everything in their wake. Once he is caught in his own torrent, then such a person cannot help being selfish and destructive, even though this kind of selfishness is different from that of the reason personality, as well as different from the selfishness of the will personality. For him it becomes important to realize that what he has been so proud of ceases to be an asset because of the extreme he finds himself in. It becomes important to cultivate the selecting process of deliberate thinking and of planning. This selecting process is the beginning of wisdom.

The emotion type uses the will too, of course, for no one can exist without doing so. But he will do so without responsible and conscious planning. In other words, without deliberation. He will use his available willpower chaotically and on the spur of the moment. This is because he is completely submerged not in healthy and constructive intuition, but in basic, unchanneled instincts. Thus this person loses his balance in life just as the reason type does in the opposite way.

Both types are subconsciously afraid of their opposite extreme. Therefore, they remain on their side of the extreme. This is a wrong conclusion. In this wrong conclusion the person feels, or unconsciously thinks, that his extreme is a better solution to life than the opposite one. The reason type is afraid of losing control, thus cutting out not only a major part of life's necessary experience, but beauty and happiness as well. The emotion type is afraid that by curbing and training his nature, then he might miss something valuable in life. Both are wrong, for only in the harmonious middle path lies the complete solution.

There are people in both categories who are obvious representatives of each. But there are many more who are not quite so clear-cut. One reason is that a person may be either over-emotional or over-intellectual in some aspects of his personality, while in other respects he may be more balanced, or even tend to the opposite extreme. Another reason is that where he belongs may not be obvious because his true nature in this respect may have a mask. For example, a person who is basically emotional, out of his sick fears and his immature currents chooses to assume a mask of intellectuality that is really foreign to his true nature. Such a person may outwardly appear calm and controlled, but inside he finds himself in a storm of his emotions. He will never find peace until he works toward achieving his proper balance.

I am discussing this from the point of view of your path. When you penetrate your soul -- your images, your wrong conclusions, the layers of your errors -- then this material will give you more understanding about who you are, what you are, and how you are in reality.

The third category, the will type, is altogether different. The will is supposed to be a servant, never a master. In the ideal case, the will should serve equally man's reasoning process and his emotional and intuitive faculties. The will type makes a master out of the servant. This brings the personality out of focus in a way that might become dangerous if this trend is not recognized in time. As do the former two types, such a person may unconsciously look down on the other two. He will think or feel (perhaps not in the same words, my friends, but the inner reaction might amount to just this): "The reason type is just an intellectual. This is the type of person who talks well, who has wonderful theories, but it is all in the abstract. Nothing is accomplished by that. Nothing is achieved. I am the achiever." As far as the second category is concerned, that is even more despicable for him, because it accomplishes even less. He is right, as are the other two in their judgment of the extremes that are not theirs. But all are wrong in the belief that their extreme is better than those they look down upon. The person of will -- who uses the servant as the master -- is out for achievement and results, tangible results. This will often tend to make him much too impatient, thus forfeiting the very result that he is after. The impatience will cripple his reasoning process which, in conjunction with a healthy emotional nature, leads to wisdom. Without wisdom he either cannot accomplish what he sets out to accomplish, or, even if he should succeed, then he will be unable to exploit it in the right way, and thus he will be forced to lose it again. He will not only tend to lose sight of all caution, but also to lose sight of many aspects of life, and to overlook many considerations that are essential in order to gain truth for the self, for others, as well as for any given situation. The person of will also neglects the emotional side. He is just as afraid of it as is the reason type, only with a different, often unconscious, purpose in mind. Emotions are acceptable for the will person only as long as he can remain master of them, as long as they serve him; otherwise they could possibly hinder his aim. So he, too, misses an integral part of the life experience. He seldom experiences what it is to give himself up to a feeling without knowing what the outcome and his own possible advantage might be.

These are three crass types, my friends, and you do not always find a personality with characteristics so predominant that you recognize him right away. Since it is always easier to know the other than to know the self, then you may form certain conclusions about your fellow creatures from the angle I have indicated here. In most people two of the three types are predominant, while the third is crippled. There are also a great many people in whom all three aspects function. But each functions in a wrong channel, at least in some respects, while the proper functioning is insufficient and does not apply to the whole personality. You may remember the lecture I gave about the active and the passive forces, in which I discussed that both currents are necessary for the healthy human soul. It would be just as wrong to be an entirely active person as to be an entirely passive one. Actually, this does not exist, although there may be a predominance of one trait in many a person. But what frequently happens is that the active current flows through the channel destined for the passive current, and vice versa. It is similar with reason, with emotion, and with the will. Even where there is no outright predominance, where reason should function, emotion is used, and vice versa; or the will does not function where it should, while it often functions where it should not. This should be of help when you get deeper and deeper into your own soul, so as to find out where and how all these aspects or currents function; where one interferes with the other, instead of helping along and thereby creating one harmonious whole.

Is there a question on this subject, my friends?

QUESTION: Does this division correspond to the so-called Kretschmer types: the cerebrotonics, the somatotonics, and the viscerotonics? In other words, are they combined with the physical habitus of human beings?

ANSWER: Yes, of course. It applies to everything. No soul current is entirely indifferent of the physical. The physical is an outpicturing of the soul currents, and this outpicturing can occur in many ways and has many possibilities.

QUESTION: Is it possible to react emotionally in some instances with some people and then exert willpower towards others predominantly? I mean the same individual reacting towards one person in one way and in the other way towards others.

ANSWER: Certainly. But there must be a reason for that. He who is on this Path and makes this observation about himself should check why he would react towards a particular person differently than he usually reacts. There must be an answer in that too. All these things are very important for your self-observation.

QUESTION: If one were to achieve purification completely, then I presume that the three phases would be pretty much equal.

ANSWER: Exactly.

QUESTION: Does everyone have the same potential for the development of each of these qualities?

ANSWER: No. There are basic types. Each spirit, as he was created by God, was perfect in one way. Each was a distinctly different personality in his own right. They had different talents, different assets, and different characteristics, while being perfect in one way. Yet, there is no disharmony in this distribution of currents, be it the ones you have been told about so far, or be it others that you still ignore. The highest angel of the active forces is not disharmonious in his activity, as an unpurified human being would be with an overactive current. He is just as perfect in his own way, a specialist in his activity, which would exclude the possibility of a disharmonious over-emphasis. It is the same with the highest representatives of the three aspects I discussed here. The perfection of the reason personality would be an angel of love. The perfection of the will personality would be an angel of courage.

QUESTION: Wouldn't it be ideal to have all three in balance?

ANSWER: The idealized form is in balance. But that does not mean that they are distributed in equal measure. Balance and harmony do not always mean an equal measure of each. It depends on the way they are distributed; it depends on the way they work in cause and effect; and it depends on the way one current strengthens the other instead of weakening it, as happens in the disharmonious, unpurified being. If you re-read the story of creation I told you some time ago, then you will see that God created His spirits perfect, each in his own way. The idea was that each spirit would perfect himself with the power and the creative force that was given to him. In other words, he was to make himself perfect in all ways, instead of remaining perfect in one special way, and thus become God-like. Instead, many spirits used their power in the wrong way, thus causing the Fall. If the Fall had not happened, then all the spirits would have become truly Divine in every conceivable respect, instead of being specialists in one particular aspect. This continuation of the perfect creation will take place after all the fallen spirits will have reached their original perfection again in one particular way. In other words, until the Plan of Salvation has been successfully executed. Until then, all the pure spirits -- those who did not participate in the Fall, as well as those who have already reached their original state -- pool their resources to help in the Plan of Salvation, postponing their own further creation to some extent, although in an indirect way they work towards that end by helping in the Great Plan.

QUESTION: Aside from this triad of willing, thinking, and feeling, are there any other types?

ANSWER: Yes. Some I discussed already, others I will discuss in the future.

QUESTION: I don't understand why the angel of courage is the perfection of will. I can't understand that at all.

ANSWER: If you have courage, then you need a great amount of will, in a positive sense. Isn't that clear? Who else doesn't understand it? (Some say they do understand it, one other person says she does not.) Can you explain why you do not feel that courage and will go together?

QUESTION: Well, I know a lot of people who have no willpower but who are very courageous.

ANSWER: That has nothing to do with it. You may have a person who is very emotional, but the emotions are all covered up so that this person appears quite cold. A person who has no willpower and yet has courage may summon this courage, partly from the recesses of the soul where all the perfect attributes slumber, partly due to outside events, perhaps in order to prove to himself and to others that he has willpower.

QUESTION: There is also a certain courage that comes from fear.

ANSWER: Exactly. You can have any positive attribute from a positive motive or current, as well as from a negative motive or current. That is the complication of the human soul. It is not so easy. In addition to its pure background, any quality may be motivated by negative trends and tendencies. The same applies to faults that may be influenced by particular positive qualities that ignorantly run in a wrong channel. But in its true sense the extension of the will in the positive and perfect way is courage. Both need activity. In the will there must be a strong active current. That it is often used negatively and self-destructively is something else again. And also, the fact that the inborn courage, based on willpower, cannot function because of other deviations in the personality, has nothing to do with the principle as such. We are not discussing the many possibilities of mixed-up soul currents where the will may be broken and then appears only in certain aspects of life. The will needs active pressure, either positively or negatively. It needs activity. In the purified state, it would manifest as courage. It may even manifest as courage in the unpurified stage, although then the courage is used for wrong purposes. Courage cannot exist without activity, in a spirit of surging ahead, in a spirit of doing, rather than in a spirit of being, as would apply, for instance, to love.

QUESTION: I suppose that on the Path of purification we are on now any individual who is mostly an intellectual in finding himself can tap more of the other two currents too?

ANSWER: He must, because that is the purification process. Often the person whose willpower is crippled displays courage in some instances of his life. It may be similar with a person who seems to be more the intellectual type, while he is not really that at all. He may be more emotional by nature; but he is afraid of it and, out of his fear, he assumes a mask that does not correspond to his true nature. First, he will find out what he really is and he will begin by being true to himself, before he can adjust any disharmony in his soul. In other cases, the reason personality is really just that. In his further self-search and purification he must ultimately lose all the phantoms of fear that have made it impossible for him to function harmoniously. Then he will learn to balance his nature, so that it will function properly. He will still remain a reason type, but in a much more harmonious and perfect way, without interfering with his other faculties. The same applies to the other two types. They will remain just what they truly are, but without crippling their other faculties, and thereby shortchanging their own lives.

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And now, my dear ones, we will turn to your planned questions.

QUESTION: It says in the Greber Book that the only means for spiritual growth is either through mediumship or spirit communication in another form. In other teachings it says that one can contact that part within oneself which is called Divine and which contains all wisdom. Which is right and how would either one work?

AMSWER: The final aim is to find that in yourself that which is Divine. There is no doubt about it. But until you can get that far, then you need help. And it is often the case that communication with the spirit world of God is the best means to give you this help. Complicated and perilous as the establishment of such a communication is, once it is established it is best suited to help you remove all the obstacles that obstruct your own divine spark. However, I do not say that this is the only way. There have always been great teachers who have done just that. And in your present time there is even a further means to attain the one aim, and that is the medicine of the soul, that which is called depth analysis. The fact that it is not always handled rightly does no more disprove the idea behind this -- and that is the ultimate purpose, whether your doctors know it or not -- than badly applied or arrested development in mediumship. Communication with the spirit world ultimately has only this one purpose and no other, no matter what the various stages of the developing medium are until the channel is clear enough. Simply to learn about the facts of creation, about God, and what happens in the universe and the various spheres is secondary, my friends. The sole purpose, if and when you are told about such things, is to give you information without which you might not understand the reason for life and the necessity for development. It might give you the incentive to overcome your own resistance to taking the necessary steps in order to reach your divine spark. You should consider all teachings and all religions from that point of view. The knowledge of the universal facts is supposed to be a help and an incentive, and not the final aim. The final aim is self-finding and self-purification, for only then can you get in contact with your divine spark. Otherwise it is blurred, and therefore is unreliable. As a result, it can be easily confused with subconscious desires that have nothing to do with the Divine in the human being. Contact with the divine world is not the way for all human beings. For some, other ways may be better suited. It depends on their personality. It depends on their stage of development. The only reason for this life on earth is purification and self-finding. There are many ways possible which can help you to that end. And it goes without saying that if you have the grace and the privilege to have a communication with God's world, then this should be best suited to help you because it would be a little faster and more direct in showing you how to proceed in order to find yourself. But it is not the only way, there are other ways too.

QUESTION: What is the part of the Virgin Mary in the spiritual concept?

ANSWER: The spirit of the woman whom you call the Virgin Mary is a very highly developed spirit, a spirit who has never belonged to the Fall. Jesus Christ could not have been born out of an impure spirit. And the purity of this spirit led to the misunderstanding of the Immaculate Conception. I often say that each error in the various religions must have some background that makes this error understandable. Through spirit communication humanity was told that Jesus' Mother was a pure spirit, as it could not have been otherwise. Out of this arose the misunderstanding that purity means sexual purity and that the Mother of Jesus gave birth as a virgin in the physical sense. That is the whole misunderstanding. Many people on earth misdirect their sexual forces and therefore think that sexuality as such is impure. This is not so. The Mother of Jesus was and is a pure spirit, but this has nothing to do with the fact that conception took place as any other conception. God has created His laws in perfection, regardless of whether humanity perverts some aspects of them or not. So there would be no need for God to defeat His own laws. So you see, my friends, as usual the truth lies in the middle. There are those who say that the Mother of Jesus Christ had to be a virgin and who insist that in denying this one would commit a sacrilege. This arises out of the mistaken idea that everything sexual is impure. This causes others, who cannot accept that, to go to the opposite extreme and to deny not only the purity of the spirit of Jesus Christ's Mother in the real sense, but also the fact that Christ was the inborn Son of God, merely because they cannot accept certain unreasonable errors. They cannot find the truth between.

QUESTION: If you break a Divine Law in good faith or if you break it knowingly, are the consequences the same in both cases?

ANSWER: No, of course not. When you break it in good faith, then the evaluation is a very different one than when you know what you are doing. But, my dear friends, I would like to say this. Since all the knowledge is contained within you, then something of that knowledge gets through. That is why so many of you have a resistance to going on this path. There is something in you that says: "The more I know, then the more responsible I am to change. If I guard myself against knowing, then I may stay as I am, which is more comfortable." That accounts for much resistance. And I would like to say also that this lack of self-honesty -- the motive for your resistance -- unconscious or half-conscious as it may be, will be taken into account. For many, the real reason could be obvious if only they would but examine their resistances, which they rationalize with all sorts of outer pretexts, while in reality they simply do not want to change.

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My dearest friends, receive the blessings of love and strength that permeate your heart, your soul, and your whole being at this moment. Know that you are in God and that God is in you. All you need is to lift your hands up to Him who waits that you take the first step out of your spiritual childhood toward becoming a strong and independent child of God -- thereby growing in spirit, growing in strength, and growing in love. Love one another, my dear ones. Understand one another. Remove the walls of the fear of one another, for they stand without reason. You who fear the other, remember that he is just as much afraid of you. Remember that when you want to settle your differences, then God will be with you. So, proceed on this Path. Consider that each step forward may bring you temporarily into a crisis, into a difficulty. But that is the product of your noble efforts. View it that way and you will come out victoriously.

And so, my dear ones, be blessed, all of you. In the Name of God, in the Name of Jesus Christ, be in peace, be in the Lord.

Jan 2, 1959