Best of Spirits

People do what they want to do.

What people want to do can be…
…what they ought to do or what they ought not do.
…what might be good for them and others or what might be harmful.
…what they thought they wanted or what they didn't fully realize they wanted.
…what they intended and what they never would intend.
But, people do what they want to do.

Mortals of time and space* originate as pretty much purely potential personality.

Proto-human mental abilities achieve a self-and-other awareness which confronts the young mind with, ultimately, moral awareness, and the moral choice permits a new reality, the birth of the immortal soul. The potentially immortal soul.

Personality, the gift of God to be like God, cannot be defined,^{1, 2, 3} but the best characterization of personality would be unity. In our origins, we develop a number of roles, identities, behavioral patterns, masks, rote responses, and even a variety of whole world-views we wear in different circumstances. Cynical on a Friday night over beers with rough-hewn companions, hopeful on Sunday afternoon after prayer and worship with other faithful. Context, above all the context of those around us, determines our masks, as a rule. When our compartmentalized circles overlap, we have conflicts. You're thinking you're getting away with something when suddenly your boss, pastor, guru, Mom, or the police are there. All these rules and masks, and especially the world-view matrix in which all thought must take context, if they are morally at odds with one another, represent schizophrenic personality — which is actually an oxymoron. Basically, everyone on earth is a disunified soul — a mostly-potential personality.

Unified personality may not be the same thing as achieving full spiritual status, but they're certainly related.

It's not really that hard to understand personality unification. "He walked with kings, nor lost the common touch," words by Kipling which my grandfather admired. Unified personality does not mean homogeneous behavior. A person can behave in many different ways — quiet in group prayer, boisterous at the ball game, gentle with young children, tough in friendly competition — and remain, as the saying goes, "the same person" throughout. The unified personality treats each person with the same regard as any other, President or peon, simpleton or genius. Interestingly, the definition of treating each person the same can work for the Narcissistic sociopath whose myopic egotism lends the mind much the same power as personality unification, but devoid of moral governance and self-discipline. Such a state can only be temporary. Even if the sociopath does not break down and endure the consequences of a life of evil in this life, there may have been no morally-predicated soul to continue. One way or another, this life or next (or none), this form of unity cannot endure. True personality unification is absolute mental health. Without that we remain, as Freud put it, the sick animal — in the sense that we are not functional anymore as "animal" mind, but we are not cohesive in our humanity either, a personality in process.

The whole process of unification may be mysterious, but aspects of it can easily be understood. In any arenas of life in which you find yourself betraying your highest ethical and moral principles, your ideals, whenever you put on a false face for show, in whatever ways you compartmentalize your behaviors to excuse doing that which you know to be wrong, you are delaying unification.

People do what they want to do. Un-unified people want many impossible, conflicting things at once, creating irrational, self-destructive choices — insanity and suicide. The unified person has one focus, one overarching idenity, one "want," to do the will of God, loving God and serving our One Parent and universal family.