No two human beings are alike, and this is not a poetic observation; it is a law. Dissimilarity governs nature as a principle, not as an exception, and the personality of every human being is born through this very law. But it is one thing to manifest a personality, and something entirely different to affirm it. The first depends on how free the soil was in which one grew. The second depends exclusively on one’s experience, on how far one has already walked the road of experience, practice, knowledge, consciousness. No one inherits the second phase, one conquers it, or else remains forever in the first, believing he has a personality because he has an opinion. That is where the real work begins.
That is where the real work begins, because a person’s opinion is rarely his own. Before affirming anything, he must free his innate powers from every belief, theory, or perception that does not hold up under his own judgment and his own consciousness. The truth is that most people carry a borrowed personality, stitched together from scraps of ideologies, prejudices, and morality they never chose, only inherited or swallowed whole, unchewed. This is not character; it is packaging. Nature has no such problem.
Nature has no such problem. It is unified in its conception and dissimilar in each of its manifestations; the same design that produces countless variations gives none identical to another. Modern biology confirms this in a way that would make any teacher of old envious: diversity is not an accident of evolution, it is the very method of survival. Nature is, then, man’s silent educator, and if he studies it properly, it becomes the most eloquent teacher one can ever acquire, without tuition and without flattering him.

In order to affirm his personality, then, man owes four things, and none of them is particularly easy. He must cast off his vices, his passions, his flaws, and free himself from conditions, mores, and customs that enslave the expression of his thought. He must also strengthen the vigor of spirit, soul, and body together, not one at the expense of the other. And finally, to dare to say, unhesitatingly, what he believes about truth, goodness, morality, even when this makes him unwelcome at the table.

Then comes self-mastery, which is not asceticism; it is economy. Man must limit his aimless movements and his thoughtless words, because speech exists to manifest his conscious work, not to fill the silence that frightens him. Speech is the mirror of thought, a sign of the spirit’s elevation or decline, and the strong man prefers silence to aimless words. The neuroscience of self-regulation says something very close to this today, that self-control is a resource that depletes when it is squandered on trivial things, and yet our age lives on a speech that never stops, which is exactly why it rarely says anything.

Every act of man now is also a link in a chain, not metaphorically, literally. It reminds him of himself at every step or obliges him to other acts that can consume an entire life. No act is neutral. The ambition to appear as what one is not is the most widespread and the most punished error, because it gives birth to a life devoted to maintaining a false image, and this exhausts more than any true struggle. But the purpose must not be confused. It is not a matter of casting off one’s flaws in order to win some Eternal Kingdom. It is simply a matter of conquering one’s independence as a human being, here and now. Flaws are the tool with which tyrants enslave the individual, and today the tyrants wear different clothes, they are called algorithms, marketing, demagoguery, and they work precisely on his weaknesses, not on his virtues. No one builds an empire on people who know what they want.

Lying and theft are not merely moral offenses; they are self-harm. Lying creates abnormal psychic states and pushes a person into acts contrary to his own interest. Theft encloses him in a sphere of secrecy and forces him to play a false role. Not every beneficial act is, after all, simultaneously advantageous for the independence of one’s personality; one can gain and lose at the same time. The collective delusions that wrong a society do not fall from the sky, they are the sum of individual flaws that no one corrected in time. Society was born of the need to preserve existence, and from need springs duty, which is simply respect for the need of the other. The same logic that sustains mutual life in nature, that reciprocity which the biology of evolutionary cooperation describes as reciprocal altruism, also sustains every healthy society of people who do not oppress one another’s freedom.

The individual, at its base, is three things at once: material body, material principle; soul, ethereal principle; spirit, rational principle. The spirit possesses three virtues, Imagination, Will, Power, which bear no kinship to the emotions of the soul or the impressions of the body, but use them to produce harmony. Imagination is manifested through Thought and gives birth to Conception. Will is manifested through Word and gives birth to Determination. Power is manifested through Action and gives birth to Execution. Three virtues, three means, three results, an architecture so simple that we forget to notice it.

The soul is the product of the spirit’s energy upon matter, the vehicle through which the Ego communicates with the body and the world. It possesses a double current: the individual current, which is created by the energy of its own spirit and serves its preservation, and the universal current, which is borrowed from a wider Spiritual Collectivity through which all beings on earth are connected. The first keeps a person standing. The second reminds him that he is never alone, whatever he might believe at three in the morning. Precisely because he borrows from this common current, man must know where he sets his boundaries. To watch over his weak sides, to distinguish his strong points, and above all to accept no contact that was not initiated by himself. It sounds like an old ritual instruction, yet it is something that the psychology of boundaries, and even immunobiology, confirm every day: every healthy organism, biological or psychic, survives because it knows how to recognize what is its own and what is an invader. Sovereignty over the self begins with the choice of who touches it.

Two laws struggle over man with equal force, the creative and the destructive, or transformative, factor. His spirit is not touched directly by the second, which is why it infiltrates sideways, through the body and the soul, where it creates passions and flaws. Entropy works exactly like this, it does not abolish order in one motion, it erodes it slowly, from the periphery toward the center. The elixir of life of the ancient initiates was not a recipe for immortality, it was a symbol of the victory of the complete man over this very corrosive factor, the same victory that shows itself when the Divine Spark persists unaltered even when the body and the brain give way.

Man’s task, then, is to ally his three natures, spiritual, psychic, material, without one absorbing the other. And then to raise each state of his Hyperessence to the one immediately above it: the unconscious to the subconscious, the subconscious to the conscious. But here lies the point where most people simplify it wrongly: the passage from the conscious to the superconscious is not a continuation of the same scale, it is not won by adding one more dose of experience. It requires a spark, not an accumulation of experiences. Without it, man remains educated but unmoved.

This is, in the end, the purpose of the teaching on the resurrection of personality, for Love to reach its wholeness and man the perfection of his Wisdom. Not as a prize one waits for, but as a road that is walked, and this road always begins at the same point, at the refusal to be whatever it was convenient for one to become. And here allow me to add that this is how he lived, and this is what he believed, the one who helped me begin the road of initiation.