1.5 What does it mean to say, ‘reality is a process which devours the personality’?

To understand this, it is necessary to develop a point of view, a way of seeing the objective nature of the interaction between the personality and reality. Within the context of the personality, one’s experiences and insights are subjective; however powerful, intense or varied in joy and suffering they may be, they are, in the end, personal and subjective. Viewed objectively, from a transpersonal point of view, the function of the process which is reality is to bring each individual consciousness to an awareness of its true nature.

From a focus of awareness rooted in the context of the personality, i.e. within normal consciousness, one’s life is experienced in terms of the extent to which one achieves a balance between the satisfaction and lack of satisfaction of one’s needs and desires. To remain locked in such a low level of consciousness is to be subject, without release, to the endless play of opposites. One experiences constantly the conflicting tensions of emotions, desires and objective reality.

Just as time devours the physical body in the course of its passage from youth through physical maturity to the gradual physical decay leading to death, so too does reality, through the passage of time, lead the personality from the innocence of childhood, past the idealism of youth and the draining realisations of life’s harsh realities in maturity, to the emptiness and fear of an old age unprepared for death. A consciousness shaped by the constraints of the personality fears profoundly the transpersonal, which is, correctly, sensed as inimical to the ego, or sense of the individual self.

This, then, is what is meant by saying ‘reality devours the personality’:

One who remains rooted in the personality is fated to suffer the endless conflicting tensions of desire and non-fulfilment of desire. Driven by the ego-based desires of the personality, one fears that dissolution of the sense of ‘I’ which is the hallmark of the transpersonal. This is commonly found in the individual’s fear of death. One is devoured by constant conflict and fear; in the end, one dies unfulfilled, empty, unprepared and fearful of death.