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Identity and Personality
Mortal identity is a temporary life-time condition that becomes permanent provided only that its accompanying personality elects to become a continuing universe phenomenon, an entity in eternity.
Personality is that quality in reality bestowed by the Universal Father. While itself devoid of identity, personality can unify the identity of any living energy system.
Personality is unique, both in space-time and in eternity. It is changeless--there are no duplicates, no copies. It can be added to spirit, is uniquely conscious of time, and manifests both self-consciousness and free will.
During earthly life the material self has both personality and identity, and is indwelt by the Spirit of God. After death the material body returns to whence it came, eventually becoming dust. However two non-material factors of the surviving personality persist. One is the memory transcript of the mortal career--which is in the keeping of its personal God-Spirit fragment. The other, the immortal soul, is in the custody of the Destiny Guardian.
Both the soul and the memory transcript are essential for re-personalization. It is the reunion of the formerly indwelling God-Spirit fragment with the soul that reassembles the surviving personality and 're-consciousness-izes' the individual at the time of survivor awakening.
Morals, Virtue, and Personality
Intelligence alone does not explain the moral nature. Morality and virtue, are indigenous to human personality. Moral intuition, the realization of duty, is indigenous to the human mind which carries these intrinsic concomitants of cosmic mind. It is also associated with the other inalienables of human nature, such as scientific curiosity and spiritual insight.
Mankind's mentality far transcends that of its animal cousins, but it is a moral and religious nature that especially distinguishes man from the animal world.
The selective response of an animal is limited to the motor level of behavior. The apparent insight of higher animals is really only on a motor level--usually appearing after trial and error experiences.
Mankind, however, is able to exercise scientific, moral, and spiritual insight prior to all exploration or experimentation.
Only a personality can know what it is doing before it does it; only personalities possess insight in advance of experience. A personality can look before it leaps and can therefore learn from looking as well as from leaping. A non-personal animal ordinarily learns only by leaping.
When men and women fail to discriminate the ends of their mortal striving, they find themselves functioning on the animal level of existence. They have failed to avail themselves of the superior advantages of that material acumen, moral discrimination, and spiritual insight which are an integral part of their cosmic-mind endowment as personal beings.
Virtue is righteousness--conformity with the cosmos. To name virtues is not to define them, but to live them is to know them. Virtue is not mere knowledge nor yet wisdom but rather the reality of progressive experience in the attainment of ascending levels of cosmic achievement. In the day-by-day life of mortal mankind, virtue is realized as the consistent choosing of good rather than evil--and such choosing ability is evidence for the possession of a moral nature.
Choosing between good and evil is influenced, not only by the keenness of a moral nature, but also by such influences as ignorance, immaturity, and delusion. A sense of proportion is a necessity in the exercise of virtue, otherwise evil may be perpetrated when the lesser is chosen in the place of the greater as a result of distortion or deception.
Mankind's moral nature would be impotent without the art of measurement, the discrimination that is embodied in the ability to scrutinize meanings. Likewise would moral choosing be futile without that cosmic insight which yields the consciousness of spiritual values. Mankind ascends to the level of a moral being because of its endowment of personality.
Morality can never be advanced by law or by force. It is a personal and freewill matter and must be disseminated by the contagion of the contact of morally fragrant persons with those who are less morally responsive, but who are also in some measure desirous of doing the will of God.
Moral acts are those human performances which are characterized by high intelligence, directed by selective discrimination in the choice of superior ends and the selection of moral means to attain these ends. Such conduct is virtuous.
Supreme virtue, then, is wholeheartedly to choose to do the will of the Father in heaven.
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