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Little by little the triple mechanism is developed and the center of experience expands in knowledge. Today this knowledge is of a very high order, and the world is full of personalities. Supplementing our earlier definitions, a personality might be simply defined as:

1. An equipment which is becoming adequate in three directions of contact. The experiencing Soul can now begin to use the instrument effectively.

2. An expression of the creative power of the Soul which is ready to transmute knowledge into wisdom.

3. An incarnate Soul, which is now ready to work consciously with the time factor, for, having learned how to work with the factor of environment, the Soul can now begin to control circumstances and environment from the standpoint of time. This means, in the first instance, the right use of time and opportunity and then the establishing of continuity of consciousness.

THREE GROUPS OF PEOPLE

We can divide people into three groups:

1. Those who are unconsciously gaining experience, but are at the same time so engrossed with the processes of the results of experiencing, that they remain unaware of the deeper objectives.

2. Those who are dimly awakening to the fact that adaptation to the ways of living to which they are subjected, and from which there seems no escape, means for them the learning of some lesson which:

• Enriches their lives, usually in the practical and material sense.

• Intensifies their sensitive perception.

• Permits of the development of quality and the steady acquiring of characteristics, facilities and capacities.

3. Those who are awakened to the purpose of experience, and who are consequently bringing to every event an intelligent power to extract from the happenings to which they are subjected some gain to the life of the Soul. They have learnt to regard the environment in which they find themselves as the place of purification and the field of their planned service.

This is a rough and broad generalisation, but it accounts for human experience and consequent attitudes in the three major groupings. It is of interest to bear in mind that the process of the appropriation of the bodies, presents similar stages with respect to the evolution of the form and to the evolution of the indwelling life. In the history of the material aspect of manifestation, there have been the following stages:

1. The stage of involution, or of appropriation, and of construction of the vehicles of expression upon the downward arc, where the emphasis is upon the building, growth and appropriation of the bodies, and not so much upon the indwelling, conscious Entity.

2. The stage of evolution, or of refinement and the development of quality, leading to liberation upon the upward arc.

It is the same in the psychological history of the human being. There too we find a somewhat similar process, divided into two stages, marking the involution and the evolution of consciousness. Hitherto in the occult books the emphasis has been upon the development of the form side of life, and upon the nature and quality of that form as it responds, upon different levels of the planetary life, to the impact of the environment in the early stages and to the impress of the Soul at the later stages.

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