John Algeo – USA
The three spatial dimensions of our physical world yield six directions, since each dimension has two directions. If our spatial dimensions are height, breadth, and depth, then our six directions are up and down, right and left, and front and back. When to those six we add the center position, the “here” from
which the directions range, we have another septenary to augment the others we are familiar with from Theosophical teachings.
The existence of six spatial directions is obvious. We look above and below ourselves, to our right and left, and forward and backward. Here we are in the center with these six directions radiating out from us, like the six points of a star with living light at its core.
Because analogy exists between all aspects of reality, it should not be surprising that we can think of our personality, the physical part of us, as also having six directions along three dimensions. We can think of the six directions of the personality as defining it on our obligatory pilgrimage through the Cycle of Necessity. The three dimensions of personality are heredity, environment, and transpersonality. And each of those has two directions, making six in all, with the personality itself in the center.
GENETIC INHERITANCE
Our heredity is of two sorts. First is our genetic inheritance. That is what we normally mean by heredity. We inherit certain physical characteristics from our biological ancestors. And because the physical is not isolated but in fact is linked with the subtle realities of feeling and thought, we also inherit certain emotional and mental characteristics from our progenitors. Western Science has made much of genetic
inheritance, and it is important, but it is not all-important.
CULTURAL INHERITANCE
Another sort of heredity is our cultural inheritance. We are born into a society, a culture, with certain values and ways of regarding the world around us and responding to it. Sociologists have called them MORES and FOLKWAYS. Mores are the customs that have deep value for the culture, because they are powerful shapers of our behavior. When we violate them, trouble follows, for society regards them as having the force of law. Folkways are just the ways we happen to do things. If we do not observe them, we will be thought peculiar, but not wicked. Our language is also part of our cultural inheritance, and so is our habitual world-view (unless we have thought about it for ourselves, which few people do).
We inherit our culture from our cultural ancestors, just as we inherit our genes from our biological ancestors. Americans, whose biological ancestors came from all over the world, are nevertheless the inheritors of a common culture, which is basically British (English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh) with a
strong admixture added in the New World from many other cultures around the globe. If Americans visit the land of their biological ancestors' origin, they quickly discover that culturally they are not African, English, or Polish. They are, whether they like it or not, American in culture.
Genetic and cultural inheritances are often contrasted as NATURE and NURTURE. It is true that we learn our culture, though in an unconscious way, but we (as personalities) don't pick it out, at least not our first and most formative culture. We inherit it. We don't say, I think I'll be a Louisiana Cajun or a Scots
Highlander. Our cultural inheritance is imprinted on us in our formative years. Like Popeye, we must say, “I am what I am, I’m Popeye the sailorman.” Or as the adage has it, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy.
TOPOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT
Another dimension of personality is environment. It also has two directions. On the one hand, there is our topographical environment, the world around us – not just the physical topography, but the psychic and spiritual topography as well. It is obvious that our personality is influenced by our physical topographical environment. If we live on the sea shore, or in the mountains, or on a great plain or in the canyons of a vast city, we respond to that environment. It moulds us.
However, we also live in the midst of a psychic and spiritual landscape that likewise moulds us. The Anglo-Saxons came to the British Isles, probably in the early fifth century. They had a vast stock of legends and myths about Germanic heroes and gods, some of which are reflected in the great Anglo-Saxon epic BEOWULF. But that Germanic ethos belonged to the Continent, not to Britain. So on the island, the Anglo-Saxons adopted the legends and ethos of the native Britons, and the great English
hero came to be King Arthur.
Arthur and the Arthurian material are basically Celtic. When the English moved into Celtic lands, they conquered the native Celts politically, but were themselves conquered by the psychic and spiritual landscape of Celtic myths. It is a great irony. But it often happens that way. When the Vedic Aryans migrated into India, they absorbed (and were absorbed into) the native pre-Indo-European Indic culture. When Europeans came to the New World, they moved into the landscape of the Amerindian peoples,
and even today the various Amerindian traditions exert a powerful influence on Americans.
We live amid a landscape of psychic and spiritual energies and forces that were generated by peoples long ago but that provide our environment. The psychic and spiritual landscapes are just as real as the physical one. And they are even more powerful than physical geography in shaping us. The ancients knew about
this inner, psychic landscape. The Romans personified it and called it the GENIUS LOCI, the guardian spirit of a place.
ASTROLOGICAL ENVIRONMENT
In addition to our topographical or terrestrial environment, there is also a celestial one, our astrological environment. Everything in the cosmos is interconnected. Every event at any point in the entire universe resounds, echoes, and reverberates throughout the whole vast cosmic stretch of space. And so our environment is not limited to this terrestrial globe. Our neighborhood includes the nearest planets and the farthest stars. The fall of a rose petal in Paducah has consequences for the lost star of the Pleiades.
Astrology maps out the celestial environment at the moment of our birth by a natal horoscope and at all subsequent times by progressed horoscopes. It is a mistake to regard a horoscope as a prediction of events. It is rather a description of an environment. We are not astrological patients suffering the effects of a horoscope. We are actors on the field of the earth and the heavens, which is mapped out by a horoscope. Astrology does not tell us what is going to happen to us. It tells us what the territory is like where the action takes place. We, not the stars, make things happen.
TRANSPERSONAL SKANDHAS
Western thinking has largely stopped with two factors molding our personalities: heredity and environment. And even for those, it has usually thought of environment as what is here called
cultural inheritance. The influence of the topographical and celestial environments has been generally ignored in our time, except by a comparative few. But in addition to heredity and environment there is yet another dimension with two directions: our transpersonal dimension, whose directions are our SKANDHAS and our DHARMA.
Our skandhas are the effects of our past lives. They were made by prior personalities and come to us as past-life karma. Each of our personalities contributes collectively to every succeeding personality, which is formed by them. The skandhas are the “bundles” or “aggregates” from our former personalities that come together to form the seed from which our present personality develops, out of its heredity and within its environment.
In Buddhist teachings, there are five skandhas: our form, sensations, ideas, mental tendencies, and mental powers. We might think of them as the predispositions we have acquired from the experiences of our past lives that affect our perceiving, feeling, thinking, responding, and conceiving. They come to us in our present personality across earlier personalities and so are transpersonal.
TRANSPERSONAL DHARMA
There is, however, still another transpersonal direction in us. For we are not just a succession of personalities. Our personalities are like beads that come one after another in a necklace, but there is also a string or thread that joins all the beads. So there is also a "thread-self" or individuality that unites all of our successive personalities. It is the "real" us. It generates all our separate personalities and joins them into a whole.
The influence of our individuality on a particular personal life is what we call DHARMA. That word is often translated as "duty," but that is a weak rendering of the inner sense of the word. Our dharma is our innermost nature, the reality at the core of our being that makes us what we truly are. All of our personalities are efforts of our individuality to express itself, to realize our dharma in our personal lives.
If we tune into the individuality within ourselves, if we let our dharma be expressed in our lives, the result is marvelous. It is transforming and overpowering. That does not happen very often. But most of us have moments in life when the influence of dharma breaks through. If we open ourselves to those moments, the
effect can last a lifetime.
IMMUTABLE AND MUTABLE DIRECTIONS
So what are we now in this life? We are a personality sitting in the centre of six great influences, the six psychological directions of our being. Along the dimension of heredity, we are formed by our genetic inheritance and by our cultural inheritance. Along the dimension of environment, we are formed
by our topographical surroundings (physical, psychic, and spiritual) and by our celestial surroundings, our place in the cosmos. Along the transpersonal dimension, we are formed by the seeds of tendencies from our past lives and by the call of our higher nature, our individuality, our dharma to become what we
truly are.
Even in our personalities, we are sevenfold beings. For the personality is at the centre of these six directions of influence, and is produced by them. Three of the directions are immutable: our genetic inheritance, our astrological environment, and the skandhas from our past lives. They are all GIVENS that
we work with but cannot change. Three of the directions, however, are mutable and indeed are ever changing: our cultural inheritance, topographical environment, and individual dharma.
Although we do not choose our culture, it is not fixed but constantly changes. The culture around us today is not the culture of our birth; it has changed with the years. Indeed, in our time certain aspects of culture are changing more rapidly than they have for eons in the past. That is easy to see in communication, transportation, technology, living patterns, and social values all around us.
Similarly, though less dramatically today, our topographical environment changes. Even if we stay put, the topography changes. Village life becomes urban or deserted. The coast wears away. The forests disappear. But the inner environment is also changing. The psychic and spiritual landscapes are shifting
around us. And of course we ourselves can move into a new environment – physical, psychic, and spiritual.
Finally, and most important, our transpersonal dharma changes. Or rather, the aspect of it that shines into our personal life changes. Our individuality, or higher self, is constantly trying to break through into personal consciousness. Its full power can seldom do so. (In the rare cases when it does so fully, the
result is the saint, the enlightened one, the sage, the initiate.) So, the influences that continually come from it change in order to take best advantage of the opportunities it has to express itself.
We human beings tend to dislike change, to fear it, and to try to stop it. But change is opportunity. Only where there is change can there be transformation. Most change is lateral, and lateral change produces nothing but just one thing after another. However, in the midst of lateral change, there is the opportunity
for change of another sort: transformative change, by which we become not just different, but new.
Being aware of the directions of our personality along the psychological dimensions gives us an opportunity to be open to such transformation when its possibility comes. The possibility comes unexpectedly, unannounced, and must be seized, or it is lost. It is up to us to recognize it when it comes and to act. As HPB said in “There Is a Road”: “I can tell you how to find those who will show you the secret gateway that opens inward only, and closes fast behind the neophyte for evermore.”
The first necessity for obtaining self-knowledge is to become profoundly conscious of ignorance; to feel with every fiber of our heart that we have been self-deceived: we are responsible for our own ignorance. The second requisite is the still deeper conviction that knowledge – intuitive and certain knowledge – can be obtained by effort. The third and most important is an indomitable determination to obtain and accept that knowledge. Self-knowledge of this kind is unobtainable by what is usually called “self-analysis.” It is not reached by reasoning or any brain process; for it is the awakening to consciousness of the Divine Nature within us. To obtain this knowledge is a greater achievement than to command the elements or to know the future. It is to understand the unexplained laws of our nature and to develop our latent powers. It is the purpose of human evolution.
[Revised slightly from Circles, Autumn 1994, pages 19-23.]