Building up a personality which has attunement to the first sphere of light, a spiritual world of love and harmony, requires many lives on earth for each soul in its evolution.

Before all our character traits can be symbolized by precious stones and rarefied sphere flowers, usually hard work must still be carried out on a considerable amount of less attractive personality traits.

In the book ‘The Origin of the Universe’ master Alcar, the spiritual leader of Jozef Rulof, describes how every soul works on building up its personality during many subsequent lives.

Many people are still busy building up a material personality, an inner life that is aimed at the earthly material.

They work day in day out in order to increase their earthly possession.

As a result, they are still not able to cope with the storms of life, because at any moment this possession can be lost or stolen.

Although they are often able to work on the social ladder in order to gain more possessions, the inner life of many people is still not calm, they want more and more.

They still have no brake within themselves that says: to here and not further.

They still do not realize that the earthly circumstances serve in order to master spiritual possession.

When they lose their earthly possession due to circumstances, they usually fall into a deep depression, because they still do not have any spiritual personality which takes care of them.

A great deal of people then begin from the beginning again, because they also want to possess the wealth that they see with another person.

In this way, many lives pass during which they reach the age of eighty and ninety, and all that they have done in that life is working to increase their earthly possessions.

Every soul experiences these lives, because it is only by means of its actions that it becomes conscious of what those actions result in.

By experiencing many lives during which the earthly possession is lost, the soul as personality will learn how it must deal with the earthly material without losing itself as a result.

In this way, it will learn to use the earthly means insofar as necessary, without wanting more and more.

As a result, it will build up a spiritual personality which will become independent of earthly prosperity, and which will calmly remain itself in all material and social circumstances, because it has placed its certainty in her inner life instead of in the outside world.

Many lives are needed in order to become a spiritual personality.

First, in a material grade of feeling, people build up inner strengths in order to control the material.

Later, those inner strengths grow into a spiritual grade of feeling, and they are deployed in order to serve and love the life.

However, if inner strengths were still not built up in the material grades of feeling, there will be nothing to devote to the spiritual evolution.

Jozef Rulof illustrates this at a contact evening on the basis of a question that he received about the ‘föhn’, a wind which can get on a great deal of people’s nerves and make them irritable.

Some people become melancholy because of it and even have suicidal tendencies, because they hang their heads.

Jozef indicates that anyone who has not built up a strong personality cannot deploy this either in order to withstand the storms of life.

The articles ‘soul’ and ‘feelings’ describe how the soul builds up an inner life for itself by experiencing many lives on earth.

How does the personality relate to the reincarnating inner life of the soul?

The personality takes particular feelings from the inner life and converts them into thoughts or into actions.

In this way, we can see the personalty as the creating acting part of the soul.

The soul as personality acts, as a result of which people see what is present in the soul.

The soul is more than its personality, because there are still many feelings which remain hidden in the subconscious.

However, in order to gain new experiences which then become feeling, the soul must act as personality, do something.

By deploying our personality, we become conscious of the aspects which live in our soul.

As a result, we can distinguish two different levels within ourselves.

There is the level of our personality by means of which we act and are conscious of those feelings which we convert into thinking and actions.

And there is the level of our soul, which is still not felt and understood by our personality, the level of which we are therefore still not conscious.

If the human being says ‘I’, he usually means his personality, that part of himself which he is personally conscious of.

However, the human being is much more than ‘I’, much more than what he already knows of himself, of his soul.

By means of our many lives, we become more and more conscious of what else lives in us than what we already knew.

In this way, our personality experiences an evolution, which can also be described in terms of ‘grades of feeling’.

Every soul will first have to build up a material personality, to only then achieve a spiritual personality.

During this development, we become conscious of our reincarnating inner life, and we feel that our soul reaches further than this one little earthly life.

First our personality still often thwarts our soul, because we are still not conscious of the nature of our soul.

When we cause another person suffering, sooner or later our soul will take us back to that other soul in order to convert that suffering into happiness, because our soul wants to come into harmony with all the life around it.

As a personality, we wonder why we have coincidentally ended up in this situation, because we are not conscious of the fact that our soul has sent us ourselves to those circumstances.

Most people only get to know their personality when they have left their earthly life.

In the hereafter they stand before the grade of feeling of their personality as a world with light or darkness.

It is only then that they see what they have built up for themselves by means of their earthly lives, and what they have brought from their earthly life to the hereafter.

All their material possessions have stayed on earth and only their feeling has remained.

Then they experience what remains of their personality when the social part of it has to be released.

If a spiritual part has already been built up, then that can now take over control.

Or do they still wish to appeal to what they were on earth?

A spiritual leader of Jozef Rulof, master Zelanus, describes how he took care of a theologian from the earth in the hereafter.

Zelanus asks: ‘Who are you?’

The man answers: ‘I am a professor.’

Zelanus says: ‘You are nothing here.

You were a theologian, professor, doctor.

What else?

You see, sir, life, that that professorship, that doctorship and your being an engineer, your technical wonders mean nothing if you still do not worship, cannot love the smallest thing of all this life, because you do not have any love.

You have smothered pure, spatial, divine friendship by growling, snarling, boasting, pride; and that has to go now.’

The man still tries to close himself off from his own becoming conscious by saying: ‘Where is God, where is Christ, I gave myself for Christ and God, I brought the people to the awakening in order to show them all the things that live in the world, I have had my students...’

Zelanus tries to get the man to see his new reality: ‘Yes, you have had students, but you took them from the frying pan into the fire, because your philosophical teaching had no meaning.

Your philosophical inner life is darkly attuned.

What you mastered, Mr professor, is professorship.

That book, those letters ... you learned to write the language beautifully, wonderfully, you understand religions of the earth, but you consciously smothered the divine religion as truth and goodwill, which is the love.’

Master Zelanus summarizes what really matters when we arrive in the hereafter: ‘Look, this is what I am like, this is what my character looks like, this is what my personality looks like at this moment.

Do I have true human love?’

Personality -- Sources