“Your consciousness is not your consciousness.
It is the manifestation of the desire of the Cosmos.
It comes to you through you, but not from you.”
Ervin Laszlo, the Immortal Spirit
“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life.
They come through you, but not from you.”
Khalil Gibran, the Prophet
“Just as in your relationships with others, the world reveals to you everything you need to know. The difference is that it can be more difficult to establish a personal relationship with the world. The world does not have an individual mind. It has a collective mind, an impersonal mind. Its value is especially precious to you because it shows you that you too must discover your impersonal mind, which is the higher mind of Knowledge within you. Discovering this higher mind within yourself allows you to truly contribute to life. God has an impersonal mind, because God is not a person.” The mind behind your mind is an impersonal mind, because behind your mind, you are not a person. Being a person is a role you play in the world. It is very important, but it is not your Higher Reality.
By learning to live in affinity with others, you will access your impersonal mind and find that it contains greater love, contribution, understanding, and expression than your personal mind. You don’t need to create a complex belief system here, but simply understand a few basic ideas that are essential for right thinking and action.
Marshall Vian Summers
There is the personal life, so well-known and obvious. It is our personality that thinks itself separate from others, that reacts and takes events and relationships personally. Our personality serves us to move forward in the world; it is our vehicle through which we contact our reality. Criticism displeases us, praise enhances us. Success is positive; failure remains negative.
Then there is impersonal life. This no longer concerns our personality, our ego, but a higher part of ourselves. An impersonal life is a life freed from ego, because every relationship and every event then becomes information, a message from the universe.
Consciousness is truly impersonal. Reality becomes nothing but frequencies, energies, thought forms… The first principle of the Kybalion (the foundational work of Hermetic philosophy) is:
The Principle of Spirit: All is Spirit, the universe is Spirit.
This is the true nature of our reality. But to interact at this level of reality, we must transcend the ego and connect with our higher self. Beyond ego, personality, and dualities, stands the impersonal nature of our consciousness and our universe, our Self. It is no longer against us, or thanks to us. The universe communicates through us through human relationships and events, through nature and the body. Everything becomes a source of information. Everything becomes love and teachings.
There is no true reality or permanence, explains Joseph Sieber Benner in “The Impersonal Life.” The limitations of the personality include criticism, judgment, annoyance, misunderstanding, and frustration in daily life. But pleasures, compliments… They are positive, but can trap the personality in patterns of pride and addiction. And yet, according to Joseph Benner, the Higher Self is impersonal, because it is the major characteristic of the divine realm.
Freed from personal consciousness, delivered from the personality (which trapped us in dualities), impersonality would be our true divine identity. We then embody the principle of higher truth through the higher impersonal perspective.
Our lives would have nothing to do with us, because human beings allow the divine to experience matter: they see through us, they suffer or experience joy through us, they experience matter through us, so rich in information and teachings. This is the true divine dimension of the human being. The path to liberation is therefore impersonal life.