*  From Master DK, through Alice Bailey, Esoteric Healing /
A Treatise on White Magic / Esoteric Astrology
Test, Trial And Triumph Over
The Dweller on the Threshold

56.)  On The Three Stages Of Personality
Life (From Master DK*):

The personality life of the now coordinated
individual persists for a large number of lives,
and also falls into three phases:

a.  The phase of a dominant aggressive
personality life, basically conditioned by its ray
type, selfish in nature and very individualistic.

(i)  The outstanding characteristics of those
personalities who are not as yet soul-centered or
controlled, are dominance, ambition, pride and a
lack of love to the whole, though they frequently
possess love for those who are necessary to them or
to their comfort.


b.  A transitional phase wherein a conflict rages
between personality and Soul.  The Soul begins
to seek liberation from form life and yet—in the
last analysis—the personality is dependent upon
the life principle, conferred by the Soul.  
Wording it otherwise, the conflict between the
Soul ray and the personality ray starts and the
war is on between two focused aspects of
energy.  This conflict terminates at the third
initiation.


c.  The control by the Soul is the final phase,
leading, to the death and destruction of the
personality.  This death begins when the
personality, the Dweller on the Threshold‡,
stands before the Angel of the Presence.
Secondly, the tests connected with desire and
the astral plane. These are subtler in nature,
producing automatic effects upon the physical
plane; they are not inherent in the animal nature but
are imposed by the desire nature and are again three
in number:

1. Fear—which conditions activity today.

2. Hate—which is a factor in conditioning
relationships.

3. Ambition—conditioning objectives.


Thirdly, the tests of the lower critical mind
which are:

1. Pride—which is intellectual satisfaction,
making the mind the barrier to soul control.

2. Separativeness—which is the isolated attitude
and which makes the mind the barrier to right group
relations.

3. Cruelty—which is satisfaction with personality
methods and which makes the mind the instrument of
the sense of power. Remember that the worst kind of
cruelty is not of a physical nature but is more mental
in character.


Therefore, you have … that which must be
tested and proved to be non-existent […]
When these faults are realised and are
overcome, the result is twofold:
the establishing of right relations with
the Soul and also with the environment.  ))
The light of the solar Angel‡‡ then obliterates
the light of matter.

((  ‡ : Dweller on the Threshold: “From ancient
recesses of the memory, from a deeply rooted past …
and from the racial and the individual subconscious …
there emerges from individual past lives and
experience that which is the sum total of all
instinctual tendencies, of all inherited glamours
and of all phases of wrong mental attitudes; […]

“This Dweller is the sum total of all the
personality characteristics which have
remained unconquered and unsubdued and
which must be finally overcome before initiation
can be taken. Each life sees some progress made;
some personality defects straightened out and some
real advance effected. …”

- - -
‡‡ :  “… This is, however, only possible when the
personality eagerly enters into this relation with the
Angel, recognises itself as the Dweller and—as a
disciple—begins the battle between the pairs of
opposites and enters into the tests of Scorpio.
[…] The three tests in Scorpio also concern the three
aspects of the human being as they fuse and blend
upon the physical plane.

They are, first of all, the test of appetite. This
appetite is the natural predilections and tendencies
which are inherent in the animal nature and these are
mainly three:

1. Sex—the relation of the pairs of opposites.
These can be selfishly utilised or divinely blended.

2. Physical comfort—life conditions,
selfishly appropriated.

3. Money—selfishly cornered
(if I may use such a phrase).