Pyramid of Human Personality

April 22, 2001

• Human personality rises vertically by mental energy that is comprehension.
• It expands horizontally to enjoy its physical strength and vital energy.
• The result is a pyramid, neither a tower nor a flat one-storied building sprawling all over.
• The vertical dimension and horizontal dimension can each be subdivided into 100 parts and the 10,000 (100 x100) varying levels along the different levels of the pyramid located.
• This bypasses the infinite permutation and combinations arising out of each of these 100 with the rest, for the sake of brevity.
• Sri Aurobindo speaks of 24 fundamental spiritual determinants of creation (Truth, Beauty, Knower, Knowledge, etc. p. 315 Life Divine) and says all the rest we see in this world is the result of their interaction.
• If one is philosophical, one can use this framework. If one is practical and wants to reach the layman's understanding, he can fix on terms like energy, strength, skill, capacity, comprehension, etc.
• To fix a hundred levels each way and find ten or fifteen attributes to represent both or each is possible.
• Then we must construct their interactions or several possible relations until all the 10,000 levels are represented by at least one example.
• One way of doing it is to start thinking of people we know and the actions we have witnessed and fix them in their allotted place. If 100 points are thus met, a beginning is made.
• Much thought needs to go into classification, gradation, standardization and greater thought is needed to correlate the two dimensions.
• As we proceed, the verticality bends towards the horizontality and vice versa.
• This increases the complexity at each step until you feel the movement of complication is changing into a master complexity.
• What will emerge is the fundamental, basic framework for the Science of Life within the limits of character and behaviour.
• It can be extended on either side to personality, impersonality, energy, sources of energy and manners, observation, listening, sense response, sensitivity, etc.
• A limited framework is too much for us just now.
• This schematisation will help us understand Life Response better.