Personalities Dictionary

A dictionary of parapsychology. Please note that words in grey are hyperlinked to a corresponding archive with articles related to that particular topic.

Four Animals. The symbolical animals of the vision of Ezekiel (the Mercabah). " With the first Christians the celebration of the Mysteries of the Faith was accompanied by the burning of seven lights, with incense, the Trishagion, and the reading of the book of the gospels, upon which was wrought, both on covers and pages, the winged man, lion, bull, and eagle" (Qabbalah, by Isaac Myer, LL.B.).

To this day these animals are represented along with the four Evangelists and prefixing their respective gospels in the editions of the Greek Church.

 Each represents one of the four lower classes of worlds or planes, into the similitude of which each personality is cast. Thus the Eagle (associated with St. John) represents cosmic Spirit or Ether, the all-piercing Eye of the Seer; the Bull of St. Luke, the waters of Life, the all-generating element and cosmic strength ; the Lion of St. Mark, fierce energy, undaunted courage and cosmic fire; while the human Head or the Angel, which stands near St. Matthew is the synthesis of all three combined in the higher Intellect of man, and in cosmic Spirituality. All these symbols are Egyptian, Chaldean, and Indian.

The Eagle, Bull and Lion-headed gods are plentiful, and all represented the same idea, whether in the Egyptian, Chaldean, Indian or Jewish religions, but beginning with the Astral body they went no higher than the cosmic Spirit or the Higher Manas - Atma-Buddhi, or Absolute Spirit and Spiritual Soul its vehicle, being incapable of being symbolised by concrete images.

(See also: Four Animals , Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary,)

Kamarupa (Sanskrit). Metaphysically, and in our esoteric philosophy, it is the subjective form created through the mental and physical desires and thoughts in connection with things of matter, by all sentient beings, a form which survives the death of their bodies.

After that death three of the seven "principles" - or let us say planes of senses and consciousness on which the human instincts and ideation act in turn - viz., the body, its astral prototype and physical vitality, - being of no further use, remain on earth; the three higher principles, grouped into one, merge into the state of Devachan (q.v.), in which state the Higher Ego will remain until the hour for a new reincarnation arrives; and the eidolon of the ex-Personality is left alone in its new abode. Here, the pale copy of the man that was, vegetates for a period of time, the duration of which is variable and according to the element of materiality which is left in it, and which is determined by the past life of the defunct.

Bereft as it is of its higher mind, spirit and physical senses, if left alone to its own senseless devices, it will gradually fade out and disintegrate. But, if forcibly drawn back into the terrestrial sphere whether by the passionate desires and appeals of the surviving friends or by regular necromantic practices - one of the most pernicious of which is medium- ship - the "spook" may prevail for a period greatly exceeding the span of the natural life of its body. Once the Kamarupa has learnt the way back to living human bodies, it becomes a vampire, feeding on the vitality of those who are so anxious for its company. In India these eidolons are called Pisachas, and are much dreaded, as already explained elsewhere.

(See also: Kamarupa , Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary,)

Individuality (from Latin individuum undivided thing, unit)

In philosophy, as well as in theosophy, used for inherent selfhood: monad, ego, atom. Used in theosophy for the higher ego in man as contrasted with the lower ego or personality -- a distinction not made in ordinary parlance, where the two words may even be used in the opposite senses.

The individuality is the immortal spiritual ego or monad; whereas the personality, or lower quaternary of the septenary human constitution, is the mortal human ego which goes to pieces at death.

(See also: Individuality , Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Aditi

Daksha’s oldest daughter, a wife of Kashyapa. She gave birth to twelve sons, including the eleven principal demigods (such as Surya, Varuna, and Indra) and the Supreme Personality of Godhead Lord Vamana.

(See also: Aditi , Bhakti, Bhakti Yoga, Bhakti Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul)

Aja:

Aja: a name of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who is unborn.

(See also: Aja , Hinduism, Hinduism Dictionary, Sanskrit Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul)

Mahabharata

"[The Mahabharata] is...probably the longest single poem in the world's literature. Traditionally the author of the poem was the sage Vyasa, who is said to have taught it to his pupil Vaisampayana. The latter, according to tradition, recited it in public for the first time at a great sacrifice held by King Janamejaya, the great grandson of Arjuna, one of the heroes of the story. ...the poem tells of the great civil war in the kingdom of the Kurus, in the region about the modern Delhi, then known as Kuruksetra."

-- A.L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, p. 407

"The Mahabharata is the creation and expression not of a single individual mind, but of a whole people. ...The whole poem has been built like a vast national temple unrolling slowly its immense and complex idea from chanber to chamber, crowded with significant groups and sculptures and inscriptions, the grouped figures carved in divine or semi-divine proportions, a humanity aggrandised and half-uplifted to super-humanity and yet always true to the human motive and idea and feeling, the strain of the real constantly raised by the tones of the ideal, the life of this world amply portrayed but subjected to the conscious influence and presence of the powers of the worlds behind it, and the whole unified by the long embodied procession of a consistent idea worked out in the wide steps of the poetic story."

"The leading motive is the Indian idea of the Dharma. Here the Vedic notion of the struggle between the godheads of truth and light and unity and the powers of darkness and division and falsehood is brought out from the spiritual and religious and internal into the outer intellectual, ethical and vital plane. It takes there in the figure of the story a double form of a personal and a political struggle, the personal a conflict between typical and representative personalities embodying the greater ethical ideals of the Indian Dharma and others who are embodiments of Asuric egoism and self-will and misuse of the Dharma, the political a battle in which the personal struggle culminates, an international clash ending in the establishment of a new rule of righteiousness and justice, a kingdom or rather an empire of the Dharma uniting warring races and substituting for the ambitious arrogance of kings and aristocratic clans the supremacy, the calm and peace of a just and humane empire. It is the old struggle of Deva and Asura, God and Titan, but represented in the terms of human life."

-- Sri Aurobindo, The Foundations of Indian Culture, SABCL Vol.14 pp. 287-88

(See also: Mahabharata , Hinduism, Vedic Scriptures, Yoga, Body Mind and Soul)

A Theosophical definition of Skandha (Skandhas) :

Skandha (Skandhas)

(Sanskrit) Literally "bundles," or groups of attributes, to use H. P. Blavatsky's definition. When death comes to a man in any one life, the seeds of those causes previously sown by him and which have not yet come forth into blossom and full-blown flower and fruit, remain in his interior and invisible parts as impulses lying latent and sleeping: lying latent like sleeping seeds for future flowerings into action in the next and succeeding lives. They are psychological impulse-seeds lying asleep until their appropriate stage for awakening into action arrives at some time in the future.

In the case of the cosmic bodies, every solar or planetary body upon entering into its pralaya, its prakritika-pralaya  - the dissolution of its lower principles  - at the end of its long life cycle, exists in space in the higher activity of its spiritual principles, and in the dispersion of its lowest principles, which latter latently exist in space as skandhas in a laya-condition.

When a laya-center is fired into action by the touch of wills and consciousnesses on their downward way, becoming the imbodying life of a solar system, or of a planet of a solar system, the center manifests first on its highest plane, and later on its lower plane. The skandhas are awakened into life one after another: first the highest ones, next the intermediate ones, and lastly the inferior ones, cosmically and qualitatively speaking.

The term skandhas in theosophical philosophy has the general significance of bundles or groups of attributes, which together form or compose the entire set of material and also mental, emotional, and moral qualities. Exoterically the skandhas are "bundles" of attributes five in number, but esoterically they are seven. These unite at the birth of man and constitute his personality. After the death of the body the skandhas are separated and so remain until the reincarnating ego on its downward path into physical incarnation gathers them together again around itself, and thus reforms the human constitution considered as a unity.

In brief, the skandhas can be said to be the aggregate of the groups of attributes or qualities which make each individual man the personality that he is; but this must be sharply distinguished from the individuality.

See also: Skandha (Skandhas) , Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul

Ahankara (Sanskrit). The conception of "I", Self-consciousness or Self- identity; the "I", the egotistical and mayavic principle in man, due to our ignorance which separates our "I" from the Universal ONE-SELF Personality, Egoism.

(See also: Ahankara , Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary,)

Sutratman (Sanskrit) [from sutra thread + atman self]

The thread-self; the golden thread of self-conscious individuality, the stream of egoic self-consciousness, on which all the substance-principles are strung like pearls on a golden chain. It is this sutratman, or stream of egoic consciousness-life, "which is the fundamental Selfhood in all beings, and which, reflected in and through the several intermediate vehicles or veils or sheaths or garments of the invisible constitution of man, or of any other being in which the Monad enshrouds itself, produces the egoic enters of self-conscious existence.

"The Sutratman, therefore, is rooted in the Monad, the monadic essence, but its stream is colored by the individuality of the Reincarnating Ego hitherto sleeping in the bosom of the Monad, which now after Reincarnation is awakened into self-conscious activity; and this 'colored stream' working through the appropriate vehicles of man's inner constitution, in other words, through his mind and through his emotions, his aspirations, his intellect and so forth, produces the individual consciousness which man recognises in himself" ("H. B. P.: The Mystery," Theosophical Path, October 1930, p. 329). Vedanta philosophy also teaches that atman passes like a thread through the five subtle bodies or kosas, and therefore is called sutratman.

In a more relative sense the sutratman is the egoic pilgrim, the immortal individuality, or that thread of being which animates a person and passes through all the countless personalities which he uses during the course of his manvantara-long evolutionary progress. "In each of us that golden thread of continuous life -- periodically broken into active and passive cycles of sensuous existence on Earth, and super-sensuous in Devachan -- is from the beginning of our appearance upon this earth. It is the Sutratma, the luminous thread of immortal impersonal monadship, on which our earth lives or evanescent Egos are strung as so many beads . . ." (SD 2:513).

In the latter sense sutratman is a synonym of the reincarnating ego, manas conjoined with buddhi which absorbs the manasic recollections of all and each of our preceding lives. It is so called, because, like the pearls on a thread, so is the long series of human lives strung together on that one thread-stream of self-conscious being. The cosmic sutratman bears the same relation to the universe that ours does to the human constitution, being the cosmic hierarch of a galaxy, solar system, or planetary chain.

(See also: Sutratman , Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body mind and Soul)

Acyuta:

Acyuta: The Infallible Lord (Krishna), a name of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, who can never fall down from His position.

(See also: Acyuta , Hinduism, Hinduism Dictionary, Sanskrit Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul)

Drakon (Ancient Greek) or Dragon. Now considered a "mythical" monster, perpetuated in the West only on seals,. &c., as a heraldic griffin, and the Devil slain by St. George, &c.

In fact an extinct antediluvian monster In Babylonian antiquities it is referred to as the "scaly one" and connected on many gems with Tiamat the sea. "The Dragon of the Sea" is repeatedly mentioned. In Egypt, it is the star of the Dragon (then the North Pole Star), the origin of the connection of almost all the gods with the Dragon. Bel and the Dragon, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Typhon, Sigur and Fafnir, and finally St. George and the Dragon, are the same.

They were all solar gods, and wherever we find the Sun there also is the Dragon, the symbol of Wisdom - Thoth-Hermes. The Hierophants of Egypt and of Babylon styled themselves "Sons of the Serpent-God" and "Sons of the Dragon". "I am a Serpent, I am a Druid", said the Druid of the Celto-Britannic regions, for the Serpent and the Dragon were both types of Wisdom, Immortality and Rebirth. As the serpent casts its old skin only to reappear in a new one, so does the immortal Ego cast off one personality but to assume another.

(See also: Drakon , Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary,)

shadow

(Jung) Inferior part of the personality, splinter self

(See also: Shadow , Body Mind and Soul)

INITIATION -

1. clear shine forth of the inner fire, transition to another, growing capacity to see and hear small planes, expansion of consciousness that admits the personality into wisdom attained by the Ego brief period of enlightenment where in the initiate sees that portion of the path that likes ahead and stares consciously in the evolutionary plan. (Bailey) (NAD)

2. an experience that transforms the individual that their concept of personal and worldly reality has been altered. Dedication is not the same. (TRASB)

(See also: INITIATION , Wiccan Pagan, Paganism, Pagan Dictionary)

psychometry (object reading, psychoscopy): means of obtaining information about people and events associated with an object merely by touching, handling, or being near to the object.

Psychic researcher Dr. J. Rhodes Buchanan devised and named psychometry around the turn of the century. He held that all objects and events leave perpetual impressions in the ether or astral light. Buchanan discovered that when psychometry students simply held drugs, the students often exhibited the symptoms that would have resulted had they ingested the drugs. Moreover, he found that some psychometrists could diagnose illness simply by holding the patient's hand.

The word psychometry literally means measure of the soul. (In science-oriented healthcare, the terms psychometry, psychometrics, and psychometric testing refer to the use of tests to measure such psychological characteristics as aptitude, intelligence, and personality traits.)

(See also: Psychometry , Body Mind and Soul, Alternative Health, Alternative Health Dictionary)

Kamaloka (Sanskrit). The semi-material plane, to us subjective and invisible, where the disembodied "personalities", the astral forms, called Kamarupa remain, until they fade out from it by the complete exhaustion of the effects of the mental impulses that created these eidolons of human and animal passions and desires; (See "Kamarupa".)

It is the Hades of the ancient Greeks and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the land of Silent Shadows; a division of the first group of the Trailokya. (See "Kamadhatu".)

(See also: Kamaloka , Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary,)

atma

The individual spirit soul, an eternal fragment of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

(See also: atma , Bhakti, Bhakti Yoga, Bhakti Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul)

AURA THERAPY

Every substance in the universe, both living and dead tissue, emits energy and has therefore a radiation pattern. This radiation, termed 'aura', thus forms distinctly different force fields in the case of each item, in the same manner as a fingerprint. The individual auras are in contact with a universal field of spiritual energy from which they draw their power.

Artists and mystics have from ancient times seen and portrayed this effect all over the world. Aura therapists say that although we are usually not aware of it consciously, auras, rather the effect of interacting auras, determine our first responses to people and situations. Developed and understood properly, it is a quicker and more sensitive gauge than more rational faculties. The unease or elation that one feels immediately on meeting another person is thus caused by the auras being in harmony or without it.

The auras of plants, animals and minerals are said to communicate and interact with one another as part of a single living system. Each person's aura is thought to be made up of the radiation from all the cells and chemicals within the body and their interaction. The visible aura, which is much in evidence in all religious texts, is said to be an oval extending from a few centimeters to a meter around the body, sometimes more at the head. The light being composed of seven coloured rays, each associated with particular organs of the body and conveying a distinct message. The variations in shape, colour & strength a reflection of each individual's uniqueness.

Therapists believe that personality and emotions too can be interpreted from auras. One with soft, fringed edges for instance is likely to indicate a person too susceptible to the influence of others. Firm but fluid boundaries would indicate openness but not vulnerability. And a hard, distinct outline belonging to one who is defensive and insecure. Similarly, lots of red within the aura would indicate anger while a predominance of blue would stand for idealism.

Treatment comes in the form of adding extra colours to improve a dull or depleted aura or using complimentary colours to offset to help balance one that is too strong. The therapists only acting as conduits for transferring the universal spiritual energy into the auras of patients, by touching the latter's auras or by using visualisation to transmit energy. However, active patient in the entire process is extremely crucial which involves their becoming more self-aware of their spiritual nature.

(See also: AURA THERAPY , Ayurveda, Ayurvedic Dictionary, Alternative Health, Body Mind and Soul)

Enneagram

an ancient system of spiritual psychology used for centuries to understand the development of the soul. Although the familiar symbol was devised by Pythagoras, the Enneagram system originated in the Middle East in 2500BC.

Similar to the Meyers-Briggs personality test, the Enneagram can be used to identify one's strengths and weaknesses among nine major characteristics. As a tool for personal growth and transformation, it goes beyond simple personality "types" by providing compensatory strategies to balance these facets of personality.

(See also: Enneagram , Alternative Health, Body Mind and Soul)

psyche

1. Soul, spirit, mind. 2. Mental or psychological structure of the personality

(See also: Psyche , Body Mind and Soul)

Vina - a stringed musical instrument of melodious sound, the favorite instrument of Narada Muni and of various other celestial personalities.

(See also: Vina , Bhakti, Bhakti Yoga, Bhakti Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul)