Character Traits of a Teenager
Someone asked me why does hate, anger, love, curiosity, admiration, etc. exist in the world. It was a very innocent yet important question that I would like to address. Seekers of the Spirit throughout time have noticed that the Divine Reality expresses in various ways, including Peace, Oneness, Wisdom, Knowledge, Creativity, Beauty, Goodness, Love, Delight, Power, Timelessness, and Infinity. These are also qualities that the Supreme seeks to manifest in the forms of creation. We humans are the means by which they take shape on earth.
Interestingly, though the Intent of the Supreme was/is to spread these spiritual aspects throughout the cosmos, they initially took shape in their opposite form, as an inversion. For example, life first emerged in the universe as unconscious physical matter; and only after, emerged higher, more conscious forms. Thus, life, and indeed we humans have roots in unconsciousness mixed with the consciousness. And we have come to embody them in the form of both positive and negative character traits — expressing the physical, vital, and mental levels.
An obvious question is why would a Divine Reality allow for both formations of darkness and light? Why not just manifest Its own, infinitely positive spiritual attributes? The answer is that it did so to enable the greatest variety, multiplicity, and possibility of experience. If there were only good traits, the diversity and depth of our life experiences would be limited. Thus, over time, a vast array of positive, neutral, and negative physical, vital, and mental traits came to be. For example, feelings like fear, anger, hatred, are negative expressions that originate in the vital plane of our being.
It turns out that not only are these negative expressions inversions of their positive spiritual counterpart of Oneness, Power, Love, etc. , but inversions of our own positive human traits. For example, people who hate, secretly harbor love, but through circumstance inner and outer, have inverted to its darker side. A child might hate a parent because of their abuse, but secretly harbored intense love that reversed itself. In fact, the more intense the hate, the greater the possibility of love when the obstacles are overcome.
In humanity’s evolution we emerged from physical existence where our physical traits predominated, such as hunting and other survival skills, to the development of more complex vital feelings and relationships, such as trade, cooperation, and affinity toward marriage, to sophisticated traits of the mind, such as analyzing, synthesizing, calculating, rational thinking, etc. These are positive or neutral characteristics developed over the course of human evolution. And yet there are also negative qualities that developed, such as mental ignorance and falsehood.
At the vital and physical levels there are far more and more virulent forms of negative character traits because as you go lower in human consciousness, the wanting characteristics tend to appear. Anger, hate, intense desire, lust, jealousy, etc. are negative vital traits; while domination, tendency to violence, etc. are examples of negative physical characteristics. And so we see how life evolved both a plethora of qualities in the human, both positive and negative, to enable the greatest variety of experience, from which we can evolve our nature and through that discovery experience delight.
