Jim: The question this week, Q’uo, is from M: “I understand that, according to Ra, when the third-density experience of an entity has ended, the soul distills the essence of that experience and nothing of value is lost. However, I’m wondering whether the personality has any value to the soul. I find the idea of the personality being lost discomforting. I understand that my soul will prevail but what about ‘me’? I mean the ‘me’ that I identify with now. If my personality is lost, isn’t that the same as ‘me’ ceasing to exist? And, in addition, isn’t my soul’s identity also lost when it joins a social memory complex? And isn’t the social memory complex’s identity lost when it merges back to the Creator? Can Q’uo please comment?”

(Carla channeling)

We are known to you as those of the principle of Q’uo. Greetings in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator, in whose service we come to you this evening. We thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to seek the truth and to ask for our presence and we are delighted to speak with you concerning the question of the one known as M concerning the personality and various details of that particular cosmological aspect of what we understand to be the way things are.

But first, as always, we would ask that each of you listen carefully to that which we have to say, with an eye to following the path of your own subjective resonance. If our thoughts seem resonant to you then by all means use them. If they do not seem particularly telling, then please leave them behind, for we would not wish to interfere with your free will or to interrupt the rhythm of your process of seeking.

We thank you for doing us this favor. Your discernment and your discrimination are very solid for you and may not be useful for anyone but you, but for you they are those things which you may trust far more than you may trust another’s wisdom. So please believe in yourself and use your powers of discrimination, not only with our words but also with all words that you hear. With that said, we would like to move on to our thoughts concerning the personality, as you call it.

It is our understanding that each of you is part of a soul stream. You, as a soul stream, may be considered to be at the center of a three-dimensional, timeless field in which all of the incarnations which you have experienced as an individual in third density, fourth density, fifth, sixth or seventh density resides. The fruit, the harvest, of your incarnation is gathered, thankfully and lovingly, by the soul stream and by the Creator as you experience life within an incarnation and most especially as you leave the incarnation and go through the healing process of the review of the incarnation after your physical death and before you choose your next incarnation.

Again, it is our understanding that, having been reunited with your soul stream and your higher self before you choose the manner of your next incarnation, you carefully consider what you feel may be distorted about the balance of your soul stream. Are you too heavily a creature of love? Can you keep your heart open but perhaps do not have the wisdom that you would wish that you had? Or, alternatively, are you one who is very wise but has trouble opening the heart? Or, as a third possibility, is your incarnation one which has to do with the right use of power? If so, then you may examine those patterns that repeat in your incarnation, analyzing those patterns for the possibility of an imbalance between power and love or an imbalance between power and wisdom.

It is thoughts of this kind that cause you and your higher self to choose the next experience behind the veil of third density. You are always looking, as a soul stream, to lessen distortion and to increase the balance of your soul stream. By balance, we do not mean to imply that the goal of the soul stream is to achieve indifference or neutrality. Rather, we are suggesting that balance is that which enables the entire energy body to remain open within incarnation, so that you may more fully know who you are, you may more fully serve, and you may more fully be the essence of yourself.

That being said, what you experience as your personality is actually a kind of shell. It is a kind of clothing, mask or costume. It is not a trick. That is to say although it is an illusion, all things are illusory to one extent or another. Your personality shell is as real as you know how to make it be. Nevertheless, what you experience as your personality shell or as some might say, the ego, is not the whole of yourself and was never intended to be a true representation of your soul stream.

It is as if you chose to go on a journey, taking that which was needed for that journey—some gifts, some talents, some challenges and limitations and a multitude of possible relationships. The older a soul that you are within one planetary influence, the more relationships that you have had in various incarnations and the more balances of energy that you have shared with those soul streams in past incarnations. And so you have a wide variety of relationships upon which you have already worked, sometimes again and again. Naturally, you gravitate towards working with these same soul streams when you come back into incarnation because they are those with whom you have an instinctive mutual awareness. They are those with whom you have come furthest in understanding and penetrating the personality shell. They are those with whom you have done good work before.

And so, you choose not only your parents and the main relationship of your life, whether it be a mate or a friend, you also set into position a good deal of redundancy so that no matter how many times you walk away from a situation that is shaped thus and so, you will find yourself coming into a relationship which carries those characteristics from which you wish to learn.

We can assure you that you did not simply have it “in for yourself” as this instrument would say. You were not attempting to torture yourself with relationships that were challenging. You were looking to find the love within that relationship and to open to that. You were hoping that the catalyst received during that relationship would lead you to new realizations, new and deeper understandings, new insights.

Therefore, from the standpoint of an incarnation, the personality is very important. It is your handpicked choice of your talents, your limitations, and those relationships you hold dear, and it is designed to function well to place you in the fire of catalyst. You will recall the biblical story of the children in the middle of the fire who were not burned. 1 The fire of incarnation is just such a fire. It is not intended to consume and destroy you. It is intended to refine you; to help you with the process of removing the slag from your ore and mining the gold and precious jewels that are within you.

It is intended to create of you an instrument that is flexible and tempered and strong; light yet sturdy. You are hoping with each incarnation that you undertake to serve and to learn and the personality shell that you know of as yourself is your single, most important resource. Therefore, simply because your personality shell is at one level an illusion, and at best a very incomplete effigy of that which you really are in your soul stream, it sustains you, it gives you continuity, it gives you a way to manage your nature.

Let us look at this concept of one’s human nature. Many aspects of human nature are common to all—male, female, old, young, it doesn’t matter. Others are unique to you and your soul stream and you will find, as you work within yourself, asking yourself who you are and why you are here, that these questions encourage that which the one known as Jim was talking about, that process of change. For each time that you ask who you are and why you are here, you clear the surface personality and hope to go deeper than that surface. You hope to know more than simply how you did on an I.Q. test or on a Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory or any other test that purports to explain you to yourself. You’re hoping to get from the surface, with its quirks and its oddities of personality, closer and closer to that common nature which all created things have in common. And that is the Logos, the great original Thought of love that is the Creator.

Each of you are part of that Creator and the deepest portion of you that there is is made entirely of love. It is a love that waits for you beyond the reaches of personality. It is a consciousness that resides within you but which is entirely silent. It is almost as though you had within you the character of the Sleeping Beauty that is awakened by the kiss of the Prince. 2 Your inner nature can sleep for a hundred years or you can kiss it awake at any time by paying attention to that inner nature, by seeking it and wooing it as you would a maiden. And when you penetrate into your own open heart, and you experience the love of the Creator that lies therein, it is indeed the Balm of Gilead. It is a healing, strengthening presence, one that it is possible to experience and that it is very helpful to experience.

When you have moved through the gateway to larger life, you, as a soul stream, become aware again of the entire soul stream. Your awareness opens up and expands and as a natural concomitant of that the personality shell drops away. The closest that entities have of knowing that they shall, in their personality shells, move into people’s memory, is either in their being known as an author, an actress, or an artist is known by those who admire their work, or by leaving behind your children, who remember you just as your personality shell was reflected to them.

It is, in most cases, a fairly limited period during which you, as a personality, remain known and remembered, and we feel sure that this is not a satisfactory response to your question, for you would like to know that your life has made a difference, that who you are matters. And yet, my sister, would you care to save all of the details of each and every moment of your life? You are still among the living and yet you have filed many things away under the category of “golden memories.” If there were difficulties, you tend to leave them in obscurity while your favorite positive memories are taken out and polished up and perhaps even embroidered upon.

Memory becomes more golden the further away you are from the happenings thereof—unless of course, my friends, you have the misfortune to choose to react negatively to those things which occur to you, in which case you become more and more cynical and bitter and as the one known as Jim said, end up shaking your fist impotently at a Creator that seems to have other interests than yours at heart.

But for most service-to-others entities, the net result of living a long life is that there is an increasing amount of memory that becomes polished and golden and can be trotted out, and many stories told that you enjoy telling over to yourself. And thusly you perpetuate the feeling of the reality of this personality shell. However, in time, even a Shakespeare is less remembered and each of you shall vanish into the Akashic record of your planet and the memories of your soul stream.

So what was it all for if this vital, vibrant, complex personality that you are eventually vanishes? We assure you, for the purposes of this incarnation, this masquerade was necessary and vital. You needed to have a personality shell in place so that you could be a witness to that which you experience and so that you could work out what it is that you wish to do with the incarnation, day by day. It is vital, if work is to be done within an incarnation, to improve the balance of the soul stream, [so] that objective desires are defined and the focus tightened and sharpened.

Each day it is possible for you to set your intention for the day. And each time that you do that, you become more present with yourself and you use your incarnational time better. It is as though you have a job of work to do and you have given yourself everything that you need to do that job of work. The fact that it is, at one level, an illusion is not relevant to the work. This work was intended to be done inside the veil. You were not at all supposed to know the true value or meaning of that which occurs to you. Your area of responsibility, shall we say, is in choosing how you shall respond to that which the moment offers you. And it is not expected that you will somehow pierce the veil and become fully aware of a more real part of yourself thereby, logically and in a linear manner choosing the right thing to do.

Quite to the contrary, my friends, your area of work is to increase your faith and strengthen your ability to, as Kierkegaard said, take a leap into the midair of faith. When you are living in faith, you have, as the one known as J said, an overwhelming awareness that all is well. And so you can dwell, even in the midst of seemingly very limiting or challenging circumstances, in joy and gratitude. This is your area of work, to toss yourself into midair, to rely upon the knowledge that all is well, especially when it does not at all seem that all is well.

Indeed, in worse conditions it is more important for you to rest, to find peace in your heart, and to allow a reassuring presence to flow through you and to aid those about you who may be losing heart. These things are not done for linear reasons. These things are a product of a life lived in faith. It is a discussion in itself as to the interplay between the personality shell and a life lived in faith. As you press on, living a life in faith, you will find things falling away from you that you thought were absolutely part of your personality. This does not mean that you cease to have a personality. It means that those quirks and oddities of personality that are no longer necessary for you to do the job you came to do will fall away of their own accord when they are no longer needed.

This instrument, for example, used to live on sweets when she was a little girl and when she was growing up. There was a certain point in her lifetime when she stopped craving them. She would have said that loving sweets was as much a part of her as breathing and now she has found that she is free of the craving for sweets, although she still enjoys them.

It is not that which needs to be disturbing to one, that there will be changes in the personality as the spirit within matures. But it would be foolish for even the most mature soul to assume that there is no longer a personality shell or an ego, for that clothing for the self is necessary as part of the illusion of Earth, part of the illusion of living in third density. You will find, more and more, as you come to seek the silence with empty hands and a cleared mind, that there is that within you far deeper than the personality and far more attractive to the self that begins to grow and take you with it.

We would move on now to the question concerning whether or not an entity is still that entity when it joins a social memory complex and the answer to that, my friends, is decidedly in the affirmative. You have not experienced, perhaps, in your lifetime, what it is to be fully known, fully accepted, and fully loved. But you shall know those things when you enter the gates of larger life. Even between incarnations you shall experience this. And when you move into a fourth-density social memory complex as part of your choice-making after this incarnation and after your graduation, you will find that the atmosphere in which you exist is far different than you would have imagined.

To the ego or the personality shell it seems an intrusion for people to know your thoughts. However, you will find that it is a great relief. To your ego there are some thoughts that are good and some thoughts that are not good and you would not wish people to know of your secret thoughts. And yet, since all entities have them, they are not a surprise to anyone in fourth density or above. They are a part of an integrated being that contains all things that there are. If you are one with all that there is, do you not contain all things? Consequently it is not a shock to you, in the context of a fourth-density social memory complex, that those entities which make up the social memory complex have, each and every one of them, a full panoply of thoughts, both positive and negative.

It is, when one is not behind the veil of forgetting as you are in third density, very easy to see what thoughts are leading and how the personality, in a larger sense, is shaped. Consequently, if anything, individuality is stronger when one is part of a social memory complex, because all the other entities involved in the social memory complex have no axe to grind and wish only to support, respect and honor you as a unique individual. And you feel the same towards all those around you. For you see their suffering and their happiness and all of those things that they experience. You see their desires and their dreams and their hopes. And all of these things warm your heart and teach you. And you in turn teach them. So there is a very good atmosphere for being yourself in a social memory complex. Nothing is lost when you join a social memory complex. You simply focus upon desires that you have in common and, as is the way of collaboration, you are more skillful and effective as part of a group than you were by yourself.

As we talk to you, you know that we are a combination of fourth-density, fifth-density, and sixth-density entities. Those within the principle of Q’uo have not yet gone through the ending of an octave of creation. However, it is our understanding, limited though it may be, that the essence of each part of the Creator that has been sent out remains in potentiation as the Creator breathes and decides again to know Itself better. And when It sends out parts of Itself again, there is a natural tendency to fracture or be splintered into the precisely identical soul stream that you experienced in the previous octave. So in truth, you, as an individual, are never lost. You simply are folded up into the Creator after a full octave of experience. After coming from alpha to omega you start again and you learn again and you desire again and the fruits of that are preserved for the Creator so that It may know Itself ever better.

We realize that we have only scratched the surface of this multifaceted question, but we judge this to be a good time to halt for this particular meeting. We would simply ask if there is a follow-up from any of those present or from the one known as G. We are those of Q’uo.

[Pause]

We are those of Q’uo, and we find the silence to indicate that no follow-up is necessary at this time. May we ask if there is another query in the circle at this time? We are those of Q’uo.

[Pause]

We are those of Q’uo, and find the silence to be resounding indeed! And so we believe that we have exhausted the store of queries that people are willing to vocalize at this time. May we say again what a joy it is to be with you and to share your vibrations. We thank you for the opportunity to share our humble thoughts. It has been a real pleasure. We leave you in the love and in the light of the one infinite Creator. We are known to you as the principle of Q’uo. Adonai, my friends. Adonai vasu.


  1. This reference is to the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Book of Daniel, Chapter Three, in The Holy Bible. Refusing King Nebuchadnezzar, the three men would not bow down to another man’s God. So the King threw them into a fiery furnace. However they remained unscathed and eventually the King called them out of the furnace and promoted them. And he made a decree that protected their right to worship their God. 

  2. The classic fairy tale of the Sleeping Beauty was first written down by Charles Perrault in his book, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye—in English, Tales of Mother Goose. It is perhaps best known to Americans from the Walt Disney film of the same name. After being cast under a spell for a hundred years, Sleeping Beauty is rescued by the handsome Prince with a kiss of love. They of course live happily ever after, even according to the well-named Brothers Grimm.