From the perspective of certain sciences, the individual human does not have very much importance. For evolutionary biology, the individual is just the carrier of genes, and genes are the entities with real agency. For sociology, the individual is a statistic, an insignificant cell in the organism of humanity subject to statistical laws. In certain political philosophies, too, the individual is held to be unimportant, a unit or cog in the machine of society which takes precedence over it. Even in the spiritual field, there is a sense in which the individual is a small part in the vast designs of God. However, in spirituality there is also a sense in which the individual has a great importance: the individual human life is the stage where a unique soul—a differentiated portion of the Divine—can lodge in the being and grow to fruition. Thus the individual must be accorded the respect of a being that can potentially manifest the Divine.
The individual is not yet the Divine, and only has the potential to become Divine through spiritual growth. While the human social group goes through its own process of psychological and spiritual evolution, it is in the individual that spiritual progress happens; the progress of the group comes as a result of the progress of its individuals diffusing through the larger entity. This is because the individual is a locus of responsibility for the psychological contents of its being. In business, there is the idea that for a task to get done, a single person needs to be responsible for it. It is similar with spirituality: for spiritual transformation of a human organism—a long and exacting work—to be done, an individual needs to be responsible for it. Spiritual progress cannot be done by committee. It is done by an individual making a thousand or a million choices about how to drive the machine of their consciousness Godward.
The task of the human is not to perform a cookie-cutter spiritual discipline, however—or else there would be no point in the manifestation of the Divine into billions of different human forms. Individuals must bring out that which is unique to them into the manifestation; that is their reason for being in this universe, to bring out a unique facet of the Divine. Psychologist Carl Jung called this process "individuation". This means discovering one's own talent, sensibility, thoughts, personality, work, style, and so on. The task of each person is to manifest their uniqueness and use it to contribute to the manifestation of the whole. But this uniqueness cannot be a mere eccentricity of the outer mind and emotions. Rather, it has to be the outward expression of the soul.
But does this emphasis on manifesting uniqueness contradict the spiritual requirement to transcend the ego? In fact, there is no contradiction. The ego is the psychological sense of separation of the being from God and all else in the manifestation. But the individual can continue to manifest their unique individuality while at the same time no longer feeling the sense of egoic separation. After transcending the egoic sense of separation, consciousness is still bound to an individual human, and the task that God has given to this individual is to manifest what is uniquely theirs. Overcoming the ego can be seen as one more step in the flowering of the individual consciousness.
This unique individuality need not display unfettered dominance, trampling over others to fulfill the individual whims and wants. To be caught in that mode of being would in fact be to be caught in the ego; only one who feels separate from others would be able to disregard their rights to satisfy his own whims. The key word for the individual's relations with the outside world is harmony. We must live in harmony with those in our immediate orbit, with our community, and with the larger groups that make up society. We have even learned in the 20th century that there is a physical environment that we must work to harmonize with as well.
The development of the individual for its own sake might lead to the individual overstepping his bounds, aggrandizing himself, and in the worst case harming others, as the unbounded growth of the cell leads to cancer. However, when the growth of the individual is put in its proper context of the larger purpose of spiritual growth, it eventually leads to a harmony with its surrounding environment through the transcendence of the ego. This natural balance and harmony is a consequence of the purpose of the manifestation of the Divine in the individual. For this balance to be respected, the individual must make necessary spiritual progress to bring out their Divine individuality while also working to surmount the ego. When the spiritual individual does all of this, they will naturally be in harmony with the rest of existence, as both whole in themself and a part of a larger whole.
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