Inquiry · “You Are Not Your Thoughts”
Character Charting
To take an honest written inventory of one’s own qualities and faults, set it out as a personal chart, choose specific weaknesses to work on and strengths to build, and review progress on a schedule — turning vague self-improvement into a deliberate, trackable plan.
Character Charting: Write an honest two-column chart of your real qualities and faults. Choose a few specific weaknesses to reduce and virtues to build. Work at them deliberately day by day, bring them into your daily quiet period, and review progress on a schedule — re-charting as you change. Honest survey and plan, never self-condemnation.
What it is
Alongside her daily meditation, Vera Stanley Alder asks the reader of The Finding of the Third Eye to do something bracingly concrete: draw up an honest written chart of your own character. List your qualities and your faults, see yourself on paper as you really are, then choose specific weaknesses to work down and specific virtues to build up, working at them deliberately and reviewing progress over time.
It is self-knowledge turned into a project-management exercise: the diffuse wish to “be a better person” is converted into a written inventory, named targets, and a review schedule. Alder treats this character-work as the necessary groundwork of her whole programme — the mind and emotions must be deliberately retrained before higher development can proceed.
It operationalises repetition installing new patterns (The Inner Creates the Outer), the principle that what you become precedes what you attract (The Inner Creates the Outer), and contact with a deeper Self lived out through character (All Is One).
The Method
Faithful paraphrase of Alder’s instructions (short attributed phrases only):
- Make the chart. Sit down and write two honest columns — your good qualities and your faults/weaknesses. Alder wants this seen “on paper,” not merely mused over, so that self-knowledge becomes concrete and inescapable.
- Be ruthlessly honest but neutral. Aim to see yourself “as you really are,” neither flattering nor flagellating. The chart is a survey, not a sentence.
- Choose your targets. Pick a small number of specific faults to reduce and specific qualities to strengthen — not the whole list at once. Define them concretely enough to notice in daily life.
- Work at them deliberately, day by day. Bring the chosen targets into the daily quiet period and into ordinary conduct; watch for the fault arising and practise the chosen virtue in real situations.
- Review on a schedule. Periodically (Alder envisions ongoing, repeated review) come back to the chart, mark honest progress, retire what is genuinely improved, and choose the next targets. Treat it as a long, patient campaign of self-cultivation.
- Pair it with the daily quiet period. The chart sets the agenda; the meditation is where the chosen ideals are held and reinforced. The two practices interlock. (Sourcing note: paraphrase and short attributed phrases from The Finding of the Third Eye; not a reproduction of the text.)
Source & Lineage
Alder turned the Theosophical insistence on “purifying the vehicles” (refining body, emotions and mind) into a plain written exercise any lay reader could do at the kitchen table. Where the older tradition spoke of character-refinement abstractly, she made it a chart with targets and reviews.
The Traditions' versions
The move — honest, recurring self-examination against named qualities, with a commitment to improve — is one of the most universal of all inner disciplines; Alder’s distinctive twist is the self-generated written chart of one’s own traits with chosen targets, rather than a fixed list handed down: - Blavatsky’s “Golden Stairs” self-review — daily examination, but against Blavatsky’s fixed thirteen qualities; Alder has you draw up your own inventory.
- Manly P. Hall’s self-analysis and self-correction — the same inventory-then-correct logic in another esoteric voice.
- Seneca’s evening review and Confucius’s daily self-examination — recurring review of one’s conduct against a standard.,
- Pierrakos’s daily review — structured looking-back on the day’s conduct and reactions.
- (Historically akin to Benjamin Franklin’s virtue chart — a written list of traits tracked deliberately over time.)
Common refinements
Turning the fault column into self-attack. The chart is information and a plan, not a verdict on your worth. Hold it neutrally or it curdles into scrupulosity.
- Targeting everything at once. Pick a few; willpower is finite. Broad fronts collapse.
- Vague targets. “Be kinder” is unworkable; “don’t interrupt people in meetings” is trackable. Make them concrete.
- Never reviewing. Without the scheduled look-back there is no feedback loop and the chart goes stale. The review is half the method.
- Doing it once and stopping. Alder intends a long, patient campaign — re-chart as you change.