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THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER V

PHYSICAL DESTINY

Section 1

What physical destiny includes.

PHYSICAL destiny is everything that affects flesh and blood and nerves. It includes the features, frame and fabric of the physical body, the skin, the outer organs of sense and of action, and the inner organs of the generative, respiratory, circulatory and digestive systems. It also includes all physical causes that affect the body agreeably or otherwise. Physical circumstances that carry with them opportunity or the lack of it, environment of all kinds, food and the means of work or of leisure, are physical destiny. It includes, moreover, birth, family connections, health, money and the need of it, the span of life and manner of death of the body. Group destiny affects those who are drawn together into families or held together by social, political or religious ties.

Men see the world, but not the causes that bring about what they see. Upon examination into the factors which make up the race, environment, features and habits of even a single man, it is wonderful how these factors were worked together as the exteriorizations of so many conflicting thoughts.

It is difficult to follow the thoughts which elementals as nature units had to build into these healthy, diseased or deformed bodies, and into the daily events amidst which people exist, as well as into the epochal facts that mark periods in their common history. Though the real causes producing these results will not be seen at once, what can be understood is the law of thought, as destiny, according to which they are produced.

The entire physical world is made up of exteriorized parts of human thoughts. Not only the direct and intended results of human action, but the physical facts generally attributed to the gods of religions are exteriorized human thoughts.

Thoughts are produced by the thinking of the doer-in-the-body concerning objects of nature; and they are the cause of all physical acts, objects and events. These physical results are not always intended. Usually they are not, and would be avoided if that were in the power of the person who issued the producing thought. Neither the creator of the thought nor any other being can stop the further exteriorizations of a thought once it has been exteriorized in part.

A thought is a being, conceived by thinking, with a purpose and a plan. It is like an invisible blueprint to be exteriorized as an act or an object. The exteriorized action is physical destiny.

The first exteriorization is physical destiny and, as such, produces its results. Even the first exteriorization is the concretion of many thoughts, all having a similar aim and flowing from the same motive.

One does not murder or steal or commit any dishonest action without having thought of murder, or planned to steal or harbored dishonest thoughts. One who thinks upon murder, theft or lust will find a way to put his thoughts into deeds. If of too cowardly a nature to do this he will become the prey to others’ thoughts, or to invisible inimical influences which may, even against his wish, possess him at some critical time and urge him to perform the kind of act which he thought of as desirable and revolved in his brain, yet was too timid to execute. In the same way acts of goodness, courtesy, delicacy, service or gratitude do not come out of thin air, but are the form in which long continued thinking of the same kind is expressed. Over weakness and hesitation at the critical time one may be helped by thoughts of others and by friendly influences which seize him and decide him to do the kind of act which he had thought of as ideal.

Physical destiny is, however, not only what results from that first act. The physical destiny of that thought comprises all the successive exteriorizations which are projected out of it. These take place whenever its cycle has led it again to the radiant-solid plane, and whenever on that plane it intersects one or more thoughts, whether of the one who created it, or of other persons. These precipitations are from thoughts; from them there is no permanent escape. There must be exteriorizations until adjustment is made. Everything existing on the physical plane is an exteriorization of a thought which must be balanced through the one who issued the thought, in accordance with his responsibility, and at the conjunction of time, condition and place. That, in each instance, is the decree of the law. The destiny and decree do not reach beyond the physical plane.

Some psychic results are inevitable, as joy or sorrow; mental results are uncertain because they depend on the mental attitude. Neither, however, is a physical result. But they are to be considered because physical conditions continue on account of them. There are three purposes in the operation of the law of thought, and they cause exteriorizations of thoughts as physical acts, objects and events.

The first purpose is to let the doer-in-the-body learn what thoughts are, their meaning and how the physical world is built by them; that it is responsible for its thoughts and will be rewarded and punished for them and that it can attain conscious immortality only by thinking. The second purpose is payment. Therefore a doer pays and is paid in the equivalent of what physical actions and conditions it caused or permitted. This does not mean that if a man beats a boy the boy will sometime beat the man, or if a wife nags a husband that the husband has formerly jarred the person now his wife. It means that the man who put the stripes on the boy will himself suffer stripes, but not necessarily from that boy, and that the present husband has nagged someone, but not necessarily that same woman. The third purpose is the adjustment between the desire of the doer and the exteriorization, the balancing of the thought.

The adjustment must be made by the doer understandingly; not necessarily with knowledge of the past, but with an understanding, for example, that a certain suffering is merited, and so must be borne willingly. This decision makes the adjustment, and that thought is then balanced. Usually a man refuses to take that attitude. Thoughts are created and accumulated without an adjustment being made. So these thoughts become the hard circumstances that envelop so many. In each of these thoughts the balancing factor causes exteriorization after exteriorization. Little is learned and few adjustments are made out of the multitude of accumulating thoughts.

The three purposes are interrelated. By paying and receiving payment a man learns about his thoughts and his duties. Without payment he does not usually learn. In most cases he does not learn even by being made to pay repeatedly. He must continue to pay until he learns what he should do or not do in a particular case. Even after he has learned what is wrong he has not learned well enough to resist temptation; therefore the condition of the world is what it is. But there is a bright future ahead if people are willing to learn and to adjust.

All worlds depend on the physical plane of the physical world of the sphere of earth for their development. Progress of the matter in any sphere can be made only while the matter of that sphere is in the physical bodies of doers. There only is it under the influence of the Light of an Intelligence, and there only do all the worlds and spheres meet.

There matter circulates through the corresponding four zones of the physical atmosphere of the body. The circulation is kept up by the swing of the breath as it comes and goes. The matter then circulates through the four systems of the fourfold body. The reason all matter can come together there is that there the physical planes of the four worlds interlock. By these circulations this body is built, maintained, made coarser or finer, kept in health or afflicted with disease, according to the thinking of the doer which inhabits it. A thought is built into the body through nature units, elementals, which rush into the form which the thought assumes. They build it out and precipitate it, as a handsome feature, a malformed part or a disease of the body; or they bring about actions and accidents as exteriorizations of the thought.

Beyond the physical plane the law of thought does not decree or compel results; however, the results not directed or compelled by the law of thought, namely, the results on the doer which are produced by the physical events, are also means for teaching the doer. Life in a human body affords opportunities by which the doer is to be taught, trained and disciplined to be in union with his Triune Self. The doer can become thus conscious only while living in a human body, never after the death of the body. Only while it is in its fleshly body is the doer in contact with all the worlds and spheres. The commingling of all the worlds and spheres is necessary as a condition under which a Triune Self can be raised to become conscious as an Intelligence.

The body is the result of the work of the doer during eons. There are in human bodies doer portions of various degrees, on the descent and on the ascent. Both classes need physical bodies to work out their destiny. No two bodies are equal in any sense; the doers in them are not equal in development, nor are their thoughts, which make the bodies. People who look at a human body cannot tell what is in it. Position in life will not tell; a man of education may be rapidly descending, one who appears to be lowly may be advanced. In these physical bodies, however, all receive the destiny they have made for themselves, and through these crucibles passes the whole of nature in the human world of birth and death.