THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER VII

MENTAL DESTINY

Section 10

Prehistoric history. First, Second, and Third Civilization on the human earth. Fallen doers from inside the earth.

On the four invisible earths of the Realm of Permanence there is no need for what is called Civilizations. On the human earth, any First Civilization in the cycles of Four Civilizations, started innumerable years ago; it was not a gradual development, but was inaugurated by those who came from the third and fourth earths of the Realm of Permanence, under the direction of an Intelligence and its related complete Triune Self. There were fluctuations but no evolution. There were divine kings, in the sense that they were not of the race, but were perfected doers who had come from the interior earth to teach and rule over human beings on the crust. The physical body of the king was different from those of the people. The human beings of doers were men and women, the divine ruler was a perfected doer in an immortal physical body.

Mankind gradually increased and spread over a large portion of the land. There was a steady rise in the civilization. The continents were different from what they are today; they have changed numberless times. At the high-water mark of this civilization some of the people were taught the relation of the Intelligence to the Triune Self, the history of the earth, the organization of the elementals in nature, the laws that governed them, the laws by which animals, plants and minerals received their forms and by what they were embodied, and the purpose which the existence of these creatures served. At the height of the civilization the earth was in a condition transcending in power, splendor and happiness anything that tradition or legend tells. Building, agriculture, metal working, fabrics, colors and the arts were such that, compared to them, the efforts of the people today in these crafts are primitive.

However, there was no commerce; all that was needed was produced by thought by the people in every locality. The people could communicate by thought from one end of the earth to the other. There was much travel; the people had air boats and swift vessels on the water. But they did not use steam or engines; the motive power for these vehicles and others used on land was taken directly from the starlight and connected with every part of the vehicle. The direction was given by the thought of the driver, and the speed regulated in the same way. Not only such vehicles but other objects like huge stones for building were moved by thought and the hands, which acted on the forces of nature. No part of the earth was a duplicate or imitation of any other. Different sections were distinguished in all respects. Only the form of government was the same throughout. The people were instructed by their divine ruler; there was an absolute monarchy, but it was by divine right. No one was oppressed, no one suffered want. There were the four classes that are always in the world. Authority and power were used for the good of everyone and everyone was satisfied. The people had health and long life; they lived without fear and had a painless death; there was no war. The types of the animals resulted from the thoughts of the humans, so they were without sharp teeth and claws and were of a strong, but gentle nature.

After these institutions were established and had lasted for long periods, the period of divine kings ended. The divine king withdrew and left mankind, which was now to be responsible for itself. There was only one race on the earth. The wisest of the governors selected one of their number to rule as king, and this order of government lasted for a period. As long as the wisest was selected all went well. Then a king began to wish to be succeeded by his issue, and the same desire for succession in families came to prevail among the people. A dynasty arose; the king, full of ambition, desired power. The hereditary successors were not always the most excellent. Some were good, some inefficient, and the old order in things was not maintained. Dissatisfaction among the people enabled some leaders to establish rival dynasties. The old order disappeared; the kings were removed, and in their stead sets of nobles ruled in various parts of the world. After a while the rulers, who possessed most learning, constituted an aristocracy which drew apart from the rest. Then another class, those who were skilled in the management of industries or agriculture, overthrew the aristocracy and established a new form of government with themselves at the head. This kind of government went on for a time, and then from the handworkers desiring power came men who claimed the right to rule for the people, and succeeded. They became despots and enslaved the people. When the people had suffered enough they supported other men, who then became their despots. The arts and sciences were lost; despot fought despot. Amidst conditions of misrule, the dominant factors in public and private life were rapacity, hate and corruption.

According to the types of the thoughts held, the surface of the earth changed. In different parts, people of different types and animals corresponding to them came into existence. Minor rises followed minor falls. Sometimes civilization disappeared in one place, but was started afresh in another by one of the Wise Men or some one sent by them. Lesser nations and races followed after the steady rise to the highest point reached by the single race under the divine rulers. Each race disappeared in decadence after it had repeated the political phases of the first. The thoughts of the decadents brought on lesser cataclysms that wiped out portions of the race, but through all there was a steady descent.

A large part of the earth crust was destroyed. These disturbances of the earth were merely exteriorizations of the thoughts of the people whom they affected. This was the end of that First Civilization on the fourth physical earth. The sea and the land changed positions. Great heat and great cold prevailed. The remnants of the peoples changed their habitations from the gradually sinking old lands.

For a long period only stray bands moved from place to place. They had lost the memory of the past, and hardships and climatic changes brutalized and debased them. They were without homes, comforts, civilization or government. The forms of the animals had been made from the types of thought of decadent peoples, and the entities in the animals were the unhuman desires of the decadents who were later confronted by them. There were animals that lived in water and animals that lived in trees and flying animals. The shapes of many were grotesque and monstrous. The brutalized humans had to fight these animals with stones and clubs. The humans were possessed of great strength and were much like the animals, with whom they mixed, the stronger of either sex overcoming the weaker. Interbreeding produced mongrel types between animal and human forms. There were some who lived in the water, some who lived in trees, some who lived in holes in the ground; some were flying men. There were hybrids whose heads were set in their bodies. Some of the remnants of these types may be seen today in monkeys, penguins, frogs, seals and sharks. Some of these human mongrels were hairy; some had shells and scales on the shoulders, hips and knees.

Left to itself, the race would have perished for want of Light, but after the thoughts they had had were exteriorized sufficiently, they were again helped by Wise Men. The better kind among some groups of the scattered remnants began to protect themselves against the weather and devised weapons against the animals. They built huts and houses, subdued animals, domesticated them and tilled the soil.

This was the beginning of that Second Civilization. With small comforts the groups became larger. Their habitations were often endangered by hordes of the wild and mongrel men. These they gradually overcame and drove back to the jungles and the waters. By degrees domestic crafts and arts began to flourish. The doers which had been obliged to depart from the earlier men took up their abode in those of the human bodies which were not unfit to hold them. Such doers came in groups, as the different colonies were prepared enough to receive them. In the course of time another great civilization was built up. Teachers again appeared among men and taught them arts and sciences. They led men through strife and war into ways of culture and taught them concerning the doer and the Triune Self and the laws by which the animals came into the world. There were again kings, but they were not divine rulers different from human beings; they were human kings. Variations of the types of government followed each other as in the First Civilization. The high-water mark was under the kings.

The different parts of the earth had again been filled with various races. Agriculture, trade, the arts and the sciences flourished. The people engaged in extended commerce, carried on through the air as well as by water and on the land. A motive power was taken from the air, the force of flight. This force was adapted to carriage through the air, through the water and on land and was applied directly to the vehicles in use, in all their parts. Men flew through the air without any appliances. They regulated their speed by their thought.

There was no machinery. Some of the woods used were as hard and as tough as metals. Some of them were of gorgeous coloring, which the people knew how to produce by directing the sunlight and introducing certain plant food into the growing tree. Some among the people could make diminutive plants to grow as large as they wanted them. Metals were worked not by heat but by sound, and so developed an unbreakable temper. People could soften and melt stone and had solid buildings of stone without mortar. They knew how to make stone and to give it different grains and colors. They had statuary of exquisite shape and coloring. Their civilization passed its height and was crushed out, the last state of decadence being the rule of the handworkers. Then came other rises and falls of various peoples in different parts of the earth. Continents were born and destroyed and others rose. The decline of the civilization as a whole was steady, though there were many local revivals, each followed by a relapse.

With each decline of the people came a change in the animal forms, due to the thoughts that gave them their shapes. There were huge mammals that flew through the air, and large fish that could fly for long distances. At last earthquakes split the outer crust of the earth, flames and steam issued and the water sucked in the land with its people. The water was churned hot over a large part of the earth. That Second Civilization was wiped out and only remnants of the people survived here and there.

Then came a Third Civilization. Stray herds of hardly human creatures ranged over portions of the newly risen lands, skirted the deserts and inhabited the dense growth of marshes and forests. They were the rude remnants of the glorious civilizations which had preceded, but they bore no trace of their past.

There also came additions of peoples from inside the crust of the earth. Some were descendants of people who had sought refuge there from the corruption under the rule of the handworkers, had escaped the cataclysm on the outer crust and had increased in numbers. Others were those who had fled from an inner earth toward the outer crust. They were the descendants of those who had failed, who had lost their perfect bodies and had taken the path of death and re-existence. As these people increased in number they were segregated and were gathered in communities, and in time were driven by fires and floods to the outer crust. There they were barbarian tribes like those who had survived. The senses of all these inhabitants were as keen as those of animals and they could climb, burrow and swim as easily as the animals. They could defend themselves and escape as well in the water as on the land. They knew of no houses, but lived in caves, in burrows, under rocks and in hollow trees of enormous size. Their prodigious strength and cunning made them the equals of animals in fight. Some tribes developed claws; some used as protection a tree bark which was simple, strong and impenetrable to tooth and claw. In the course of time their cunning increased, but they were unable to make fire or implements. They used stones or clubs or strong bones as weapons. They had no orderly language, but articulated sounds, which they had no difficulty in understanding.

However, some of the better kind of doers had been led to safety chambers in the interior of the earth crust, where they propagated and continued to live through those ages. They came out, subdued the savages and taught them husbandry, the working of woods, metals and stones and weaving of grasses. At first there was very little land. As the population increased, they had floating cities on inland lakes. Their chief foods were liquids, which contained elements to produce the bodies desired. They could increase the size of their bodies or retard their growth and grow them in the forms desired. They were able to do this from their knowledge of the human type and of the foods needed for the growth of the body. They developed an extraordinary fineness of taste, and could prepare drinks that would put them into ecstatic states without injury to their bodies. During these ecstatic conditions they were still fully conscious and could communicate with others in similar ecstasies. This was a social pleasure. They could mix dreadful poisons and brew antidotes. They traveled a great deal on and under water in boats which they propelled by motive power obtained through the water. They knew how to harden water without freezing, and used the transparent mass to fill apertures and to admit light. They extracted while under water all the air they needed for breathing. They had access to subterranean waterways and to the vast oceans within the earth crust. Portions of the earth came up in continents and large islands, which were gradually populated, and in time their civilization reached its highest mark.

Their houses and buildings were made of stone but did not look like any architecture known today. Most of their buildings showed undulating curves throughout. In building they could soften any material with water, use it in construction and then harden the moisture in it, so that it would remain solid. Many buildings were made of a sort of grass or pulp. The buildings were not tall; few exceeded four stories in height, but they were spacious. On the roofs and from the sides, out of the grass and pulp, grew lovely flowers and vines. The people had a skill for growing their plants and flowers in strange shapes. They domesticated aquatic birds and fish, which would respond to call. None of these were ferocious.

There were neither rains nor storms, but they caused a vapor to rise from the water or to condense from the air, and settle to moisten the land. They made clouds which, however, did not come from the water, to shield them against the sun. They had extensive commerce and developed home industry and arts to a high degree. The people lived near each other, not separated by great distances. There were no large cities. The people were not all of one color; some were white, some red, some yellow, some green, some blue or violet; and they were of light and dark shades and combinations of these colors. Those who were of any of these colors were distinct races, the shadings were due to a mixture of races. The political institutions were the same as they had been during the Second Civilization. There were kings, then followed aristocracies, then bureaucrats and traders, and then came misrule and general corruption with the aid of the servants, but an oligarchy of some sort ruled always.

While the rise of the First and Second Civilizations had been steady and their decline proceeded amidst lesser falls and subsequent recoveries, the Third rose to its zenith, not steadily but through lesser rises and falls and then became decadent and went on towards total extinction as had the preceding ones, during the rises and falls of lesser races. The Third Civilization lasted through unrecorded ages and flourished on many waters and lands, which changed their positions after the various periods of decadence, when the thoughts of the people brought about the changes and upheavals.

A large number of the land animals had fins and scales, and could live in the water. The feet of many were webbed. During the long periods of obscurity between the rise and fall of peoples, the forms of animals changed. The types expressed the thoughts of the peoples, and the natures of the animals were harmless, stolid or ferocious, depending upon the doers from which they came.

This Civilization was wiped out by water. Great waves engulfed it and every vestige of it was effaced.