THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER IX

RE-EXISTENCE

Section 10

The doer-in-the-body. Error in the conception of “I.” The personality and re-existence. The doer portion after death. The portions not in the body. How a doer portion is drawn out for re-existence.

Only one of the twelve portions of the doer is embodied at any one time. Each portion represents a different aspect of the doer and re-exists to accomplish a definite purpose. Each of these portions is a separate portion and yet is related to all the others because the doer is one doer. That portion of the doer which re-exists is not conscious of its connection with the other portions. At the end of the heaven period that portion enters again into relation with the other portions, returns to its place among them and remains there until the other portions have re-existed, each in its turn. Then it re-exists again. Each portion is responsible for itself, makes its own destiny, takes up its own life and reaps what it has sown.

The other eleven portions of the doer constitute the non-existing portions. These are however affected by the embodied portion during its life as well as after the death of its body. The portion of the doer which is embodied may be, though it need not be, affected by those portions which are not embodied. Sometimes more than one portion of the doer is embodied during one life. This happens when the embodied portion works to the advantage of the doer and its capacity for work is increased. Sometimes some of the embodied portion is withdrawn, as in old age, in insanity or after disregarding conscience. In the portion of the doer which re-exists sometimes feeling predominates and sometimes desire. In the thinker, which contacts the body, rightness-and-reason are equal; one does not dominate the other. The knower contacts the body in a small degree, enough for I-ness to give identity and for selfness to furnish Light from the Intelligence. In the successive existences the re-existing portion of the doer takes up its own life and not the life of any of the other portions.

The twelve portions of the doer are one and inseparable. Each is what makes the human being of the doer conscious as a human, distinct from other human beings, throughout the period of his earth life. A human is conscious that he is conscious, but he is not conscious as that which is conscious; he is not conscious that he is only a portion of a doer, or that there are the other portions, or of relations between himself and these non-embodied portions. He is conscious of his feeling, desiring and thinking and of his identity. He is conscious of “I” but not as “I,” and he does not know the “I.” He does not know himself, nor does he know how he feels and desires nor how he thinks.

The doer-in-the-body says to itself “I see,” “I hear,” “I taste,” “I smell,” “I touch,” but it does nothing of the kind. It cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. The sense of sight looks through the eye, sees through the eye and makes on the breath-form a record of what it sees. The breath-form carries the impression to the feeling of the doer. The desire side of the doer passes the impression on to the body-mind to have translated and interpreted in terms of feeling the impression brought in by the sense of sight. Then the feeling of the doer, being all over the body, identifies itself with the sense of sight, which does the seeing, and says to itself “I see,” which is an error. It is only conscious of what is seen, heard, tasted, smelled and contacted by the senses. It does not itself do any of these things. It feels identity with or as the senses, because it is conscious of them and not conscious that it is not the senses and that it merely feels through them. It merges itself with the senses by feeling and then cannot be separated from them. Feeling will be merged with these senses and be conscious of itself as these senses until it desires to feel itself apart from them, and then, thinking with its feeling-mind, it will identify itself and establish itself as feeling and as being different from the senses.

The doer in the body says “I feel,” “I think,” “I know.” In this it is nearly as much in error as when it believes that it sees or hears. It is true that the doer-in-the-body feels and thinks, after a fashion, but the real “I” does not feel and does not think. The error lies in the conception of what that “I” is. The “I” of which the embodied portion of the doer is conscious is a delusion, it is a false “I” and is the basis of the actions of the human being. The false “I” is feeling-and-desire, the doer, and identifies itself moreover with the physical body and the senses.

There could be no conception by the feeling-mind as an “I” if there were not actually an “I” present. This “I” is the I-ness of the Triune Self, but the doer-in-the-body is not conscious as that. Being conscious of the presence of that “I” causes feeling to make the mistake that it is what it feels, whereas it only feels the “I,” but is not that “I” anymore than it is the four senses. Feeling tries to find the “I” in desire and desire wants to get the “I” from feeling. This interaction of each trying to get the “I” in the other adds to the mystery of identity—of what is the true “I” and what is the true Self.

By their thinking, feeling-and-desire can never give a correct interpretation of this mystery, because the feeling-mind can solve the mystery of feeling and the desire-mind can solve the mystery of desire, but these minds cannot be made to solve the mystery of the “I” and of selfness. Rightness does not confirm but leaves them in doubt. The subject they are dealing with is a truth, a reality, but their solution is not right. The mistake about the “I” and the self of the human being is due to a delusion which is produced by thinking under the pressure of feeling-and-desire.

So the doer-in-the-body is conscious of itself as being something which it is not, and it is not conscious of what it actually is. This delusion of the false “I” lies at the basis of the human being, which is partly personality and partly doer.

The personality consists of the physical body with the four senses, all operated by the breath-form. The personality is an inseparable combination during life. It is a mask, a costume; it does not work alone. In it is the embodied portion of the doer. The doer uses the personality, speaks through it, acts at its behest and conceives that it is the personality. The combination of the personality and the embodied portion of the doer is the human being and usually identifies itself as the personality. Thereby it shuts out the possibility of being advised by thinking that this is an error. Its feeling and desiring and thinking are done for nature; it is not conscious of true feeling-and-desire, or of true thinking, which are done by the doer for itself, apart from nature. The human does not identify himself with the atmospheres and the portions of the doer inside and outside of the physical body. The “I,” as which the human being is conscious, is a false “I.”

The personality as a whole does not re-exist; parts of it do. It is dissolved before another portion of the doer re-exists in a new personality. The human being does not re-exist as a whole; his fourfold body and transient units do not re-exist. The breath matter of the breath-form returns to the matter of the four worlds from which it was drawn. The matter of the body is dissipated into the four states of matter of the physical plane, and these transient units go back into nature and continue to travel through the heavenly bodies and the bodies of minerals, plants, animals and humans. The matter that made up these beings may or may not be part of a future body of a human being of the doer.

Between re-existences the portion of the doer with its breath-form, which had been in the human being, recedes from the outer crust of the earth through the earth towards the inner crust; and in certain zones between these two crusts the doer with its breath-form has its hell and its heaven, (Fig. V-D). During his journey the human being is divested of his carnal desires, which make his hells until they have burned themselves off, and is later enveloped in a dress of his nobler desires which make his heaven.

Between the outer and the inner surfaces of the earth’s crust there are passages and chambers like cavities in a sponge. In these each doer portion has its own experiences, which are the development of its thoughts during the past life. No new thinking takes place. Each concentrates on and repeats automatically the thinking done in life, and this conjures up events of which it is there conscious.

The run of human beings are not developed beyond feeling-and-desire. Their thinking concerns these and they identify themselves with them. Feeling-and-desire have now to do with surfaces only. Therefore the doer of the average human does not go much beyond the outer earth crust. After death the doers are in states; but, for a short time, they are also in what would be to sensuous perception, localities on surfaces in the earth crust. In life they knew of but one dimension, surfaces, and to these they are limited after death. The exceptional human beings whose lives were not dominated by the lower feelings and desires, go beyond these surfaces into the inner sphere.

In life the doer-in-the-body conceives of itself as an entity, the human being; and this entity does not know itself any better after death than it did while it acted through the personality in life. The false identity does not change, though the desires and the thoughts change as the human goes through his hell and his heaven after death. The portion of the doer that was embodied does not recognize its relation to the Triune Self as a whole, because it did not know it during life. The journeys from the outer crust towards the inner are made by that which carries with it the identity it had in life. After the end of the eternity of happiness in heaven this false “I” as the human being disappears, when the portion that was embodied is gradually withdrawn from the breath-form into its psychic atmosphere. There it rests until each of the other doer portions has re-existed in its turn and then it is drawn out again for an embodiment into a new human being.

The portions of the doer that were not embodied are, however, affected in life and after death by the portion that was embodied. In life there was a connection in the kidneys and adrenals between the doer portion and the thinker and knower which had contact through the breath with the heart and lungs and with the pituitary or pineal body. In life, currents in the atmospheres flowed to and from the parts outside the body through the embodied portion. These currents were kept up by the three breaths of the Triune Self flowing through the fourfold physical breath. There was a strengthening or a weakening, a calming or disturbing, a darkening or enlightening of the non-embodied portions. After death this ceases. Then the reaction comes. The results produced upon the non-embodied portions are then thrown back upon the portion that was in the personality, and produce in it the automatic feeling and thinking that makes the hell and heaven for the false “I.” These states of suffering and of happiness are intensified because the intermingling and alternation of pain and pleasure, which came in life, are absent. The reactions from the non-embodied portions are therefore more poignant and severe in hell and more intense in heaven than were the casual feelings in life. These reactions continue until the results in the non-embodied portions which were affected during life are exhausted by the suffering and happiness of the false “I.” Then the portion which was embodied is ready to be reabsorbed into the atmospheres of the doer. When this takes place after the end of the heaven period, the four senses return to their elements, the compositor units build up the structure of animals or plants, the breath leaves the form of the breath-form, and the aia remains in its undimensional state. The form of the breath-form is then reduced to a speck, as of ash, a point, inert, and is in the psychic atmosphere of the doer; there it waits until the ruling thought for the next life of the doer portion to re-exist causes the aia to revivify that inert point with essential matter of the worlds as its breath, and it is again the breath-form.

When the doer portion which was embodied has joined the portions that were not in the flesh, the false “I” as which the human being was conscious, ceases to be. It will have its next embodiment after each of the non-embodied portions has re-existed in its turn. The thinker of the Triune Self directs the portion to be drawn out to make up the next human being, according to the ruling thought of that portion.

That thought is the sum of the thoughts of its past life. Though these may seem numerous, various and hard to coordinate, yet the thoughts which underlie them are simple and much alike because they have the same aim. It is their designs which make them vary. Many designs often specialize the same aim. Usually an aim or a few aims unite all the thoughts of any life into one dominating thought. This has a continuity, notwithstanding slight variations in the aims. It changes very little from life to life with average people because they allow themselves to be pushed or led by circumstances and by passive thinking. The ruling thought is a being of great power. It gets its power from the desire of the doer and from the Light of the Intelligence. It gets its good or evil aspects from the use to which it has put the Light of the Intelligence which it has sent into nature, and from the amount of Light it has brought back into the noetic atmosphere.

Such other portions of the doer are also drawn into relation to the portion about to re-exist as will supply the characteristics which the ruling thought requires to let the person be a burglar or a banker, a clam digger or an archaeologist, a housewife or an actress. Without the relation of these other portions the ruling thought could not manifest itself as the new human being. These other portions are drawn in to satisfy unfulfilled wishes, to enable destiny to come home, to allow other thoughts to find cyclic expression which past lives did not afford them, to furnish an opportunity for learning special things, to open avenues for new adventures and to fill out the personality.

All attainments which are matters of memory, like professional or business efficiency, together with mechanical skill, are left behind, whereas tendencies, habits, manners, health and temperament, which are not as superficial but express aspects of the doer itself, may be brought over as characteristic traits. Such externals as rank, money, position, success or their opposites are evanescent and, if not needed for the doer to learn from, will not appear among the surroundings of the new human being.