THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER XIV

THINKING: THE WAY TO CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY

Section 2

Recapitulation: The make-up of the human being. Units. The senses. The breath. The breath-form. The aia. Human bodies and the outside universe.

A human being is, first, nature units organized into a fourfold human body, by, second, the breath-form or living “soul” of that body; third, the portion of the conscious doer in the body; and, fourth, Conscious Light which is loaned to the doer.

The human body is composed of a solid-solid, a fluid-solid, an airy-solid and a radiant-solid body, and is a fourfold physical body, (Fig. III). The solid-solid part is the only one that has apparently definite outline and form. This is what is called the physical or flesh body. It is made visible by solid-solid structure units, which are sufficiently compacted. It is the field in which the sense of smell works with its digestive system. The fluid-solid body is made up of units of the fluid-solid state, penetrates the solid-solid units and makes them cohere. It has no definite form apart from the form of the solid-solid particles. It is the field in which the sense of taste works in its circulatory system. The airy-solid body permeates the fluid and through that the solid body. It has no form and could not stand alone, without the solid-solid and the fluid-solid bodies. It is the field through which the sense of hearing works with its respiratory system. The radiant-solid or astral body is the only one of the three inner bodies which can at times stand apart from and appear as the form of the solid-solid man or woman body. The astral body is present in the other three bodies and is the field from which the sense of sight works with the generative system. This radiant or astral body is the first body to be built by the breath of the breath-form. The radiant-solid units take form from the breath-form and give form to the solid-solid body.

The form of the breath-form unit enters the woman’s body through her breath during copulation and then or later causes conception by uniting the two germ cells. This re-existing form is the pattern which the mother’s breath and blood follow in building the body as soon as the embryo takes life. At birth, its breath at once enters the infant, unites with the form, as the breath-form, in the heart, and throughout life the breath continues the building of the man or woman body according to the form.

A human body is the plan of the changing universe. The head and spine represent the center of the starry system, the heart the center of the solar system, the kidneys the center of the lunar system and the sex the center of the earthy system. At present the body is one-columned, instead of two-columned; the digestive system which should be stationed in the pelvis extends through the body to the head. The circulatory system should be located in the abdomen. The respiratory system is the only system which is, generally, in its proper place, that is, in the thorax. The generative system, which is now in the pelvis, should be the creative system and be in the head. The misplacement of the systems has developed malformed organs which function with effort, feebly, often for unworthy results.

The distinguishing feature of the body is its sexual function, which is a degradation of creative power into the pelvis, from whence it rules the other systems. The sexes are not in the doer, though the potentiality and the origin and cause of the sexes are. Feeling and desire affect the original perfect breath-form so as to divide and modify it to the male and the female type. Physical matter then adapts itself to the type and builds out the male and female organs and traits of the body. The sexes in the human body are the pattern for the world of change, which is an extension and magnification of the human body. The breath carries transient units from the organs of the fourfold body into the fourfold breath stream of the earth zones and so creates a universe extending and expressing human beings which are on the outer earth crust.

The condition of the body in which the organs are, through which thinking has to be done, prevents proper thinking. It holds and compels thinking by the body-mind about and for the body and its chief features, the sexes. The thinking has to be done according to the male or to the female type. Thinking ought to be done by means of four brains and plexuses, the pelvic, the abdominal, the thoracic, and the cranial. But thinking is now started by the heart and lungs, which are used for circulation and respiration, and is carried on and completed by the brain as a subordinate and secondary organ. Nature, which is the screen on which the picture of man is projected, in turn stimulates the body to distract and to dominate thinking.

The body is visible in so far as it is made up of compacted units of the solid-solid state of the physical plane. Some of the invisible units are of the three other states of the physical plane, some are of the three other planes of the physical world and some are of the three other worlds of the earth sphere. Four kinds of units make up the fourfold physical body: sense units, representatives of the four systems; compositor units, which build and maintain the body; transient units, which the compositors hold for a while; and free units, which are not subject to but affect the transient and the compositor units. The transient units are the structural matter of the visible physical world, after they are released by the compositors. The compositors, between re-existences of the doer, build and transform the things in the physical universe, which includes the visible world with its strata, flora and fauna, the heavenly bodies and all phenomena of sights, sounds, tastes and smells. The free units are the active forces or the passive matter which stand behind these phenomena. The compositors are arranged in the generative or fire, the respiratory or air, the circulatory or water and the digestive or earth systems, each controlled by its sense, which connects it with the corresponding element in outside nature. Outside nature as elemental units acts on, maintains and controls the fourfold body through these same four senses and their nerves in the involuntary nervous system.

The senses themselves do not see, hear, taste, smell or contact independently. They merely receive impressions from nature and carry them to the breath-form, and the breath which is the active side of the breath-form, focuses them and correlates them so that they do their work through the sense of smell. A nature impression is received by a sense in its organ, as in the eye, and is taken inside the body by the breath along nerves in the brain and in the involuntary nervous system to the sex opening, and is taken simultaneously outside the body along the breath current itself, to the same opening. The senses, sight, hearing, taste and smell, cause the sex organ to be open for the reception of the impression. From there, the breath of the breath-form carries the impression to the portion of the doer in the kidneys and adrenals, and from there to the heart and lungs, with which the thinker of the Triune Self is related, and thence into the brain. The tip of the tongue, the heart and lungs, above, and the sex opening, below, are the gates for the swinging in and the swinging out of the breaths. In the brain, the impression, as it comes in through the eye, is met by the impression that has made instantaneously the circuit of the atmosphere and the body. In the heart and lungs and in the brain the impression compels thinking.

Each of these senses controls the compositors which make up its system during life. After death each sense has much to do with the units of its system in outside nature. When it is summoned on re-embodiment it leads the transmigration of the units, from outside nature, into the new body of the doer.

The sense of sight cannot become less than a sense of sight, nor can it be destroyed. It can only progress, though its powers may be diminished or dulled for a while. It is a unit, trained by many adaptations while in human bodies belonging to one doer, so that it as such sense may be used by nature towards the control of the doer, or by the doer to control fire units of the fire element. So it is in every way with the other three senses in their respective elements. These senses belong to nature, are ministers of nature and are the means by which outside nature affects the physical body and the thinking.

Around the fourfold physical body and circulating through it, its transient units make up the physical atmosphere, (Fig. III), which is roundish or oval in form and is kept in constant circulation by the breath-form and its breathings. While they are being held by the compositor units, the transient units, compacted into mass, make up the visible physical body. To an eye allowing sight of the four states of physical matter or even of the four substates of the solid state, the transient units are streams coming into, coalescing with and going out of the fourfold physical body. The physical atmosphere is a diffusion of these transient units.

Ordinarily, the physical atmosphere extends from a few inches to several feet. The four senses perceive only within the boundary of the physical atmosphere, which may be extended in any direction. In the case of smelling, the units of the object smelled contact the nerves directly in the solid-solid state. In the case of tasting, the units also contact the solid-solid body, but the taste of the object is sensed through the fluid-solid matter of the object by nerves in the fluid-solid body. In the case of hearing, the sounds contact the solid-solid organ and are heard through the fluid-solid body by nerves in the airy-solid body. In seeing, the units from the object seen contact the solid-solid organ of the eye, and are seen through the fluid-solid and the airy-solid bodies of nerves in the astral body which contact radiant-solid units coming from the object seen. The units of these objects must come into the atmosphere before they can be sensed. This is passive seeing and perception. There is an active sensing. There the human projects by one of his senses his atmosphere beyond its ordinary boundary. This projecting is now done in a small measure and unconsciously by seeing or by hearing distant objects. So a portion of the atmosphere is sent or is present as far as the distant mountains or the sun. Within this portion some of the radiant-solid units of the mountain range are aligned or focused by the sense of sight with radiant-solid units in the atmosphere and thus the distant mountains are seen. When the senses are trained to sense actively at will, the universe holds nothing they may not perceive.

It is the breath that keeps the fourfold physical body and the physical atmosphere in relation. The breath catches transient units, carries them to the compositors and after a while takes them away from the compositors.

The breath is the active side of the breath-form, which is always active and passive at the same time. One part is active as the breath, the other passive as the form. The breath takes the transient units out of the food in which they are bound. The breath stimulates and mixes the ferments with the food and changes that so that the transient units are taken out of it into the blood stream, where they, together with the transient units from the outside, build the cellular tissue structure of the body from the form of the breath-form. The breath liberates the secretions of the endocrine glands and mixes them with the blood.

The breath-form is a unit; its form aspect controls the functioning of the sense of smell and of the three other senses; and the breath is essential matter, that is, it differs from the ordinary matter in the visible world, in that it is matter of the unmanifested sides of the four worlds which has been present through manifestations so often that it has become refined as essential matter and is used in thinking to build out thoughts from their issuance to their exteriorization. It is neutral matter through which a unit in its changes must pass to get from one state into the next.

The breath-form attracts radiant matter of the body to itself, adapts it to its form and thus makes the radiant or astral body, which is the connection between the other masses of units composing the fourfold physical body, (Fig. III), and the breath-form. The difference between them is that the breath-form is of the refined matter which is not in the state of units and is related to all the worlds, whereas the astral is the copy of the breath-form, made from units of the physical plane of the physical world.

As to form and structure, the form of the breath-form changes according to needs, as determined by the ruling thought and by the marks made on it by thinking. Its changes are brought about by the breath, the active side of the breath-form. They are visible as the features and form of the physical body, its youth and age and its health and disease, and in addition they may be seen in the physical environment in which the body lives.

The matter of the breath-form cannot be injured or destroyed, because it is refined or essential matter and so not subject to harm, but the form of the breath-form is marked by the lines which thinking and thoughts make upon it, and so is besmirched by vices, by feelings and desires, or purified by virtue.

After death the breath-form represents nature to the doer. Every scene and event that is to be reproduced to the doer is borne by the breath-form and elaborated therefrom by elementals. After death the breath-form goes with the doer, is separated from it in the purgations and is again united with it in its bliss or heaven world. Like gold, however it may be sullied, the breath-form emerges clean from the fires that are fed by ignoble desires. At the end of the heaven period the breath of the breath-form is, so to say, out of gear with its form until, by the aia, it is again related to vivify for conception the form, which was reduced to a mere point.

In life the inertia of the ordinary form of the breath-form weighs on and so holds up and slows down any effort to think. After death, the lines on the form of the breath-form cause the unfoldment and reproduction of thoughts which made them. The breath of the breath-form is the means by which impressions from the four worlds can reach the atmospheres of the doer and can so affect thinking, and by which thinking can reach those worlds.

The breath-form unit is the most advanced degree to which a nature unit can progress. Then it is advanced and becomes the aia unit. The aia is unmanifested matter, neither nature-matter nor intelligent-matter. It cannot be perceived by the senses because it is not nature-matter. The aia is the transition state from nature to the Triune Self. It is under the influence of the doer, and is in the atmospheres of the Triune Self. It is not conscious of what it is, of what it does or of what is done with it or to it. It has no form, no extension, no physical properties. It is indestructible. It is without dimension, without a single attribute, except that it can be affected by the thinking, the thoughts, the feelings and the desires of the doer to which it belongs. Nature cannot affect it, unless the doer submits to the pull of nature. It takes every impression made by nature on the breath-form to which the doer agrees; but it can take no impression from the breath-form that is not allowed by the doer. It receives an impression from every thought of the doer and is marked by the thinking of the human. The impressions or marks are conveyed to it by means of the breath-form, with which it is at all times in phase.

The aia does nothing of itself or by itself. It acts only through the breath-form and by thinking. Thus it yields up the destiny which the doer has prepared for each embodiment. After the death of the body the aia is inert, is not in contact with the breath-form, and remains inert until the time for the conception of a new physical body.

The doer is the only friend and the only enemy of the aia; it can improve it or debase it. On the one hand, the aia is to the doer what the breath-form is to the aia and what the astral body is to the breath-form, and on the other hand, what the doer itself is to the Intelligence.

Nature is matter, unmanifested and manifested throughout the spheres and worlds, which has come out of Substance. Manifested nature is made up of units, that is, the ultimate divisions of nature in the sphere, world and plane on which the units are. Unmanifested nature in any sphere or world, plane or state is that condition where the matter is one mass, not divided into units. A unit is in the unmanifested state after it has run its course as a unit of one kind and before it becomes a unit of the next kind. Each unit has an active and a passive aspect and a side which does not manifest but is neutral to the active and the passive aspects. This unmanifested side of the unit pervades the manifested mass and is the means by which the active and the passive aspects of the unit change in their relation of dominating each other, and it is also the means by which the unit changes from one state, plane and world to the next.

The units of nature, and therefore nature itself, have no qualities, attributes or powers, except duality. They have no size, color, form, weight, temperature, instinct, feeling, desire, intelligence or anything, in and as themselves, except their active and their passive aspects. Their active and their passive aspects cannot act by themselves, but only when under the influence of human thinking, which brings them the Light that awakens them and releases their energy, which expresses itself through the passive aspect as the phenomena of light, sound, heat, electricity, magnetism and all other forces, known and unknown.

All things visible, all that can be heard, tasted, smelled or contacted, are made up of units in the solid state of the physical plane of the physical world. These things, masses made up of structure units, are created and destroyed by causal units, maintained by portal units and held together by form units. These four classes are progressed beyond, and control the multitudes of other earth, water, air and fire units, elementals. The only things that can be seen, heard, tasted, smelled or contacted are structure units, when massed sufficiently. They become so massed as to become objects perceptible by the senses, because of human thinking. The objects are perceptible when a sense focuses their mass which flows along the line of vision and brings them into the sense organ as impressions.

The bodies of human beings are of nature, they belong to nature as much as the parts of nature that are not in human bodies. Nature that is in human bodies is either fixed or movable. Permanently fixed from birth to death are the four senses and their four sets of compositor units. These are invisible and intangible. They compose, build up and maintain the physical bodies from the transient units which are caught and brought into them by the breath, light, air, water and solid food, out of the fourfold stream of transient units that is constantly passing everywhere. Some of the transient units are held for a while as the visible body and then are carried on by the stream. That is, nature fixed and nature flowing as and in the human body.

The fourfold stream flowing in and through each human body goes into the solid earth and the planets, the waters and the moon, the air and the sun, the starlight and the stars. Thus human bodies and their bodily atmospheres extend to the remotest stars. Neither the earth nor the sun is the center of the universe, but human bodies on the earth are.

The heavenly bodies are interrelated, as are the organs and nerves of the body. The heavenly bodies are not in the same zones or layers, but men hold them to be bodies on the same layer as the earth crust, and judge the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies by their own movements in on-ness. In this they are in error, not understanding the eclipses and other phenomena, which prove to them the axial and orbital rotations and vast distances of the heavenly bodies.

Human beings on the outer earth crust see only those parts of the universe which they maintain and use. There are other parts of the universe which correspond to the organs of the body which human beings have lost; those parts they cannot see or use, as they do the visible stars and the sun. Those parts are seen only by doers in bodies which have not lost them. Such doers do not move among human beings on the outer crust of the earth, where the seasons and the rules of the sexes are ignored.

The earth crust and the visible heavenly bodies correspond to the human physical body, and the four zones or layers of the earth correspond to the four zones of a human atmosphere. The fourfold breath through human bodies moves the fourfold breath stream of the earth that circulates through and animates the physical universe. The only units that are moved by both these breaths are transient units. The compositors remain in the human bodies which they build and rebuild during life. But after death these compositors, when they go into outside nature, still catch and hold transient units and so make up the earth crust, the bodies of the plants and animals on it and the heavenly bodies above it. There is a constant action and reaction between human bodies and the outside universe. The transient units of outside nature make the conditions under which the human bodies exist, through which these units have passed and from which they have received and carried impressions.

One who thus understands nature will not conceive himself to be a part of it. He will distinguish himself as one who is distinct from his four senses and from his body, and as not of or a part of nature. He must discover what he is, that is, the kind of thing he is, and who he is, that is, his identity, and he must become conscious of himself as that identity. He must understand that beings that are merely conscious as their functions in nature, are only elemental units, nature spirits or nature ghosts, but that he is conscious of nature. And when he distinguishes nature as being not himself, he begins to be conscious of himself as connected with his Triune Self.