THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER XIV

THINKING: THE WAY TO CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY

Section 3

Recapitulation continued. The doer portion in the body. The Triune Self and its three parts. The twelve portions of the doer. How long a human is dissatisfied.

What the soul is has not been shown by those who have spoken of it and speculated about it. Nobody seems to have known what the soul actually is or what it does. At least, the soul has not heretofore been described so that its place and function in the body could be understood. But much of what has been said about it does actually have place and function in the make-up and maintenance of the body—even though many of the statements about soul are contradictory. The soul does die, but it lives again. The soul is lost, but it is found, to resurrect its parts into a new body for the return of the conscious doer to bodily life in the world. “Man” (as the conscious doer) must eventually “save his soul.” And, the soul, when saved, does save the body from death. The discrepancies are reconciled by understanding the facts: that what has been called “soul” is actually the form aspect of the breath-form, which is the most progressed and ultimate unit of nature, including in itself all the functions as degrees in being conscious that it has passed through in its training in the nature machine; that it is indestructible and cannot really die, though it is temporarily inert after death and before it is recalled as the form for the building of another human body; that it is the form of the breath-form which causes conception; that at birth its breath of life enters into it; that it then becomes the living form (the living soul), and thereafter depends on its own breath and not on the breath of its mother for the building up and maintenance of its body throughout the life of that body. The form of the breath-form, then, is the soul of the body, and the breath is the life of the breath-form. The living breath builds food into the flesh and blood and bone tissue, as the physical body, according to the plan on its form. The soul or form of the body is not conscious of itself or as itself. It is merely the form, on which the conscious doer in the body, by thinking, writes the plans for the building of the body of its next life, in which it will itself re-exist and operate.

When the doer in the human eventually restores the human body to the perfect state in which the doer had inherited the body, by adjusting its feeling-and-desire into balanced union and thereby balancing the breath-form, then that breath-form is ready to be advanced to the aia state. The aia is as a line, or neutral point, between the nature-side and the intelligent-side. Upon it is inscribed in symbolic lines the totality, in essence, of the acts and thoughts of all the human bodies of the doer in whose service it has been. After eternities of functioning as the aia, it, so to speak, crosses the line, and is advanced on the intelligent-side of the universe and is a Triune Self.

Only a small portion of the doer lives in the body. The entire doer is prevented from coming in because of the weakness, inefficiency and unfitness of the body. The portion of the doer that does come into the body is, moreover, subject to limitations imposed by its own faults, and to illusions and consequent delusions. Hence human beings are limited in their understanding of that which is itself as the conscious something in the body, as distinct from the body, and of how it works in the body or out of it. They are limited in the exercise of their powers for the advancement of the doer, and of those for guiding the forces of nature. The doer is connected, on the one hand, with the body through the aia and the breath-form, and on the other hand, with the Intelligence that has raised and has its Triune Self in charge.

The doer is matter, to use a nature term, but it is incomprehensible as nature-matter. Words for nature have to be used to describe this matter because there are no words for the doer of the Triune Self. But dimension, distance, size, weight, force, division, beginning and end and all other qualifications and limitations of nature-matter do not apply to the matter of the doer.

A Triune Self is a unit that has been raised from the state of aia and is now a unit of intelligent-matter. It has three parts, the doer, the thinker, and the knower; each being a part, a breath, and an atmosphere. The breaths connect the Triune Self atmospheres with the three parts of the Triune Self. Each of these nine parts has an active and a passive aspect, and each of these eighteen aspects is represented in the others. Yet the Triune Self with these hundreds of aspects is a unit, is One. They have to be spoken of as separate, else they could not be described, explained, or understood; nevertheless they are One.

The Triune Self is connected with the body by means of the small portion of the doer which lives in the body. Through the indwelling portion of the doer, the respective breaths flow and keep up the connections between that and the non-embodied portions, and the atmospheres. These atmospheres, like the parts of the Triune Self and their breaths, are matter, and all together are a unit of matter.

But this matter cannot be measured or divided; it has no dimensions, no size or weight, it is incorporeal; it cannot be spoken of in any terms of corporeal nature-matter. It is the matter of feeling-and-desire, of thinking and other intangible states and actions. No nature-matter can feel, desire or think. Though the Triune Self is one, it is conscious in three degrees; passively as feeling, rightness, and I-ness; and, actively as desire, reason, and selfness.

The embodied portion of the doer in a human is subject to limitations and to illusions. It is limited in the exercise of its own powers because of its own ignorance, indifference, sloth, selfishness and self-indulgence. Because of ignorance the doer does not conceive itself to be not of nature. It does not understand who and what it is, how it got here, what it has to do, what are its responsibilities and what is the purpose of its life. Because of indifference it allows itself to remain in ignorance and to be the slave of nature, and so it increases its troubles. Because of sloth its powers are dulled and deadened. Because of selfishness, of blindness to the rights of others and of gratifying its own wants, it cuts itself off from understanding and feeling its powers. Because of self-indulgence, the habit of giving way to its own inclinations, appetites and lusts, its powers are drained and wasted. Therefore it is limited in its understanding of who and what it is and of what it has to do to discover itself and to come into its inheritance.

The doer in the human is limited in the exercise of its powers also by its slavery to nature. The doer has made itself depend upon the four senses for its thinking, its feeling and desiring and its acting. It is unable to think of anything as apart from the senses or as other than as reported by the senses; and its feeling is guided and ruled by sensations, which are nature elementals that play upon the nerves. The four senses originally functioned in the four worlds; now their perceptions are limited to the solid state of matter on the physical plane of the physical world. Therefore the doer is trained to regard only the hard, coarse, physical and most material things and to hold them to be the realities. The human is thus shut off from the higher realms and worlds of nature and cannot perceive in the light world or in the life world or in the form world or even on the three upper planes of the physical world, but is bound down to the four subdivisions of the lowest of the four states of matter on the physical plane.

The run of human beings desire, feel, think and act merely as human elementals, that is, their thinking, their feelings and desires are dominated by elementals, by sensations; they run after and act for sensations; their feelings and desires dominate their thinking, and that turns around material things as the realities and is blind to the higher parts of nature and ignorant of the royalty of the doer; they have no Light in their psychic atmosphere and the little Light in the mental atmosphere of the human, is dimmed and obscured.

In addition to such limitations, human beings are inevitably subject to illusions and delusions. The four senses are limited and disqualified from perceiving anything beyond on-ness, surfaces. If one were to be undeceived concerning nature, his senses would have to see, hear, taste, smell and make contact anywhere and everywhere. The sense organs, too, are defective, and so inhibit the free action of the senses, disqualified as these are. So the sense of sight does not see correctly, as they are, form, size, color, position; and light it cannot see at all. So the sense of hearing does not perceive what a sound is and what the sound means; the sense of taste does not perceive what it is that it tastes in food, nor does this sense perceive forms, which it ought to do, as forms are to be apprehended by taste; the sense of smell does not perceive the bodies which it contacts as smell, and does not report their properties and qualities.

Because of these illusions, feeling does not feel correctly about outside objects. Feeling causes thinking to conceive and interpret these objects so as to satisfy the incorrect feeling. Hence the information is incomplete, distorted and often false. Thus the human deludes himself about outside nature. His conceptions are delusions.

The doer has twelve portions, which re-exist successively. When a doer portion enters the body it is embodied in the kidneys and adrenals by means of the breath. To this embodied portion of the doer is related the thinker which does not come into the body, but is related to the lungs and the heart. With the thinker is the knower which is related to the pituitary and pineal bodies.

The small embodied doer portion is seldom if ever conscious of its connection with the non-embodied portions, though there is no separation. There is a reciprocal action between the embodied and the non-embodied portions. Many of the ambitions, aspirations, thoughts, feelings and desires of the human are not exhausted, recognized and adjusted during life, and so fail to respond to the reciprocal action. Hence the states after death, through which the doer portion that was in the body passes, are the states necessary to complete the reciprocal action of the non-embodied portions upon the portion that was in the body.

The portion in the body is conscious of its loves and hates, pains and pleasures, fears and longings and its turmoils and flashes of inspiration. It is conscious as and of its feelings and desires. It is conscious also of its calculating, comparing, reasoning, judging and other mental actions, which are all instances of thinking with the body-mind, intellectually; but it is not conscious of itself as any of these mental activities. It is conscious of an identity which it connects erroneously with its name and the body. It is not conscious of its identity, and it is not conscious as its identity, as who and what it is. It is conscious of feeling and desire; and that “I” which it erroneously believes itself to be, is the false “I,” is the embodied portion of the doer which is mistaken for the true or real “I,” as which the knower as the noetic part is conscious, knows. Among the causes of misunderstanding the identity of the human, are the presence in the doer of the I-aspect of the knower and the misinterpretation of this given by the thinking under the pressure of desire. The human being is conscious of the I-ness in it, and desire forces the mistaken conception, to please itself and feeling.

Of all this the run of human beings are unconscious, except that they are conscious of feelings and desires, and occasionally conscious of thinking and conscious of having an identity. They are unconscious of the relations existing between any of the parts of the Triune Self and their aspects and between these and the Light of Intelligence.

There are in a human feelings and desires that demand communion with the thinker and the knower. Yet he is not satisfied if he tries to feel and think beyond nature. This is so with every doer portion in a body, but is true in a greater degree when certain others of the twelve portions of the doer are in the body, and the demand for communion with the thinker and the knower is more urgent. Those portions are related on the intelligent-side. Then the restlessness causes the human to seek piety, mysticism, philosophy, occultism, asceticism, or forces him to engage in good works. These efforts do not satisfy him, because he cannot distinguish what is nature and what belongs to the conscious something which is himself, the doer, and because he mixes the two in his conception of what he is and of what his “God” is. As long as he is controlled by his body-mind he cannot distinguish himself as feeling-and-desire, and not as the elementals which he regards as feeling, and he is unable to feel and think away from nature, and the urge to feel and think beyond nature makes him dissatisfied.