THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER XIV

THINKING: THE WAY TO CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY

Section 6

Recapitulation continued. The knower of the Triune Self, selfness and I-ness. The noetic atmosphere. What a human is conscious as. Isolation of feeling; of desire. Being conscious of Consciousness.

The knower of the Triune Self does not feel or desire, nor does it need to think to get knowledge; it is Self-knowledge. Knowledge of the Triune Self does not change. When it acts it acts as Self-knowledge. It is that which knows, and which knows its identity. When thoughts are balanced and so knowledge of the conscious self in the body is acquired, it is acquired by the human, not by the knower that already has and is all knowledge.

I-ness is the passive side of the knower, and selfness its active side. I-ness is the undying, continuous, unchanging, self-same, self-conscious identity of the Triune Self. It is in the noetic atmosphere, in the clear Light of the Intelligence. It witnesses and so identifies all the feelings and the desires which are carried out by the thinker, but is untouched and unaffected by them or by the changes that go on in them. Neither reason nor rightness interferes with I-ness, and I-ness does not interfere with either of them. I-ness is not connected with outside nature; but in the body its organ is the pituitary body, through which it lets Light of the Intelligence into the body.

Nothing can approach I-ness that cannot stand in the clear Light, which is a reason why the doer does not communicate with it, or is not conscious of what it is in this life or of what it was in past existences and why it cannot remember those lives.

The I-ness and the selfness of the knower are not in the body. The feeling in the body feels I-ness and thinks of itself as “I,” and so is the “ego,” the false “I.” The desire in the body desires selfness and thinks of itself as “self.” The “self” is only desire to the human. Thus feeling-and-desire in the human is the feeling of identity and the desire for the knowledge of Self. Among the desires are some that are classed as good and others that are spoken of as evil. The good ones cause the desire of an ideal or higher Self, and the bad ones cause the desire of an evil or lower self, which are then called by some the “Higher Self” and the “lower self.” Selfness is the knowledge of itself as a Triune Self in its entirety and of its permanence throughout all the changes in the doer.

This knowledge is a whole, unbroken, unlimited as regards itself, its noetic atmosphere and the noetic world. Selfness is not directly connected with feeling-and-desire and is not affected by anything that feeling-and-desire do. Selfness is connected with rightness and with reason. To rightness it gives flashes of the Light of the Intelligence. When subjects of a moral aspect are considered by the human, these flashes are regarded as conscience. Selfness gives to reason flashes of Light on rare occasions for the human, and these flashes are intuitions, teachings from within, concerning a subject or thing. They come to reason from the mind for selfness, and then to the human through the mind of reason. Selfness and I-ness in their relation to each other are the two aspects of the knower. When one side acts, the other reinforces and amplifies the action. When I-ness is in evidence, the knowledge of selfness is behind that I-ness; when selfness acts, the identity and endlessness is behind the knowledge. Selfness and I-ness differ from each other in that I-ness is a conscious, persistent identity without beginning or end, and selfness is the knowledge without beginning, end or break; but selfness and I-ness are the same in that the knowledge and the identity cannot act without each other.

Of this knowledge selfness makes available through rightness only what relates to the portion of the doer in the human in the performance of his duties and what relates to itself as selfness, when the human prepares himself to receive such knowledge.

Selfness and I-ness are related to the Intelligence from which they receive the Light. They stand in the Light, and therefore are in the Intelligence. They do not stand in the fullness of the Light, yet they stand in clear Light. They give the Light to the noetic atmosphere, conserve it there, and after the Light has been made unattachable they may restore it to the Intelligence. Selfness, and in a lesser degree I-ness, issues Light into the mental atmosphere.

A human may become conscious of the presence of I-ness. It is also possible, but it is improbable, that he will come into contact with selfness. Though he cannot so come into contact by his own efforts, yet if he has made enough effort in that direction, selfness will know when it will let him be conscious of it. Then the human has a standard of himself as that which is conscious in the Eternal without change or break, which he distinguishes from himself as the human being of short duration made up of days and nights and conscious only of his waking hours. He is astounded at the vastness and the verity of the knowledge which is his own, and yet not his as the human. He becomes conscious of this identity and knowledge by the action of the mind of I-ness and the mind for selfness, not by his own volition but by the grace of I-ness and selfness, who use them to make him conscious.

The organ of I-ness is the rear half of the pituitary body and the organ for selfness is the pineal body, in the brain, (Fig. VI-A, a). While the use of these organs has not been usurped, as has the use of the heart by feeling and desire, yet they are not in use, except to the limited extent in which a human is allowed to be conscious of himself. There is, however, a usurpation of the brain, which should be used for noetic purposes but is used by the heart and lungs in thinking about physical things. Such thinking should be done in a pelvic brain, now degenerated and inoperative, except for the sexes.

The knower is in the noetic atmosphere which flows as the noetic breath. The noetic breath is intelligent-matter and so does not in any way resemble the physical breath. The noetic breath flows in the mental and that flows in the psychic breath and that in the physical breath.

In the physical breath the noetic breath starts the lunar germ, by giving Light to a transient unit of matter of the light world in the generative system of the physical body. The noetic breath does not work directly, but through the mental and the psychic breaths and at last through the radiant current of the physical breath gives Light to a unit in the radiant matter in the brain, which so is made the lunar germ. The noetic breath, working through this aspirational fire breath when this ascends the spine, takes the Light that is saved automatically every month, back to the brain. The noetic breath also carries the solar germ, which is a part of the noetic atmosphere bearing clear Light, down and up the spinal cord during the life of the body.

The noetic atmosphere is not matter of the light world. It is intelligent-matter and belongs to the Triune Self. In the atmosphere are I-ness and selfness, the noetic breath and the Light of the Intelligence. It permeates the mental, psychic, and the physical atmospheres and the physical body, and all these are kept going by the breath of the noetic atmosphere. The Light of the Intelligence is throughout the noetic atmosphere and the Light impresses the intelligent-matter in the atmosphere. In the lower portion of the noetic atmosphere, where are the psychic and the physical atmospheres, the Light is not perceived, not because there is actually no Light, but because the matter in these atmospheres cannot make contact with the Light. The condition is like that of a man who cannot see because he is blind, and not because there is no light. The noetic atmosphere is of the noetic world, a name given to that which unites in knowledge the noetic atmospheres of all human beings.

The noetic atmosphere can act in any part of the light world and affect the elementals, the matter and things in that world, but these cannot act in the atmosphere. The Light in the noetic atmosphere affects the matter of the light world so that that matter seems to be itself light and the light world a shadowless world of colorless light. The entities of the life, the form and the physical worlds, which are in the lower and the lowest portions of the noetic atmosphere, do not affect the noetic atmosphere; they act only in the atmosphere which corresponds to the world in which they are.

The knower and the thinker of the Triune Self are perfect. The doer is not perfect. The duty of the doer is to make itself perfect, under the guidance of the thinker. Feeling and desire must identify and isolate themselves, to be conscious that they are distinct from the body and nature.

In a human feeling and desire are not thus conscious. A human is, however, conscious that he is conscious of feeling and of desire, of thinking and of a certain identity. At death he loses even this trifle of which he is conscious, because he does not think of what he is conscious of or as during life. If he will think of what he is conscious as during life, he will be conscious of it at the time of death. Everyone should try to be conscious of his identity with his Triune Self at the time of death, apart from the body with its name. Then he will be conscious of his identity in the after death states and will be conscious of his identity as distinct from the body and its name, when he again re-exists.

Being conscious is the presence of Consciousness in that which is conscious. Only a doer can be conscious of being conscious, or that it is conscious. Nothing in nature can be so conscious. Nature units are conscious only as their functions and never as what they are, nor are they conscious of their functions. Every human is, so to speak, an infinitesimal opening into the indescribable immensity of Consciousness.

A human does not know what he is conscious as. He knows that he is conscious, which means he knows that he is. This is the only thing he actually does know. It is the only thing he knows of reality. He does not know who or what it is that is conscious as he. He is conscious of many things, of his feeling, of his desiring, of his thinking and of his identity, but he is not conscious as these things. He is conscious of his body, of its parts, of its senses, and of the sensations of these as pleasant or unpleasant, interesting or indifferent. He is not conscious of all there is in his body, nor of the manner in which the units in the body are conscious as their functions. He is not conscious as his senses. He is conscious of the objects perceived, but not of the manner in which he perceives them. He is not conscious of the manner in which the sense organs act, the senses work, nature-matter is affected, the breath-form operates and the doer reacts. He is not conscious of what the things actually are, but is conscious only of certain impressions which are made on him by the perception of these things. He is conscious of sensations, but can never be conscious as sensations, such as pains and pleasures, hunger and thirst, love and hatred, joy, sorrow, gloom and ambition.

That in the human which is conscious that it is conscious, is the aspect of the doer which is feeling and the aspect which is desire. That of which he is conscious is the body which is nature. This contact of nature with the doer produces an illusion which disables the human from distinguishing himself as being conscious, and as being distinct from the body as nature. The doer in the human cannot be conscious as being conscious, while it is conscious of what it is conscious. It cannot be conscious as doer while it is conscious of nature. That in the human which is conscious that it is conscious, must disconnect itself from the body of which it is conscious, to become conscious as itself. Therefore, it is necessary for feeling to distinguish, identify, itself, so that it will know what it is, and will know that it is not nature. That portion of the doer which is conscious that it is conscious, needs no thinking to be so conscious. To be conscious of nature it needs the thinking of the body-mind. To be conscious of itself as feeling it needs the thinking of the feeling-mind without interference by the body-mind. By that, the feeling-mind, it is made conscious that it is feeling. By the thinking of the desire-mind it is made conscious that it is desire. In being merely conscious of nature or of feeling or of desire, these minds are passive. They must be active in order to recognize nature as functioning, or feeling as functioning, or desire as functioning.

For the doer in the human to become more than merely conscious that it is conscious, feeling must think of itself with the feeling-mind and without the body-mind. When one thinks, he is conscious of sensations and of nothing more. This means that impressions from objects of nature contact and grip feeling and while so gripped are sensations and are not distinguished from feeling. This thinking is done with the body-mind. The feeling-mind and the desire-mind are, so to speak, limp and flabby. For the doer to be conscious as what it is, it must not be conscious of sensations. For feeling to know itself as feeling when it is freed, it must first understand or realize itself in the body.

To stop sensations, one must stop the use of the body-mind and one does this by disconnecting the breath-form by which the sensations come in. This is done by giving undivided attention to thinking with the feeling-mind, on feeling only. When one is successful in thinking with the feeling-mind only, one is not at all conscious of nature, but discovers oneself as feeling. This is the introduction of the doer in the human to itself, and is the beginning of Self-knowledge. The system for one to think without creating thoughts or to think so that one will have Self-knowledge, is based on one’s being conscious and on becoming conscious in higher degrees by the use of the feeling-mind. After one has become conscious of oneself as feeling, that is, has freed feeling, and has established oneself as a being independent of the body and nature, even while conscious of his body, he is qualified for being conscious in higher degrees. One does so by giving one’s undivided attention to thinking of desire. Such thinking calls into use the desire-mind. When one has become conscious of oneself as desire, that is, has freed desire, and has established himself as desire, as a being independent of the body and nature, even while conscious of the body, one is qualified to become conscious successively as rightness, reason, I-ness and selfness. Then one is conscious as and knows oneself to be the complete Triune Self. This is the object to be obtained by the system of thinking without creating thoughts, that is, without attaching oneself to nature.

Being conscious that one is conscious is, as it were, a point in the fullness of the boundless circle of Consciousness. To speak of point or circle on the intelligent-side is a metaphor, because points, lines, angles, surfaces and circles are nature-matter, degrees of nature-matter. They are presence, throughness, in-ness and on-ness. On the intelligent-side there are no points, and there is no development into circles. But points, lines, angles, surfaces and circles can be used as symbols. They are accurate symbols indicating the doer’s progress in being conscious on the intelligent-side. But it is always to be remembered that they are symbols, metaphors like word-forms for living things in nature, which are used to designate things of the doer, because no word-forms for the doer are available.

Thus it may be said that all possibilities of knowing begin from a metaphorical point of being conscious. This point is expanded to a circle, as one progresses in being conscious. The circle of his being conscious is ever expanded as he becomes conscious in higher degrees, until he is conscious as the boundless circle of Consciousness.

The system of thinking without creating thoughts is based upon the use and the training of the feeling-mind until feeling is isolated, and then upon the successive use of the other minds to be conscious as the Triune Self. Being thus conscious is after all only a small circle of being conscious. The Triune Self must go on until it is conscious as an Intelligence, and on and on until it is conscious as Consciousness.

He who bears in mind what has thus been recapitulated, and assiduously puts into practice the system of thinking, now to be dealt with, will find in it a way to develop himself to whatever he may aspire to. He will see a way towards becoming one with whatever his highest conceptions of Deity may be, that is, with his own thinker and knower, and how to attain the greatest accomplishment possible to a human, which is: being conscious of Consciousness.