THINKING AND DESTINY
Harold W. Percival
CHAPTER XIV
THINKING: THE WAY TO CONSCIOUS IMMORTALITY
Section 7
The System of Thinking. What it is. Stages on: The Way to Conscious Immortality.
This system of thinking is for you, you choose and will: to have knowledge of nature and of your Triune Self; to think without creating destiny, to be conscious of Consciousness, and to become consciously immortal.
I.
1. You who would follow this system to become conscious of Consciousness should think about the reality as represented by the word Consciousness—as different from anything that you have read or heard about the word. You should not think of Consciousness as being your consciousness or another’s consciousness or as the consciousness of any being or thing. You should not think of Consciousness as possessing or being possessed, as having states or extension, or as being divided into states. You should not think of Consciousness as having any attributes or limitations, or as becoming anything or doing anything, or as a being, or as having being or non-being. You should not think of the consciousness of any being, but of the being as conscious as something or of something. You should think that you cannot really know anything about Consciousness before you become conscious of Consciousness. You should think that you may become conscious of Consciousness at any time after you begin to think about it, even while you are human and have not rid yourself of thraldom to nature and have not taken your place among the consciously immortal Triune Selves who are freed. You should think that Consciousness is present in and through and about everything, however small or great. You should think that it is by the presence of Consciousness in and through every thing or being that the thing or being is conscious of that of which or as which it is conscious. You should think that Consciousness is not in any way different in the most primitive unit in nature and the most advanced Intelligence. You should think that Consciousness is the same in the units composing a block of granite as it is in the Supreme Intelligence of the Universe, no less and no more. You should think that by the presence of Consciousness each being performs its work and is conscious of as little or of as much as it has attained the capacity for being conscious. You should think that when you have an understanding about what Consciousness is not and think about what it is, you are ready to make the effort to become conscious of Consciousness.
2. Then you can think: O Consciousness! undescribed, unexplained, and without qualities; not dependent on, not affected by, any thing; present throughout all space and time and being and throughout all Intelligence; by whose presence all nature units are conscious as their functions, and the Triune Selves are conscious as what they are, of what they do and of what they may become. By Thy Presence in me through life and through death, I think and feel and will to be conscious of Thee, and to know Thee—Consciousness.
You should not set the time when you will first become conscious of Consciousness. There is the possibility of its being at any time in your present human life. It may not be until, at the end of lives, you have all your minds under control. You should think the death of your body a no greater break in your continuity of living in this world than is the retiring for a night’s sleep in your present body. When you, as the will to become conscious of Consciousness, think thus of Consciousness, you can be assured that soon or late, perhaps when least expected, you will so be. On being conscious of Consciousness you do not know any of the beings of which you are then conscious. You will know them only after you know yourself as a Triune Self. But having once been conscious of Consciousness it is possible for you by thinking to be again conscious of them. Becoming conscious of Consciousness neither cancels the obligations which you have incurred by your thoughts, nor gives you entrance to other planes or worlds, nor puts you in control of your desires and your minds, nor establishes you in union with yourself. But once having been conscious of Consciousness you will surely meet your obligations and make connection with the planes and worlds and learn the control of desire and of your minds and eventually be in union with yourself. It will be as a map and a light for you. You are human, you may choose to reach the heights and the depths of human life, but you will not linger at either extreme, for you know the road and your Light will guide you, and you will surely reach the end of the road of attainment as the Triune Self. You can no longer make yourself believe that all your desires are right. While you see things as they are, you cannot deceive yourself. You may not do what you know to be right, but you know when you are doing wrong. You will right the wrongs done, as you gain strength; and surely you will get strength. With such an understanding about Consciousness you go on with your regular duties, being confident that in due season you will be conscious of Consciousness. Overanxiousness will delay and interfere with your self-adjustment in becoming so conscious. Expectation or speculation as to time or condition will keep you out of right relation to nature and defer the time of your being conscious of Consciousness. You should have a constant, steady assurance that you will live through the lives of your physical bodies—and with no less confidence than you now live through the daily lives of your present body—towards the attainment of the purpose of life. Then, when you are ready, whether in the present life or in one far removed, it happens unannounced. Intervening partitions and divisions are gone: you as feeling-and-desire-and-rightness-and-reason-and-I-ness-and-selfness are One.
3. In the instant of being conscious of Consciousness the Light which is greater than the light of ten thousand times ten thousand suns opens up in the brain and tempers it and quickens the portion of the doer connected with that brain so that you are conscious beyond the limits of thought and are made conscious of your relation to Consciousness. You are conscious of all Intelligence, and see everything of nature at once. You are not thrilled by emotions, do not build in imagination, are not raised to beatific ecstasies and are not dazzled or overpowered. You are calm, and have limitless increase and extension in being conscious throughout and within all being and Intelligence, and there is no thing of nature which you do not perceive. By the Great Triune Self of the worlds and your Intelligence, you are related to all Triune Selves and to all Intelligences, and by your body with its breath-form you are related to all nature, manifested and unmanifested. You are conscious of all there is of the spheres and worlds and planes, and through these are conscious of that which is unmanifested. You see and hear in all the worlds. You are conscious through all space, and in the same instant you are conscious of all the aias and Triune Selves and Intelligences, of Conscious Sameness and of Pure Intelligence and of their relation. By being conscious of Consciousness you are at once conscious of every being. All things are related in Consciousness and you are in conscious relation with all. You do not wonder at the mightiness of yourself as the Triune Self or at the number and the greatness of the Intelligences with which you are in relation, or at the order in relation of all beings of which nature is composed. There is no here and there, or this or that. All are at once. In the same instant you are in gracious peace and conscious allness with every being that is, and that is not yet. You are satisfied and calm and you have ease and poise with a glad at-homeness in unmistakable reality. Being conscious of Consciousness, you are serenely conscious of the glory and the grandeur and of the simplicity in relation of all there is.
II.
4. Before being conscious of Consciousness you will desire to think without being attached; then you will cease to make destiny. You should understand that thoughts are beings, the children of their parent-creator who is responsible for all that they do. You should understand that they influence others, and that as acts, objects and events they exteriorize to you the impressions of the objects which you have generated by thinking. You should think and understand that the desires in your thoughts holding on to the impressions from nature in your thoughts, are the magnetic links which bond you to nature. You will think without creating thoughts when your feelings and desires will not attach themselves to the nature impressions which have come in through your four senses. You should understand that the thoughts which you have created, blind you to and prevent you from being conscious of the difference between your desires and the impressions of objects to which they are attached, and from distinguishing yourself as different from nature. You should understand that, to free yourself from your thoughts, you must learn how to think so that you will recognize yourself to be that which is conscious as itself and as distinct and different from nature. You should understand that when you find that you are so conscious and as not of nature, you will dissipate your thoughts by returning the matter in them which belongs to nature, and by reclaiming that which is of yourself, and that then you should always be able to think without creating thoughts.
5. Thinking is the steady holding of the Conscious Light within on the subject of the thinking. Thinking is done by feeling-and-desire with the body-mind or the feeling-mind or the desire-mind or with these three minds. The process of thinking, that is, the gathering, the turning, the training, the holding and the focusing of the Light, is the same for each of the minds, though only the body-mind is ordinarily used in human thinking. There is human thinking which is not a steady holding of the Light, but is an untrained, spasmodic, irregular, often feeble, inconsequent attempt to hold the Light; and there is real thinking which is the steady holding of the Light. Human thinking is done by the use, not the control, of the body-mind, which calls to its aid the feeling-mind and the desire-mind. If the feeling-mind is used, even to a small degree, the results show originality and are superior in kind. The thinking is started by desire, and desire is prompted by feeling. The subject of the desire determines the mind which is used when one tries to think. The seven minds are centered in reason. The body-mind is related to the physical body and is used for nature by means of the four senses. It should be used by feeling-and-desire for the control of the body and the guidance of nature, subject to rightness and reason. Each of the other six minds is for the use of a particular aspect of the Triune Self: the second for feeling, the third for desire, the fourth for rightness, the fifth for reason, the sixth for I-ness, and the seventh for selfness. Nearly all human thinking is done with the first or body-mind. This is used for seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, weighing, measuring, and for comparing, analyzing, combining, coordinating, computing and reasoning about these sense perceptions. The body-mind thinks on all things of nature and its instrument, the body, and on sensations. It does not and cannot think of any part of the Triune Self. You cannot think on more than one subject at a time; that is, human thinking is thus restricted, though real thinking is not.
6. Thinking, that is, the steady holding of the Light, is done only in the intervals between the incoming and the outgoing and the outgoing and the incoming breaths. Therefore human thinking consists of intermittent, irregular and jerky flashes of Light; whereas in real thinking there is a steady stream of Light, and breathing stops. The thinking that is done between the breaths, is done, as it were, in points connected or separated by dashes, which represent the sense impressions received during breathing. The continued effort to think on a subject results in such intermittent flashes of Light on the subject. This is as far as human thinking goes. Thinking is done in the heart and lungs, which are, potentially, a brain, like the cerebellum and the cerebrum. A thought conceived in the thorax is gestated, elaborated and issued from the brain in the head, which is the only brain that can be used at present. The direct cause of thinking is desire, and desire is prompted by feeling, which receives impressions of objects from outside nature. If these impressions are not the immediate subjects of the thinking, they are at least the bases for associations, distinctions and memories which cause the thinking.
7. There are four stages in thinking. The first is the presentation of the subject, which is a nature impression, its acceptance and turning the Light on it; the second is the fixing and cleansing of the subject, which is done by training the Light upon it; the third is the reducing of the subject to a point, which is done by focusing the Light upon it; and the fourth is the focus of the Light on the point, which is that impression, and the result of the thinking. These four stages are incipient in all thinking, but are completed only in the thinking which results in knowing. Ordinary, casual, human thinking stops with the second stage, if it can go that far. Thinking usually does not go far because of adverse conditions. These are that the body-mind is weak, untrained and unsteady and keeps turning from one subject to another; then there is the unsteadiness, disagreement or lack of coordination of the three minds themselves, and the fact that they are out of touch with the nerve centers through which they should work. Further difficulties are due to feeling-and-desire, which make no proper effort to call their minds into action and often interfere with their own action after they have been started by the body-mind. Then there are the interferences from elementals pouring in as impressions and prodding, irritating, distracting and confusing the body-mind so that they may become sensations; elementals, nature units, are attracted into and swarm in diffused Light. The Conscious Light which the mind finds available is so diffused and obscured that there is difficulty in turning and focusing it on the subject of the thinking, and the Light is unsteady because the mind which guides it is unsteady. The result of this is that human thinking is ineffective, beyond the bare material achievements of a corrupt civilization, and leaves the human in his self-delusion and ignorance of the world in which he lives. The results of human thinking are the thoughts which are ever being exteriorized as the acts, objects and events of the lives into which they are drawn. The purpose of this system is to show you how to think and yet to avoid the creation of thoughts, since they rule your lives and subject you to nature.
8. The first step is to decide upon a subject to be known, that is, to turn the Light on that subject and on no other. Then comes the fixing of the subject, which is done by training the mind on that subject and so holding the Light steady upon the subject. Then comes the reducing of the subject to a point by focusing the Light upon it. The fourth stage is the steady holding and focus of the Light on the point, that is, the thing as it is in itself, the opening up of the thing and the revealing of itself to the Light. Then the thing is known at once as a whole, and in all its parts. The difficulties to be overcome in casual ordinary thinking become almost insuperable as soon as you select a definite subject to think upon. To overcome them you must have persistence. Persistence in thinking on one subject alone is a necessary exercise to strengthen, train and steady the mind which gathers Light and excludes from it obstructions and so makes it clearer and holds it steady. As the Light which is used in the thinking increases and becomes clearer, the nature units and thoughts which are attracted and swarm into diffused Light cannot endure it; they flee. Persistence in thinking increases, strengthens and tones up your nerve matter so that it can be worked by your mind as that becomes more effective. You who hold the body-mind steady on a subject and so hold the Light steady and focus it, know the subject and know that you know it. Then you have the body-mind under control, that is, you, as feeling-and-desire, are able to think with it. Thinking with the body-mind may begin with nature as a whole or with any part or object of nature units, such as a star, an atom, a tree or a geogen elemental. After the subject to be known is selected, thinking can begin anywhere and at any time. Nor need your thinking be with any special preparation or favorable condition. When the subject to be known is decided upon, the time and place to think is here and now. When the subject is known you should define it by putting into appropriate words what you know of the subject. A definition is the embodiment of a subject in a set of words which expresses the subject as it is, without need of a description or explanation. If you will not think into words what you think, you will not make definite progress in thinking. You need think about nature and the objects of nature only until you can use the body-mind at will. Use of the body-mind relates to it the brain and nervous centers and through these the finer states of matter, so that by thinking all states of matter can, later on, be controlled and related to the doer. Continuance in thinking with your body-mind to solve problems of matter, other than those concerned with you, will lead you away from yourself and make more difficult the thinking that will enable you to be conscious independently of the body. Feeling-and-desire, under the glamour of the body and nature, mistakes the senses and the physical body for portions of itself and so you want to think with the body-mind in order to get body comforts and objects of nature. You are conscious of the distinction concerning yourself, in your two aspects as feeling-and-desire and as nature, when you are dissociated from contact with nature. But you are no longer conscious of that distinction when in association with the body, because then you fall under the glamour of nature. You ought to help nature in requital for the use of the physical body and you should work in pursuance of your own destiny, but you fail to do either when under the glamour of nature, and so you remain a slave. To fulfill your destiny in your relation to yourself and to nature, you must dispel the glamour of nature and discover your dignity and purpose as feeling-and-desire, while in the body. Then you, as feeling and as desire, recover your memory of the distinction and difference between yourself and nature.
III.
9. The actual effort to think without creating thoughts begins with the effort to identify and free feeling. This effort calls into use the feeling-mind. Before sleep, at waking, and before the effort to think for freedom, you may make this earnest appeal. You address yourself in thought to your thinker and knower, as your Triune Self, and think clearly: My Judge, and my Knower! Give me Thy Light and the Light of Thy Knower. Let me be always conscious of Thee, that I may do all my duty and be consciously one with Thee.
Feeling is that of yourself in the body which feels: which feels impressions from objects of nature, but which cannot of itself distinguish itself from the impressions and from the senses. Your feeling-and-desire cannot be identified and freed unless each has the other’s assistance. Your desire cannot free itself until after the freedom of your feeling, because nature has its stronghold in feeling and your feeling holds desire and holds your desire to nature. Your feeling cannot be identified and freed unless your desire desires feeling to free itself. When there is the persistent desire for feeling to be freed, your feeling is empowered by your desire to accomplish its identification and freedom by your persistence in thinking on feeling as feeling, until you as feeling are identified and freed.
10. The freeing of feeling begins with locating it in the body and distinguishing it from the sensations with which it is associated and identified. You should try to think of and feel feeling as different and distinct from the body and the sensations which you feel. Then your feeling extends through and over the body and there are sensations of warmth and tingling, but you do not feel feeling. The effort to think of and feel feeling as of yourself and as distinct from the sensation, by which you are employed and engrossed, awakens and calls into action your second mind, the feeling-mind, which is for the control of feeling. You, as feeling, are in the body wherever the blood and nerves are; therefore you may practice by trying to locate feeling in some particular part, a finger, toe or other part of the body, by thinking of it there. As soon as you try to think of and distinguish feeling as yourself, you are likely to be distracted by sensations, such as itching, uneasiness, trembling, sweating, flushing, yawning, fatigue or sleepiness. This is caused by your effort to control your untrained feeling-mind and its sluggish nerve centers. You, feeling, will then go into parts of the body to serve these sensations, and your thinking following you, as feeling, also serves them. This means that there has been an obstruction to the thinking and that your thinking has been turned from feeling as the subject, to the obstruction. Thinking on your feeling alone as the subject, necessitates the holding of your feeling-mind steady, to focus the Conscious Light on feeling and so to locate yourself in your body and to free and know yourself. The change of the subject from feeling to a sensation changes thinking with your feeling-mind, to thinking with your body-mind. When thinking is not turned to a subject of nature and continues on yourself alone, the first efforts so to think will most likely numb or tire your body and induce sleep. When your thinking is switched back to thinking on a subject of nature, or when sleep comes, your effort to distinguish and identify yourself as feeling stops. You cannot feel feeling in the body without sensation until you use the feeling-mind, except in deep sleep, when you are not related to the body. Therefore you must persist in training your feeling-mind by trying to think of and feel yourself, feeling only, nothing else. You should not think of feeling as having anything to do in connection with or related to seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or even touching. You, feeling as yourself, are separate and distinct from the senses and objects of nature, even though you extend along the blood and nerve centers of the body. The body is corporeal; you are incorporeal. If after many efforts you are not able to know yourself in the body, as distinct from the body, you may practice the feeling of sensations, so that in this way you may become more familiar with yourself as feeling. You may think of your toe and feel what you can in that toe. The member in which there had been no feeling, then begins to pulse with sensations of warmth. Then you should think on and feel the same toe on the other foot, and it will pulse in unison with the first toe. Then you should extend your thinking and feeling to each of the other toes until all are pulsing. Then you should continue the thinking and feeling to the instep, the heel and the ankle, until there is a pulsing and activity through all parts of your feet and ankles. Then you should steadily extend your thinking and feeling to the legs, knees, thighs and pelvis, and then along the spine to the abdomen, thorax, neck and head. When you arrive at the top of your head you will feel a current, a shower of life, which as from a fountain sprays down through your whole body. This means that as desire-and-feeling, and by intentionally and uninterruptedly thinking upward in the body, you have temporarily connected and coordinated the roots and branches of the two nervous systems with the spinal cord; that you have thus caused the life breath and form breath to rise and flow with the physical breath through or along the trunk or spine of the body; and, that on reaching the crown of the brain, the life currents return like a shower from a fountain and quicken the body. Practice in thus thinking and feeling, keeps up and brings the parts of your body into coordination, and harmonious life flows through it. After that you should try to think of and feel the living breath, the active side of the breath-form, penetrating every part of the form of the breath-form of the body, the passive side of the breath-form. You should try to feel the breath-form as a living being inside of and moving the body, as the hand moves and is felt inside a soft glove.
11. The breath-form is the living soul, the creator and builder and preserver of the body, which is dependent on the feeling and desire of the doer in the body. When you can feel the breath and the form through the body as a being, distinguished and distinct from the mass of matter of which the physical body is composed, the breath-form adapts the matter of the body to your thinking and feeling. Then nature begins to lose control over you, because nature loses power over the breath-form, as you gain control of it. By thus thinking and feeling you use your body-mind jointly with your feeling-mind, to the end that you may be able to use the feeling-mind without assistance from the body-mind. You are training feeling to follow thinking, instead of letting thinking follow feeling. When thinking will not follow feeling, feeling must follow thinking. When you can feel the parts of your body and the fluids, the breath and the nerve currents in them, you are prepared to think of and feel feeling as distinct from the breath-form and the body. Patience and persistence in thinking of feeling, to locate and feel it in some particular part of the body, and to distinguish it, centers feeling and cuts off the elementals, nature units, which then cannot become sensations. When you are conscious of and as feeling, in and distinct from the body, you discover that the body is actually not you, but a mass, a form, which you inhabit and wear. While conscious of the body, like as the costume which it wears, you can by practice think of yourself as feeling only, and not feel sensations of any kind. You may be cut, burned or undergo a surgical operation without sensations of pain or touch, because you are dissociated from the sensory nerves of the voluntary nervous system. While being conscious as feeling in the body you should not perform any of the wonders possible for you, else you will fall into subtle nature entanglements and stop your progress. By thinking of or as feeling only, to the exclusion of all else, you identify yourself as feeling. You, as feeling, then feel yourself to be and are conscious of yourself as being a portion of the doer, and as distinct from your body and its senses. Then the body is not seen, heard, tasted, smelled or contacted by you.
12. The world has dropped off and is forgotten. Thus your banishment of yourself to ex-istence, in nature, ends, when you are conscious of your reality in istence. Istence is the conscious doer, feeling the reality of itself in itself, as itself; not as ex-istence, not in ex-istence, but in its aloneness resulting from its intentional disattachment of itself from the illusions of nature. That is intentional freeing of feeling from nature; it is: being conscious bliss, knowing “Nirvana.” If your purpose in thinking had been to escape from the world and to be liberated from nature, without knowing what of you it was that desired escape, then the feeling of you as part of the doer could seem to remain in its state of conscious bliss for long duration, even though in a short space of physical time. But you would have to return and re-enter your human body, because you would not even be the doer part of your Triune Self, (in “Nirvana”). After death, your unbalanced thoughts would compel you to be re-embodied in a human and to continue on your path to freedom. You cannot do that because your understanding that you are feeling-and-desire as the doer part of your Triune Self prevents you from making any such mistake as an attempt to escape. A reality is a unit as it is, unattached, the thing alone, itself. An illusion is an evanescent appearance as the result of the clustering of units into mass or form. As feeling, you have no sensations, no pains or pleasures, no physical body, no senses, no breath-form, no memories of any of these, but you are the feeling which gave much of personality to all these and which made the physical body human; you are the feeling aspect of the doer. You do not know who you are, though you are conscious as an immortal reality. You as feeling are untrammeled, peaceful, happy, blissful. You become conscious of the feelings you had but which you could not distinguish from the elementals as sensations, which drained off feeling. You feel the feelings, which you mistook for sensations when the elementals fed on you, and which you could not feel while entangled with the physical body; but these cause no pleasure, no pain, because you are conscious of your reality in istence; the body composed of elementals is cut off and they cannot produce and become sensations until there is contact with you, feeling. So you do not taste food, hear sensuous music or voices, see sights or touch flesh, but you now feel that of which you were not then conscious, namely, your feelings, not felt while you felt the sensations which held you and engaged your attention. You have awakened from the unreality of sensuous life into the unmixed happiness of the reality of yourself as feeling. These feelings summon the desires which are their complements and answer to them. The reactions between you as feeling-and-desire cause the psychic breath to start the physical breath, which had stopped, and to draw your feeling back into the voluntary nervous system, where the breath-form brings you into contact with the senses. Now you use these senses not as one who sees and hears and tastes and smells, but as the one who feels what is seen, heard, tasted and smelled. You are conscious of the body and its senses, but you are also conscious of yourself and as yourself, and independent of and distinct from the body. You are conscious of yourself, not as having sight, hearing, taste and smell, but conscious that these senses are used by you and are expressions in nature of yourself as feeling. The thinking which leads to this intentional freeing of feeling must be repeated again and again until you have the feeling-mind so under control that you can use it at will and be freed at will. When repeating the thinking you should try to be continuously conscious of what you have been conscious, until there is no break in your being continuously conscious as yourself, in the body or out of and distinct from the body. When you do this you have established yourself in your istence as yourself, distinct from and independent of your body; as distinct from the body as the body is distinct from the clothes it wears. Then you are the reality as feeling with the capacity to feel.
13. You now distinguish sensations, which belong to nature, from feelings, which are of yourself. You become sensitive to impressions from objects of nature which would reach into you and move you and which call upon you to feel them and to express them through poetry, music, painting, and other arts. You should not respond to any of these calls, not because you would not or could not, but because you are not ready. If you allow yourself to be allied to nature, you will be drawn again into it and its glamour and slavery. You are delicately sensitive to the troubles of others. Their sorrows appeal to you for solace and comfort. You may advise them, but you should not allow yourself to melt in sympathy and to share their sorrows, not because you would not, but because at this time you would be overcome by sorrows, theirs and later your own. You would thus abort a vesture, the form body for yourself which is being formed in the body. During each of your freedoms by thinking with the feeling-mind, your desire would rush in to re-enforce and satisfy feeling, but as feeling you resist, and your thinking holds back the desire. This prevents a premature union of your feeling with your desire, which, if allowed, would thereafter make freedom more difficult, if not impossible. Your feeling-and-desire must each in turn be intentionally freed by itself in order that they will eventually have perfect union. Your resistance by feeling and the exercise of your feeling-mind strengthen feeling and develop skill in the use of your feeling-mind. When you can remain unmoved in feeling and can by thinking with the feeling-mind free your feeling at will, you are ready to make an effort to think for freedom of desire with your desire-mind. Your desire-mind is used for the finding, control and freeing of itself. In order that your desire-mind may be exercised at will, you should have the desire that desire should be itself self-controlled, and self-governed. When you have this desire you are ready to make an effort to think with the desire-mind. You should then think on desire, nothing else. By thinking on desire, your desire seems to be split into numerous desires, most of which are clinging to impressions of objects or want: to be, to will, to do, or to have, something. On finding the desires so divided you should declare your purpose in thinking. If the purpose is one that can be achieved by the body-mind, and you attend to it, it will lead you back into the entanglements of the world where you can achieve the object of your desire, because you can use the body-mind. If you so use the body-mind you will not free desire, though you may learn some of the uses, but not the control, of your desire-mind. When your purpose is to free desire, you must examine and prove your purpose by thinking to know what and who you are—in preference to doing, or having, or being anything in the world. You then ask rightness to be the judge in the examination, and you state that your purpose is to free desire. You question why you wish to isolate desire. Many desires appear in the Light as it is held on the subject, and the thinking must continue until one among the desires is approved by rightness. Doubt attends each desire as it is presented for examination, until rightness approves. Then, instead of doubt, there is an unmistakable certainty.
14. In every human the desires arrange themselves into two groups: those which seek the Triune Self, and those which seek nature. The few which seek the Triune Self are subject to the desire for Self-knowledge, that is, knowledge of the knower of the Triune Self; the many which seek nature are subject to the desire for sex. The many are marshalled, led or directed by four desire-generals: the desire for food, the desire for possessions, the desire for a name, and the desire for power. By an examination of the four desire-generals, all the many are included, but before the examination some things about these desires should be understood. No desire will hold fast to any impression of an object when that desire is conscious of what that impression or object is, to which it is attached; it will then let go of that impression. No desire really wants any object of nature. Each desire really wants to be at one with the desire for Self-knowledge, and with the Triune Self. The desires are under the sway of darkness because they shut themselves off from the Conscious Light in the Triune Self. These desires grasp the impressions of objects of nature which the senses bring in, hoping that through the objects they will find what they seek. They will let go of some impressions of objects, but will hold on to the others, like as one who cannot swim grasps and holds any object, fearing he will sink. These desires are led by the light of the senses, which is as darkness when compared to the Conscious Light in the Triune Self. Light in the Triune Self shows the darkness of the senses. Desires are vaguely conscious of that Light and fear it because it will make them conscious of their ignorance and of their mistakes. So they turn from the Light and seek the objects presented by the senses. When the desire for Self-knowledge turns to the Light and would lead the way, there is war. The desire for sex behind the forms of food, possessions, a name, and power, urge the four and they lead the many desires in battle—and they have won. No power other than its own can separate a desire from an impression which it holds. No power can change a desire; that desire, and that desire only, can change itself. A desire will not let go the impression it holds until it is conscious that that impression is not what it wants. A desire cannot be conscious of what the impression it holds really is, because of darkness; it must have the Conscious Light to be conscious of what that impression really is. Therefore, the Conscious Light in the Triune Self must be turned on a desire with the impression it holds, so that it may be conscious that neither the impression nor the object is what it most desires. Light comes with the desire for Self-knowledge, by thinking on the desire with the impression or object to which it is attached. The desire so thinking with the desire-mind calls to its aid the body-mind for nature. This thinking holds the Light on the desire with the impression or object it desires. The Light makes that desire conscious of what the object is to which it is attached; that the object is different from itself, is not of itself. Then that desire changes itself from attachment to disattachment. It is conscious of the difference of itself from the object it then does not want, and it lets go, and thereafter it will not again be attached to that object or attracted by it. Each desire must let go of the impression, to free itself from the object, and make itself unattachable, so that the many desires divided or opposed to each other may be united as one. Therefore, when the desire for Self-knowledge appears in the Light by thinking, rightness approves it. Rightness does not approve of any other desire which may appear.
15. Then begins the proving of the desire for Self-knowledge as the purpose of your thinking: you prove it by testing it with other desires. You summon all your desires to compare them with and adjust them to the desire for Self-knowledge, which is to be the desire of your life, the purpose of your efforts. The summons is made by your mental declaration that you desire knowledge of yourself as a Triune Self above all else, and that your purpose is to be or to have Self-knowledge. This is a summons which is answered by the cunning of age-old desires, through the events of life. By your thinking, each of these is put in the Light beside the desire for Self-knowledge. One desire only can remain in the Light. First come the desires for food. As your thinking turns and holds the Light on them, the strength of your desires for food is tested by the strength of your desire for Self-knowledge. Then food is seen to be not of you or for you, but entirely of nature, made by innumerable combinations of units of fire, air, water and earth, for the nourishment of the four systems in their upkeep of the physical body. The appetites are seen to be devices for nature elementals, which stimulate and compel your desire to keep nature-matter in circulation. When the desire for Self-knowledge has been chosen as your purpose of life and approved by rightness, no desire for food can stand in the Light against it. As each desire for food lets go the impression, that desire becomes disattached; then the strength of your desire for Self-knowledge increases and the desire for food is no longer a hindrance. When your desire for food becomes conscious that the appetites are not its desires, and that they are sensation-decoys which are binders to nature, it lets go; they lose their power over it; food ceases to be a hindrance and your desire for food serves your desire for Self-knowledge. Then are summoned the desires for possessions. As your thinking arraigns in the Light the desires for possessions, the possessions are seen to have value for the body only, as they answer to its needs of clothing and shelter and its position in life, and that in all other respects they are snares, cares and shackles. The desires for possessions, such as avarice, covetousness and rapacity, are undeceived by your thinking; they change. Possessions other than for service lose value as your desire for them becomes conscious of what they are, and they are subordinated to the desire for Self-knowledge. Freed from the binding power of the desires for possessions, your desire for Self-knowledge increases and becomes more clearly defined. Then the desires for a name are brought into the Light, with your desire for Self-knowledge. In the Light desire becomes conscious that a name is a cluster of impressions of indeterminate attributes for a personality, which are as empty and as evanescent as a bubble. These desires now let go of the impressions and willingly enlist for service under your desire for Self-knowledge. Then the desire for power is summoned into the Light. In the Light, power over objects of the senses as against Self-knowledge is revealed to be an illusion created by that desire which is the offspring and adversary of the desire for Self-knowledge. The illusion will be dispelled in the Light when the desire for it changes into your desire for Self-knowledge. When your desires for food, possessions, a name and power have become conscious in the Light that the things they desired were not what they wanted, and have put themselves under the control of your desire for Self-knowledge, and merge with it, your desire for sex can be examined. The desire for sex is summoned by turning the Light on it as the subject of the thinking. In the Light your desire for sex becomes conscious that it is selfishness grounded in ignorance and that it calls forth and stimulates the desires for food, possessions, name, and power. By thinking you see that: from these desires a male body or a female body belonging to nature is built up by food, endowed with possessions, identified by a name and engendered by power, as determined by thinking. By thinking you see that your desire for sex dreads the Light, but that it cannot escape when the Light is held on it. In the Light, you see the desire for sex to be the basis of duality, separateness and strife, the chief adversary and leader of all the desires opposed to your desire for Self-knowledge. You become conscious that the desire for sex cannot be dissipated or done away with, but that it can be changed. As the desire for sex stands beside the desire for Self-knowledge in the Light, you are conscious that it senses that a male body or a female body is not what it wants, and it changes itself and is disattached and ceases to want a male or a female body. Then the desire for sex is seen to change itself in the Light as it becomes conscious that it cannot be or get what it wants without the desire for Self-knowledge. Your desire for sex then desires to be led by your desire for Self-knowledge and is no longer afraid of the Light. When your desire for sex desires to be led by your desire for Self-knowledge, “desire as a whole” should become the subject of the thinking. As your thinking holds the Light on desire as a whole, your desire for Self-knowledge has increase of power, and the desires which had been in animal forms appeal to the desire for sex to war against your desire for Self-knowledge, or to get away from desire as a whole. Under the Light your desire which had been for the sexes now changes and leads all desires desiring nature, and, with them, merges with your desire for Self-knowledge, and there is no desire for expression as the sexes. Your thinking then holds the Light on desire itself, alone. The body with its seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching falls away, nature vanishes, and you as desire are alone and at rest. But you do not remain at rest.
16. Under the Light, you as desire become restless, strong, powerful. When your thinking held the Light on the desires they were by the desire for Self-knowledge drawn together and united. While the desires divided and warred, they were good and evil, God and Devil. Now that they are united and controlled, they are conscious power, which is goodness. In the proving of the desires, the desire-mind called upon the body-mind to cooperate with it. When the desires for food, possessions, a name, power and sex were by the Light made conscious of what those things really are, and no longer desired them, thinking with the body-mind for nature was stopped, and the desire-mind continued the thinking, which resulted in the freeing of desire. Your self-controlled desire is free in the Light, conscious of itself as power and part of a greater Self, which it desires to know. The freeing of your desire has been brought about by your effort to use your desire-mind, and by its use. The desire-mind makes contact with breathing and the body-mind, and desire is again active in the body, but the human is no longer the same human. You are conscious of yourself as a conscious power, not guided, not led by seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling or touching, and you are conscious as not the body. By thinking with your desire-mind on yourself you are conscious as unexpressed power that desires expression. But you do not desire expression of power through bodily personality, because you are now conscious that this is merely an appearance, an illusion, which could be dissipated and scattered. By thinking with your feeling-mind on yourself, you are conscious as beauty and you yearn for expression. You do not want expression of beauty through objects of the four senses because you are conscious of them as illusory and evanescent.
17. Feeling and desire are now conscious as beauty and as power, and as not the body; but they are not balanced. They can be balanced only when they are freed from sexuality and the body-mind is under their control. Sexuality is the condition of feeling-and-desire in a human body, experiencing forms of nature-madness or nature-intoxication. By the successive thinking on food, possessions, a name, power, sex, the senses, on the attractions these are to the deluded, and on their deadliness, feeling-and-desire are freed from sexuality. Then these are seen to be illusions, as unreal as moving pictures, not the things themselves, and their hold on feeling-and-desire ceases. Feeling-and-desire, immune from sexuality, are ready to be balanced. Balance between feeling and desire is made by the feeling-mind and desire-mind thinking on their right relation. Right relation is found to be, that feeling-and-desire are the necessary complements to the union and action of each other, and are equal in their relation to each other. Feeling-and-desire each feel and desire equality, and they are equal. Equality of feeling-and-desire puts the body-mind in right relation to them, so that the body-mind cannot think of them as being separable, and must think of them as they are: each being the same in and as the other. Then the body-mind is itself balanced; it thinks of things as they are, and in no other way. The three minds thus thinking hold the Light on feeling-and-desire and they, feeling-and-desire, are amalgamated in balanced union, inseparable. When feeling-and-desire are thus united in balanced union they find love. Feeling-and-desire in union with love is blessedness in perpetuity. Blessedness is the state of the doer, when feeling and desire have immunity from the intoxicating passions and pleasures of the body senses and have found love. Love is Conscious Sameness throughout the four worlds. Love in the doer is the state of balanced union and interaction between feeling-and-desire, in which each feels and desires itself to be and is itself in and as the other. Then feeling-and-desire are at peace and stand reconciled in the Conscious Light of the Intelligence.
18. At this stage you, the doer, feeling-and-desire in complete union, have capacity and power to feel, to will, to do, and to be. You see mankind in ignorance, suffering endless rounds of sensations, pains and pleasures. You would willingly show them the simple way of ending their troubles; but you should know also that those wiser than you would have done this were it possible. You see nature in perpetual and aimless turmoil and distress. You see that you can relieve suffering, give direction to force and establish order and purpose; but you should know that the state of the human world is what man makes it, the exteriorization of his thoughts, and that it must be changed by suffering man by balancing his thoughts. You see that you could be as God to men and could control them through their feelings and desires and thus prevent their bringing suffering on themselves and others. But you see that by your doing this they would be kept in the child state in which they are; that you would then be responsible for them; that men must learn to change and to control their own feelings and desires. By thinking, you see that at this stage your effort to help man or nature would only be a check to his own progress and to nature. You wish to help and you see that you could create a thought of love and beauty and power and give it to men to lift them out of sordidness and strife. But you also see that men would take the thought and build from it a religion to suit their feelings and desires, and that the religion would pass and be forgotten without accomplishing its purpose. You see the futility of doing any of the things that you might do. By thinking, you see that to be able to benefit men you must first know them. And you see that you can know them only by Self-knowledge. By thinking, you find that you do not know your Self. You are now conscious of your ignorance. By thinking, your past thoughts as ideals are examined and are dissipated in the Light. When, by thinking, the only thing that can remain in the Light is the desire for Self-knowledge, you are ready to go on.
IV.
19. To go on, you must have communion with rightness. The way to communion with rightness is made by thinking in connection with the mind of rightness. Clouds of thoughts separate you from rightness. By trying to think with the mind of rightness you perceive the clouds to be thoughts of your own and of others which are concerned with laws of nature or with human ideals. You must not be led away by these, else you will not make the way to rightness. By thinking steadily on rightness you open the clouds and go through them. Then you are conscious of the actuality of rightness and that it thinks only what is right. You find that rightness had been deserted and betrayed by your feeling, and dethroned and cast aside by your desire which had usurped its place, and you realize how both your feeling-and-desire were enthralled and deceived by nature. You are eager to repair the wrongs. You are conscious that the Light is in rightness. You recognize rightness as the conscious standard for feeling and for thought and action; you acknowledge the rule of rightness, restore to it its place, and rightness is enthroned. By thinking, you are in communion with rightness. Communion is the giving yourself to rightness and the receiving of Light. Communion with rightness is the direct connection with the mind of rightness. You see the worlds and the things in them as they are. You are conscious that it is right that they should be so, though you do not yet understand why and how. You see the perpetual slavery of men in illusions through life and death and birth. You see that they can wake and save themselves from these illusions, and you would point the way. You are conscious that you are not ready to do this; that you should go on and get understanding. Understanding is perceiving and feeling what things are as themselves and what their relations are, and comprehending why they are so and are so related. Understanding comes only with the aid of reason.
20. By thinking, you are conscious that reason will be the advocate for and liberator of mankind. The way to reason can be made only by thinking in connection with the mind of reason. The way to reason is beset by armies of reasons, causes, origins and principles which if not dispatched will bring chaos, chaos of doubt, out of which there seems no way. Persistence in thinking on reason brings approval from rightness and makes the way to reason. Then there is no room for doubt, and the chaos vanishes in the presence of reason. The Light comes with reason and all things are made clear. This is proof that by thinking on reason you have opened communication with reason through the mind of reason. Reason is the beginning and the end of thinking, the primal and ultimate cause, for the doer, the thinker and the knower, of things in the manifested worlds. Reason is the action and the sum of the actions of all the minds in agreement and in focus. Reason causes the issuing, retarding, speeding and precipitation of thoughts, as the acts, objects and events of a life; or it causes the balancing and abrogation of these thoughts according to the thinking and the feeling and the desiring of the thinker. Reason is the answerer of all questions, the solution of all problems concerning the Triune Self, concerning nature, and concerning the relation between the Triune Self and nature. Your thinking in connection with the mind of reason only, makes reason known to you, the doer. By your thinking with reason you are raised out of the world of sensations and shadows, out of the world of emotions and dreams, and you are in the world of clear vision where you see them and understand all that you see.
21. By thinking with reason you see the possibilities for all things. You see how it is possible for you to do all things. You are exultant in serenity. Then you remember your former disregard for reason and you feel guilty. You confess your ignorance and wrong and you ask reason to guide you. Reason imparts understanding to you. Having understanding you are impressed with wonder at reason. You see and understand that past and future run together; that old and new are interchanged; that birth is death and death is birth; that opposites are the same in each other; that activity and inertia end in beginning. As you think with reason you understand that that which will be is the continuation of that which has been done, stressed or varied in the meantime only through what the doer thinks and does.
22. You ask to know your past. By thinking with reason you are and again live that past. Once more you are in the body of your first existence, your original physical body, with your breath-form and your aia. With the senses you perceive the units of nature in their comings and their goings, and their changes through the four worlds. You have understanding, for you walk with the Light. Desiring anew to know completely who or what you are, you evoke feeling from yourself, and fashion for it a female form by putting forth a portion of your body, which thus becomes male and female. Then you, as desire-and-feeling, give up understanding; you betray the Light for sensations of nature through bodily union. You are blind to the Light; and, unbalanced and without understanding, you lose contact with reason. You wander in darkness. Death comes. Your re-existences begin. Again and again you live and die and live again through the endless flow of lives, as man or as woman. The recurrent flow of things in nature is caused by your thinking according to feeling through the female, and according to desire through the male. In the consecutive lives you are never conscious as the same, because the portion of yourself in each new life is different from that in the last. And still in each of the lives you are ever the same, because all parts of yourself are inseparably the same and your identity is conscious as an unbroken One throughout. You are mighty and you are menial, you are evil and you are just; you are adored and you are despised, you are divinity and you are beast. Through all changes of the earth crust by fires and earthquakes, by hurricanes and floods, by burning sands and frozen earth, through all changes of the heavens, from near to far, from one to many seasons, through all the flow and the phenomena of time, you are still the same conscious One. You are conscious that you have always been the same and yet you are conscious that you are and always have been a stranger to yourself. As a stranger to yourself you feel lonely. So in every life you try to find yourself. You are conscious that this trying takes you farther from yourself, until from agony of self you begin to think of the way and how to find yourself. You are conscious that you will thus go on continuously until you find the way to end your troubles. You are conscious that the ending of your troubles begins with your discovery that in sensation you are attached and bound to nature by feeling and thinking, and that by thinking and feeling without sensation you disattach yourself, and are freed from nature. You are conscious that by thinking you find feeling and desire of and as yourself. You are conscious that by thinking you disattach feeling-and-desire from nature and unite them into balanced union as yourself. You are conscious that by thinking you find the Light in rightness and are in communion with it. You are conscious that by thinking you have understanding, and that through rightness and reason you will be established in the Light. Now that you have seen your past and have lived over it again you come back and you are in the Light, which you never have really left.
23. In the Light and from out of the Light you now see that each of the lives you have lived was and is a dream, and you see that by thinking with the senses you dreamed that dream over again and again, through each life and after each death. By thinking with reason, you see that each human life is the dreaming of the doer of itself through nature. You see that the play of dreams began when you hypnotized yourself by thinking with the body-mind into nature, and thereby exiled yourself from the Light, and that the dreams ended when you awakened to the Light by your thinking with the feeling and desire minds, and thus took yourself out of the hypnotic dream. You see and understand that I-ness-and-selfness and rightness-and-reason never left the Light, and that you, as unbalanced feeling-and-desire, exiled yourself into darkness of the senses by thinking with the body-mind only. You see and understand that by thinking through the senses with the body-mind only, you hypnotized yourself, put yourself into the hypnotic sleep, to dream of yourself as being the body of a man or as being the body of a woman. You now understand that with the body-mind balanced and controlled, and by thinking with the feeling and desire minds only, you have redeemed yourself and re-enter the Light. You understand that you are by rightness and reason in the freedom of the Light, and that you are now at peace. Then you think of humanity and see the stream of human life and how needless it is that the doers should continue to doom themselves to sorrow and to suffer. No human thought or act is hidden from your vision, and you understand. You love and pity the doers in human life. You see that without understanding they act in ignorance by the fires they kindle with their desires. You would take the Light to men and give them understanding; you would show them that right thinking is the cure for sorrow, and Light the way to freedom. You ask reason to act with you and to guide you. By thinking with reason you look through the lives you have dreamed. You see innumerable forms of thoughts and you see the parts you have taken in the building up and the tearing down of these. You see that you have been among the teachers and the prophets as well as among the believers, the hunters and the persecuted. With reason you see that what you would do now has been attempted from time to time by others. You see that the teachers have been betrayed and deserted, or have been made into gods by men; that their teachings have been twisted into doctrines which breed selfishness and fear, helplessness and greed, which lead to deceit and wars and which cause men to dread rightness and reason and to remain in bondage to nature. You see that mankind in their distress clutch at anyone who would save them. But, you also see that to be saved, they must save themselves. You understand that the most that can be done for mankind is to show them the way; that to do more is to prolong their slavery. You understand that men cannot see the way until they weary of sensation, and desire Self-knowledge. You understand that what you now are conscious of and are is the result of your own thinking; that you could not be as you are by any other means. Your experiences in sensation, your freeing yourself from captivity into nature and your understanding of the purpose of all this, result in Self-knowledge. Knowledge of your own past saves you from the failure to which you would doom yourself by going among men and instructing them. Knowledge frees you from the glamour of sympathy. You still feel for the sorrows and sufferings of men; but you are no longer tempted to suffer with them, because you know that by so doing you would prolong their agony and blind yourself to your true course. When there is no temptation to think yourself into the affairs of men, reason makes known to you that you are no longer in jeopardy of self-delusion. Self-delusion is the state into which the doer puts itself by letting attraction or repulsion, preference or prejudice, influence thinking. You see and understand the difficulties and dangers you have passed and how you have overcome and freed yourself from them, and you ask reason why you did not see through them and overcome them before. Then you understand that attachment to nature had dimmed your perception and influenced your thinking. You desire to know what your other attachments are, and you see that they are the remainder of your unbalanced thoughts. Then you see that each of the difficulties you encountered was the result of a thought which barred your progress, and that the bar was removed when you balanced that thought by thinking. You see that your thoughts were the bonds that held you to the earth and to nature. You know that you must be released from all such thoughts and so become free from every attachment. You see that you created the thoughts by thinking and that by thinking you must balance them and so free yourself. You now know that thinking without attachment is the only way in which you can live in a physical body and still be free from entanglements. You believed, when you began your course of thinking, that you knew all this; but not until now do you really know it. With the aid of the mind of reason you have clear perception, and you are in right relation with reason. You desire to balance all your thoughts, and reason summons them in order. They come, each in its turn: thoughts for the cure of ills and sorrows, for lessening the burdens and the difficulties of men; thoughts of abstract matter or of mass, its form and constitution, thoughts of the plan and of the purpose of the Universe. You know through reason that they were conceived in ignorance, formed in fallacy and so were destined to dissolution. Then you balance all your thoughts in their order. As each thought is balanced, that in it which is of nature goes to its place in nature, and that which is of the Triune Self is in right relation to the Triune Self. You learn as you balance each thought; and, as you balance the last, you have learned all that it is possible for you to learn from your experience with nature. You now know what not to do. With and as reason you know what to do.
24. By thinking with the aid of the mind of reason you have made all your advances toward Self-knowledge and now you have available the mind of reason, at will. Thinking with the mind of reason adjusts you to reason. By thinking with the mind of rightness you are in communion with rightness. You know that rightness has approved your thinking on your problems, and that these are solved. You now have access to the life world by the mind of rightness and the mind of reason, to the form world by your feeling and desire minds, and to the physical world by the body-mind for the physical body, through which all seven minds will act to reach the worlds. You know that you should not and you do not act in the worlds. You desire Self-knowledge and you will not venture into nature before attaining Self-knowledge. By thinking with your feeling and desire minds to be free, you are in freedom. Formerly, whenever, as feeling-and-desire, you had isolated yourself by thinking with your combined feeling-and-desire minds, you were untroubled by nature and in selfless blessedness. Since then you have had the assistance of the minds of rightness and reason; through them you have been in communion with rightness and have had understanding from reason. In communion, feeling came into agreement with rightness, and desire desired to be and to do what would accord with rightness. By understanding, desire made its adjustment with reason and feeling became responsive to reason. So that by thinking you, as feeling-and-desire, have freed yourself from nature and are conscious of yourself as independent of and apart from it. In isolation you are now conscious of rightness-and-reason as the thinker of the Triune Self, which is beyond you, but of which you are a part. In isolation you are free from feeling any impression not in complete agreement with rightness, and from desire whatever might interfere with perfect adjustment to reason. Now you return from isolation and are in relation with your body. From isolation you find that the well-spring and fountainhead of all the arts and acts and events is in you as feeling-and-desire. Acts, objects and events are the distorted reflections in nature of projections from you, as feeling-and-desire. In you are the originals of these and you do not desire the reflections. By thinking with the aid of the mind of rightness and the mind of reason you understand that rightness and reason are and have been in agreement and in right relation to each other. By thinking to coordinate your feeling-and-desire minds with the minds of rightness-and-reason you, as feeling-and-desire, the doer, become a part of and are one with rightness-and-reason, the thinker. By giving yourself up to rightness-and-reason you, as feeling-and-desire, have been rectified by rightness and liberated by reason from ignorance of what you are and from bondage to nature. Now that you are identified with and as rightness-and-reason, you are free beyond the possibility of falling back into entanglements with nature. You coordinate the body-mind for the physical body with the other four minds so that the body is responsive to all the minds and is in right relation to the three worlds. As rightness-and-reason you are conscious that you are beginningless and deathless.
25. You see order in the Universe: in the life world, in the form world, and in the physical world. With the worlds as with the least unit in them, you see undeviating regularity and sequence. In human relations and in their relation to the changing world you see actions and reactions in unerring continuity. You see the objects that affect the feeling and desire which cause man to think. You see the matter and composition of a thought, how it is conceived and is born, how it and the thinking about it affect the different states of matter and how that thought and the matter thus affected act on the brains, the bodies and the thinking of mankind. You see the opposition, if any, to the thought and how it battles until there is an exteriorization of it on the physical plane. You see how the thought is balanced, and while it is not balanced how it continues its rounds. You see that in every life man is his own maker and unmaker, his own witness and judge. You see that even the slightest event that happens to anyone or anything is in order; that it could not happen out of order without upsetting the worlds, and that this cannot be done. You see and understand and know that all that men are passing through is what you have passed through. You know that each one must and will become conscious of the illusions that enthrall him; will find and will use the creative power to think; and, by thinking will free himself from all illusions and attachments. You, as rightness-and-reason, are a thinker. You know that you are feeling-and-desire as the doer, and rightness-and-reason as the thinker, and you know that there is the identity of the I-ness as yourself, of which you are conscious but which you do not yet know. You know things as they are, and you are steadfast and true. You are now ready and prepared to go on. You have reviewed your own past: your first existence, your illusions or dreams through your re-existences, the waking from dream, the rectification of your body by thinking and your present knowledge of all that has transpired. You are conscious of your being an unbroken identity throughout all changes and conditions, but you do not know the origin and history of your identity.
V.
26. You now purpose to know the reality of what you are conscious of as “I.” You will reach to I-ness by thinking with the two minds which you are not yet able to use. By thinking of yourself, only as “I,” you call to your aid the mind for I-ness. You do not isolate yourself from nature to find I-ness. By centering your thinking on “I” only, rightness-and-reason and feeling-and-desire and the physical body and nature are not included, and your thinking enters into blankness. If the blankness is a deadness, a stoppage to the thinking, the thinking must begin again, and again, until the thinking thinks through the blankness. The blankness is the barrier built by the thinking which the doer compelled, after it had abrogated its right to unity with I-ness, by its attempt to divide itself to dwell in male or in female bodies, and away from the eternal “I” in everlastingness, which made the doer a wanderer in darkness and forgetfulness. By continued thinking on “I” the blankness opens, ceases. In that moment you become conscious of I-ness and as I-ness, and I-ness uses its mind to identify you with and as itself, and you are I-ness. As I-ness you are neither past nor future; time exists, but it has no effect on you. Horizons vanish in the immensity of I-ness: you are conscious identity in the Eternal which is within and through and beyond time, self-conscious without flow or stop, in boundlessness of Light. As I-ness you are the conscious permanence of identity. When you are identified with and as I-ness, you are also conscious as rightness-and-reason and feeling-and-desire, and all are identified with I-ness. There are no complications, distinctions, qualifications or misgivings, there is no wonder or awe at your being as you are. Nothing disquiets your serenity as the eternal conscious I. You are conscious of and as your identity, and you determine to have the completion of all parts of the Triune Self in the knowledge of selfness. You have qualified yourself by thinking with the other minds and have no difficulty in thinking in conjunction with the mind for selfness. Selfness has used its mind through the ages to impart knowledge to reason, so that reason should have all knowledge necessary in the administration of justice, in the exteriorization of the doer’s thoughts and in all human relations. In thus thinking on selfness, you are qualified, there are no approaches, no obstructions to overcome, as there were in the thinking with the minds of other parts of the Triune Self. When you think in conjunction with the mind for selfness you are at once conscious not only of selfness, but you are and have knowledge as selfness. You are knower and thinker and doer—the Triune Self
27. As the knower, you are knowledge and know yourself to be the same eternal One whose I-ness is the self-conscious permanence in the Eternal and throughout time. As the thinker, you know the rightness and the reason of yourself to be the law and the justice in the worlds. As the doer, you know your feeling and desire to be beauty and power, in the body and in the worlds in which you have made yourself and the body beauty and power. As the Triune Self, you think from yourself as knowledge-and-identity with rightness-and-reason and feeling-and-desire, and with the minds of these you coordinate and gear the body-mind. By so thinking, the aia is caused to enter the physical body and to be in perfect relation with its breath-form. The aia and the breath-form are still automata. Nature contacts but cannot control them; they are under your direction and respond to your slightest behest. By thinking from knowledge into the physical body all parts of the Triune Self as your real Self enter it; and your embodiment is complete. By so thinking, the power and the glory of the Light through you as the Triune Self pervades the body and tempers it to you. By so thinking, the physical body is established in permanence and is immortal. All parts of you, as the Triune Self, are in the physical body with the aia and the breath-form. You have knowledge of all your parts as yourself and have complete mastery of your body, and the Conscious Light of your Intelligence is in and through you and your body. By thinking on the Light with all your minds you think yourself into the Light and presence of your Intelligence. You had known of your Intelligence through the Light, but now, in its presence, you are in consciously established relation to it. You make salutation, offer service, are accepted and in tranquil reverence. You choose to be in adjustment with the Great Triune Self of the worlds. By thinking on the Great Triune Self of the worlds you are in its presence and it is in and through you. You are inspired by the love that it has for every being. You know that because of its love it remains in the worlds to be the loving bond between all Triune Selves and all animate beings. You are now in right relation to yourself, to your Intelligence and to the Great Triune Self of the worlds.
28. You choose to take birth into the three worlds. During the course of your thinking the breath-form has been remaking the physical body to fit it for the embodiment of all the parts of you, the Triune Self. Your physical body is rehabilitated, made perfect, and is now a body suited for you. Your body has been made deathless and immortal by your thinking. No power in the Universe can destroy or corrupt it. You only, as the indwelling Triune Self, can change it by your thinking. It is a body built to gauge and mold and move and translate and guide nature units in being conscious as their functions, to serve the purpose of the Universe, which is, that all units will progress in being conscious in ever higher degrees. Your immortal physical body is the model of beauty and strength for the Realm of Permanence, the world by which the Universe is operated and kept in balance. The organs of the four systems have been translated into four brains in their respective sections: in the head, in the thorax, in the abdomen, and in the pelvis. The brain in the head is for your operation of the light world, the brain in the thorax for the life world, the brain in the abdomen for the form world, and the brain in the pelvis for the physical world. The physical body has a front- or nature-column for your operation of nature by means of the four senses, and a back column from which you, the knower and thinker and doer, the Triune Self, operate. The four brains have parts for you and parts for nature, each related to its section and spine, and coordinated into a working organization. The breaths keep up a circular flow of the free and the transient units of the four worlds, through the four senses of the physical body. These units are not for the upbuilding of the physical body, which is immortal and not dependent on transient units, but for the on-going of the worlds.
29. The compositor units of the physical body are now refined and tempered to the essential matter of the four worlds. This matter is of the unmanifested of a world; it is unchanging, the same, through the changing units. The aia relates the physical body to the essential matter, and the breath-form adapts the units to the worlds. The aia keeps the breath-form and the physical body in permanence, while the breath-form gives form to the units and moves the physical body to action. There is life in the mingling of the units of the worlds in your perfect body, and the units carry life through the worlds. When the physical body has been made perfect and is related to the worlds you, the three parts of and as the Triune Self, are ready to issue from your physical body into the form, the life, and the light worlds. In the course of your thinking with your feeling-and-desire minds, feeling-and-desire were voluntarily self-controlled and caused the breath-form to rebuild the physical body to accord with your conscious development as feeling-and-desire. By continuing your thinking with the minds of rightness and reason you also became conscious of yourself as rightness-and-reason. By thinking as rightness-and-reason your feeling and desire were rectified and justified; and the breath-form was made to raise the physical body into a higher form and structure. By thinking with the minds of I-ness and selfness you reached self-conscious knowledge of yourself as I-ness-and-selfness; and the breath-form was made complete and caused the physical body to be perfect. As feeling-and-desire, you are beauty and power. As rightness-and-reason, you are law and justice. As I-ness-and-selfness, you are identity and knowledge. As these three, you are not separated or divided; you are the doer, the thinker, the knower as the Triune Self complete, each developed as itself, yet partaking of and in perfect relation to each other, and all are and make complete the unity of the Triune Self. As the complete Triune Self, you are in your perfect physical body which is the physical measure of your perfection.
30. In your physical body matter of each of the three worlds has been modeled into bodies which each of your three parts will use to work with the worlds. Matter of the form world has been developed in what was the abdomen which you, as feeling-and-desire, the doer, will use to work with the matter of the form world. Matter of the life world through the thorax has grown to be a life body which you, as rightness-and-reason, the thinker, will use in the life world. Matter of the light world in the head has become a light body which you, as I-ness-and-selfness, the knower, will be with in the light world, (Fig. VI-D). By your thinking you have made these bodies perfect instruments, and you are now ready to rise out of your physical body with them and to issue and to adjust each to its particular world. By thinking of yourself as the knower and knowledge in relation to the light world, you, the complete Triune Self, rise out of your physical body through the top of the head and you are in the light world, the colorless sphere of shadowless Light. You, as the knower and knowledge, are sheathed in a column of Light, light-matter of the light world, the light body which your thinking has created and called into being in the light world. You have always been I-ness-and-selfness, the knower and knowledge, in the light world; but not until feeling-and-desire had by thinking become detached from their illusions and delusions, and by thinking had attained union, could the three bodies be related and ready for you, as the knower, to work with in the three worlds. From your light body in the light world you think of yourself in relation to the life world and you are in the life world, a radiant sphere of cycling life. As rightness-and-reason, you are clothed in an oval of life, life matter of the life world which passes from the thorax by your thinking, and through which you will deal with the life world. You have always been rightness-and-reason, the right and the just, but only in relation to feeling and desire which were enslaved to nature. Now that they are free, you, as the thinker, can be an administrator of the law and justice in accord with the knower and knowledge. From your life body in the life world you think of yourself in relation to the form world and you are in the form world, a sphere of light of typal forms. As feeling-and-desire, you are in a form body, form matter of the form world, which issues from the abdomen in response to your thinking, and in which you will act in the form world. You have always been feeling-and-desire, but now that you are free from all entanglements with nature, you, as the doer, are also beauty and power and will act in the form world with all forms of feeling and desire in accord with the right and the just. You, the Triune Self, are in each of these three beings; each being is separate and different from the other two, according to the matter of which it is. That part of your Triune Self which acts through its being in the world of that being is essentially the same as the other two parts and the three parts of the three beings constitute the unbroken and inseparable beings of you as the Triune Self. So your being of the life world and your being of the form world act coordinately with your being of the light world, though each is a being distinct from the other two. Because of the difference in fineness of matter of your three beings, the being of the light world is present and lives in and through the being of the life world, the being of the life world is through the being of the form world and the being of the form world is in the physical body, which is attuned and related to the matter of all the worlds; and, by it the three beings of you, as the complete Triune Self, may act on the matter of the physical world. Because of the relation of the fourfold physical body to the four planes of the physical world and to the four states and substates of matter, you, the Triune Self can by your thinking through the matter of the physical body be present and appear as the physical body in any place at any time. There you can, by thinking, cause to occur such phenomena as you see fit.
31. Now that your service is accepted by your Intelligence and since love is awakened by the Great Triune Self of the worlds in you for every being, and your body is related and attuned to all states of matter on the planes of the physical world, you are ready to take your part in working for the plan and the purpose of the Universe. You are a qualified and accepted officer in The Government of the Universe: you are knowledge and justice and love in relation to the world of men and in all the worlds. In the light world you are the knower and knowledge: you know all other Triune Selves and you are known by the knower of every Triune Self to be the knower of yourself and of them. In the life world you are the law and justice: the thoughts of men are open to you and you adjudicate upon each in its relation to the thoughts of other men according to the law of thought and in agreement with the reason of any of the doers in bondage to nature. In the form world you are beauty and power; you are the ideal form and character to which great thinkers and artists aspire, and you direct the administration of justice with love so that all who will may find their way through the wilderness of the world. In the physical world you are knowledge and justice and love to all human beings of the doers among whom you move, and you are sense and power supreme to all elemental beings. So you are the Triune Self complete, being and acting in each of the four worlds separately or simultaneously.
32. You choose the locality of the physical world in which your physical body is to be, on or between the crusts of the earth or beyond the crusts, alone, among others of your kind, or in relation to a people. You need not be limited to a locality, you may go, in your physical body, where you please: in any part of the solid earth, or its zones, or you may be and act on the physical plane of any of the other three worlds. You may appear to travel on surfaces, but you can go with the speed of light-matter of the world and plane and state of matter in which you will your body to be. You can be present anywhere. You are where you will to be. By your sight you see, by your hearing you hear, by your taste you taste and by your smell you smell, and contact any matter or being or place in any of the four worlds or their planes or states. You do this by thinking and by feeling your body where you will it to be. Feeling through your senses contacts the matter of the place, desire gives moving power to the matter and thinking places the body where the desire with feeling wishes it to be. You can see through, hear or contact any state or zone or being of the four worlds, from the least progressed unit to the greatest God, and it must obey what you command. But you will command only what it is right that you should command, and only what should be obeyed. You can cause the stars to move, to be bright or to be invisible in a clear sky; or the sun to focus heat or light; or you can cause these celestial masses to change their courses. But you will do these things only when the people for whom they are done have by their thoughts and acts made it necessary. You can bring the fire zone into the air, making the air a raging sea of fire or have it rain lightning on the earth, or bury the earth under deep layers of ice or you may cause the water zone to flood the earth, but only when the land and water areas are to be changed and when a people have determined destruction by what they have thought and done. You can cause the earth crust to quake and open and pour forth fire and brimstone and jets of steam and to destroy vegetation and to heave like waves between rivers of molten masses, but only when the people of the crust have ceased to learn, and the earth must be prepared for a new course and effort by re-existing doers who are to inhabit it. You can cause the seasons to recur in orderly succession over a long period or to be changeable and uncertain, or cause periods of drought or fertility, pests and panics, depression, peace and prosperity, all in response to what the people do to themselves and each other as individuals or as masses. You need not appear on the outer earth crust to do these things; you can be within the chambers of the earth or in the inner or outer zones of water or air or fire, and you can be as distant or as present as you will. For you it is possible to do anything; the only thing impossible for you to do is to do wrong, inasmuch as you are knowledge and justice and love.
THE END
Copyright 1974 by The Word Foundation, Inc.