THINKING AND DESTINY

Harold W. Percival

CHAPTER VI

PSYCHIC DESTINY

Section 23

Heaven is a reality. Re-existence of the succeeding doer portion.

On the light plane the doer meets and feels the presence of what is to it an angel. It becomes one with that angel and finds itself in heaven (Fig. V-D). When the doer parted from its breath-form and during the doer’s struggle with its desires before it separated from them, the breath-form seemed to dissolve. The struggle of the doer was also a purification of the breath-form, and a burning away from it of all that suffering could dissolve or burn away, and then the breath-form rose to the light plane of the physical world. There it awaited and met the doer and was the purified angelic being, the doer’s own glorified form, his breath-form, which the doer took on and with which it entered heaven.

In heaven the doer is a glorified being; it has its breath-form and senses and can see, hear, taste, smell and touch. It continues its earth life as if there had never been any interruption. But the life is idealized. No sins, no trouble, no sorrow, no poverty, no loss, no sickness, no death; no anger, no greed, no envy and no selfishness will be found in heaven. Heaven is a state of happiness and everything that mars unalloyed happiness is absent. There is no sex, no thought of sex; no shame and nothing to be ashamed of. The relations of sweethearts, husbands and wives are there, but idealized. Carnal thoughts, sensuality and dross were burned off in hell. Mothers have their children, whom they lost on earth. It seems as if there had never been any loss. Friends find their friends; there are no enemies. The doers in heaven carry on the occupations they had on earth, but only if their occupations were ideals to them. The good country priest or pastor is the shepherd of his flock and takes care of them as he did on earth; the kindly physician is happy because of the recovery of his patients. The chemist discovers new things which he sees are of benefit to the people. The statesman works in his ideal government. All occupations are free from the thought of gain through loss by others; the heavenly joy lies in the service which is rendered.

There is no sleep, no darkness and no weariness in heaven. There is no eating and drinking for its own sake. There may be eating and drinking if that was a part of the ideal occupation, as a mother’s or a host’s preparations to give enjoyment to others.

There are rivers, beautiful scenes, flowers and verdure, if the doer longed for them. There are lights, jewels, decorations and heavenly music for those whom this will make happy. The dress of the beings in heaven is as they conceived it as their ideal dress, while they were on earth. The doers in heaven have their religion in heaven if they had it on earth, purified from sordidness, commercialism, bigotry and fanaticism. God will be there in heaven in whatever form he was conceived on earth and the Christ and saints and angels, all will be in heaven as they were believed in on earth, but in an idealized, glorified, exalted state.

There is nothing tame, colorless or inane about heaven. The pulse of life and enjoyment runs higher than it does on earth, for there are no drawbacks or obstacles to lessen enjoyment. In life on earth things are so mixed that there is usually some interference with full enjoyment, but in heaven the interfering sentiments are screened off from the doer, therefore the feelings, affections and joys in heaven are keener and more alive than on earth. These are things the doer longed for, yet they could not be realized because of impediments on earth. Now, while it rests in heaven, the realization of every good thing it thought or worked for, comes without drawbacks.

Heavenly enjoyment is the result of what the doer thought and did in the earth life. Nothing is added to what the doer wished for or aspired to while on earth. The doer learns nothing new in heaven; the earth and the earth only is the place for learning, because there all the spheres and worlds intermingle on the physical plane.

Heaven is not a mere belief, a fancy, a beautiful mirage. It is nearer to reality than anything on earth. A doer interprets as realities that which it is thinking and experiencing at the time and under the conditions in which the doer is.

On earth there are flesh and blood relations between the doer in its body and parents, husband, wife or child; and relations of friend, neighbor or acquaintance; and relations to those whom one sees, hears about, reads about and thinks about. These relations make up the physical world while the doer is on earth. They are not merely physical, they are psychic, and some may be mental. After death the physical world and the physical body with its physical atmosphere have gone; in hell the grosser, sinful feelings have been burned out, but the relationships remain. When the grossness has been removed and the doer enters heaven, the relationships which have remained with the doer are realities to it, and are more real than they were on earth.

The Intelligence has no heaven as has the doer, yet there would be no heaven for the doer if the Light of the Intelligence did not fill heaven. Heaven is a part of the psychic atmosphere of the doer, at any rate for the vast majority of doers. This part was unmanifested during earth life. During life the Light of the Intelligence is not in the psychic atmosphere, but when the doer is in the heaven state the Light of the Intelligence is there. The doer in heaven is back in its original happy state for which it longed during its earth life.

Heaven is not a community heaven, or a theological heaven. It would be impossible as a community heaven, because no two heavens could be alike. The ideals of earth life are different to everyone, and although each one includes many others in his ideals, his ideals of them to him are different from their ideals concerning themselves. If they were to carry out their ideals, that would interfere with the carrying out of his, and then there would be no heaven for him; but there would be the discords of earth. In order for each to be in heaven, it is necessary that it should be in his own heaven and not in that of someone else, because then neither would have one. But each can be in the other’s heaven according to the ideals of that other.

Heaven is not made up of successive scenes and events, of growing and aging, of changes, of beginnings and endings. Heaven is a composite of all these. It would not be heaven if there were a succession of changes in people or events. The changes are there, but they are there only in the composite, which is a whole. So a mother would not see or think of her son as the baby, the child, the bridegroom, the head of the family and the man of affairs, but she would see him as a composite of all these. The absence of change makes heaven completeness and eternity.

There is no time in heaven. Heaven is an eternity. There is no time and no eternity in the doer itself, but only in so far as it sees time and eternity in nature.

The doer is in its psychic atmosphere at all times, in life and after death, but it is conscious in one part during life and in another after death. During life it has a mixed hell and heaven; after death there is a sorting out and a separation of the doer from its garment of lower feelings and desires, and a passing in a purified state to its own heaven, all within its own psychic atmosphere. In rare cases it may also pass into its mental atmosphere and enjoy a mental heaven in the contemplation of mental problems.

The three atmospheres of the Triune Self (Fig. V-B) are within the sphere of its Intelligence, and the Intelligence by its Light brings about all these experiences. Whatever the doer’s ideal as to time or eternity had been on earth, will be carried out in heaven. If one believes that heaven is eternal and without an end, it will be so to the doer. To those who do not pay much attention to the thought of heaven, as such, their ideals make their heaven.

There is an end to heaven for every doer when it has lived out in heaven all the ideals it had on earth. Then there comes a state of sweet rest without activities and without any appearance of ending. The doer separates from its breath-form as it did in deep sleep on earth and in the second stage of purification, and remains in its psychic atmosphere until it is again to return to earth. Gradually it passes from the form world to the light plane of the physical—the Light of its Intelligence is obscured by the physical world and that doer portion is in a state of forgetfulness.

When the breath-form with the four senses parted from the doer, the breath was disunited from the form and the senses were loosed. The four elemental beings which had served as the senses then returned to their respective elements and acted with the elemental races. The doer portion remains in the state of rest until each other doer portion has lived its life on earth, each in its turn. Then when the time of its appearance in a human body fits in with the lives of those whom it has to meet, the form of the breath-form is activated by the aia which causes the breath-form to enter the atmospheres of the future parents; the form enters the mother and then or later bonds the seed with the soil. Then elemental beings are summoned in their order and build up and fill out the astral, then the airy, the fluid and the solid parts of the fourfold physical body, in fetal development, according to the model of the astral, furnished by the form of the breath-form. The summons is answered by the different entities in nature, whether they are in the four elements, or in vegetable or animal bodies. The animal feelings and desires themselves begin to come in from nature with the beginning of placental development. They are the same feelings and desires with which the doer struggled and which were loosened by its suffering in hell and from which the doer separated when it separated from its breath-form. These feelings and desires, of which the new breath-form bears a symbolic record, are built into the astral body accordingly. With these feelings and desires the doer must deal again at the seasons when they manifest in later life.

The fetus gradually develops and is prepared for birth. It waits for the right swing of the breath—this may be for hours or for days or weeks—and is then born into the world. Up to the time of birth the fetus has no distinctive physical atmosphere. Only the form of the breath-form is in the fetus. The fetus is developed in the mother’s physical atmosphere. The breath of the breath-form enters with the intake of the breath into its form as the breath-form, and the breath-form is then the living soul of the newborn infant body. With the intake the physiological change of breathing takes place. Then the infant begins to live in its own physical atmosphere. Later, the doer portion enters and lives in the body, and the three atmospheres of the Triune Self penetrate and surround the physical atmosphere of the child.

The desire body or cloak of vices which rolled away from the doer when it entered heaven, may have passed through many conditions, but it awaits the doer and oozes or is breathed into the physical body at a later period of life.

This is the course of the doer from the time of death to the beginning of re-existence of the succeeding doer portion on earth. Ancient initiations related to this course of the doer in the after death states. Some initiations were into metempsychosis only, some were into the heaven period and others included transmigration and resurrection.

There is, and has been for ages, much confusion about such terms as reincarnation, transmigration, and metempsychosis. They have been used as synonyms, but while they have been related they mark twelve different stages in the history of the doer and of the entities composing the body, from the time of the death of the body until the doer returns to earth.

Metempsychosis comprises certain after death states and nothing else, namely, the states of the doer after death while it goes through its changes, struggles and purification before its heaven period begins. Transmigration is to be understood in three aspects: the wandering of the feelings and the desires and of the units of matter through different worlds and the kingdoms of nature, after death; the coming together of some of them and their growing into a human body after the form of the breath-form begins to glow; and the passage of the fourfold physical body from the time of conception, through the mineral, vegetable and animal forms into the human form of the fetus. Re-existence, heretofore called reincarnation, is the return of the doer portion into a human body made up from elementals that composed the body in the past life on earth. It is the doer portion that re-exists. Resurrection—incorrectly used with regard to the doer—is its coming into and taking on again the breath-form with the four senses and a fourfold physical body, after which the doer re-exists. Resurrection applies: first, to the fleshly body in so far as the breath-form calls and draws together the compositor units which made up the body in the former life; and, second, to the raising of the breath-form when it will have been regenerated and restored to its original and perfect form in a perfect physical body.

The time between re-existences varies with the needs of the doer, with the parts it has to take in the succeeding life, with the readiness of the world to let it play those parts and with the coming of other doers it has to meet on earth. A doer portion may go through all the after death states and be reborn on earth within a few hundred years, or not until a thousand or many thousand earthly years have elapsed. There is no fixed period, nor any average period at which a doer portion will return to earth. Within one year of earth time the doer may go through what by its feeling and measurement of time would be countless years or an eternity. Indeed, the period in heaven is always an eternity to the doer, because there is no beginning and no end; beginning and end are united in completeness.

Here has been given an outline of the passage of a portion of the average doer through the after death states. This outline is simplified. Complications, variations and special cases have been omitted, so as not to disturb the plainness. It can be compared to a brief description of the life of man on earth; what would be true of one would be in a measure true of all.