Thinking And Destiny

Howard Percival's Book "Thinking And Destiny" is one of the most challenging books I have read. In this blog, I would like to share parts of his book and open up a discussion about his work.

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

This first chapter of Thinking and Destiny is intended to introduce to you only a few of the
subjects that the book deals with. Many of the subjects will seem strange. Some of them
may be startling. You may find that they all encourage thoughtful consideration. As you
become familiar with the thought, and think your way through the book, you will find that it
becomes increasingly clear, and that you are in process of developing an understanding of certain
fundamental but heretofore mysterious facts of life--and particularly about yourself.
The book explains the purpose of life. That purpose is not merely to find happiness, either
here or hereafter. Neither is it to "save" one's soul. The real purpose of life, the purpose that will
satisfy both sense and reason, is this: that each one of us will be progressively conscious in ever
higher degrees in being conscious; that is, conscious of nature, and in and through and beyond
nature. By nature is meant all that one can be made conscious of through the senses.
The book also introduces you to yourself. It brings you the message about yourself: your
mysterious self that inhabits your body. Perhaps you have always identified yourself with and as
your body; and when you try to think of yourself you therefore think of your bodily mechanism.
By force of habit you have spoken of your body as "I", as "myself". You are accustomed to use
such expressions as "when I was born," and "when I die"; and "I saw myself in the glass," and "I
rested myself," "I cut myself," and so on, when in reality it is your body that you speak of. To
understand what you are you must first see clearly the distinction between yourself and the body
you live in. The fact that you use the term "my body" as readily as you use any of those just
quoted would suggest that you are not altogether unprepared to make this important distinction.
You should know that you are not your body; you should know that your body is not you.
You should know this because, when you think about it, you realize that your body is very
different today from what it was when, in childhood, you first became conscious of it. During the
years that you have lived in your body you have been aware that it has been changing: in its
passing through its childhood and adolescence and youth, and into its present condition, it has
changed greatly. And you recognize that as your body has matured there have been gradual
changes in your view of the world and your attitude toward life. But throughout these changes
you have remained you: that is, you have been conscious of yourself as being the same self, the
identical I, all the while. Your reflection on this simple truth compels you to realize that you
definitely are not and cannot be your body; rather, that your body is a physical organism that you
live in; a living nature mechanism that you are operating; an animal that you are trying to
understand, to train and master.
You know how your body came into this world; but how you came into your body you do not
know. You did not come into it until some time after it was born; a year, perhaps, or several
years; but of this fact you know little or nothing, because your memory of your body began only
after you had come into your body. You know something about the material of which your everchanging
body is composed; but what it is that you are you do not know; you are not yet
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conscious as what you are in your body. You know the name by which your body is distinguished
from the bodies of others; and this you have learned to think of as your name. What is important
is, that you should know, not who you are as a personality, but what you are as an individual--
conscious of yourself, but not yet conscious as yourself, an unbroken identity. You know that
your body lives, and you quite reasonably expect that it will die; for it is a fact that every living
human body dies in time. Your body had a beginning, and it will have an end; and from beginning
to end it is subject to the laws of the world of phenomena, of change, of time. You, however, are
not in the same way subject to the laws that affect your body.Although your body changes the
material of which it is composed oftener than you change the costumes with which you clothe it,
your identity does not change. You are ever the same you.
As you ponder these truths you find that, however you might try, you cannot think that you
yourself will ever come to an end, any more than you can think that you yourself ever had a
beginning. This is because your identity is beginningless and endless; the real I, the Self that you
feel, is immortal and changeless, forever beyond the reach of the phenomena of change, of time,
of death. But what this your mysterious identity is, you do not know.
When you ask yourself, "What do I know that I am?" the presence of your identity will
eventually cause you to answer in some such manner as this: "Whatever it is that I am, I know
that at least I am conscious; I am conscious at least of being conscious." And continuing from this
fact you may say: "Therefore I am conscious that I am. I am conscious, moreover, that I am I; and
that I am no other. I am conscious that this my identity that I am conscious of--this distinct I-ness
and selfness that I clearly feel--does not change throughout my life, though everything else that I
am conscious of seems to be in a state of constant change." Proceeding from this you may say: "I
do not yet know what this mysterious unchanging I is; but I am conscious that in this human
body, of which I am conscious during my waking hours, there is something which is conscious;
something that feels and desires and thinks, but that does not change; a conscious something that
wills and impels this body to act, yet obviously is not the body. Clearly this conscious something,
whatever it is, is myself."
Thus, by thinking, you come to regard yourself no longer as a body bearing a name and
certain other distinguishing features, but as the conscious self in the body. The conscious self in
the body is called, in this book, the doer-in-the-body. The doer-in-the-body is the subject with
which the book is particularly concerned. You therefore will find it helpful, as you read the book,
to think of yourself as an embodied doer; to look upon yourself as an immortal doer in a human
body. As you learn to think of yourself as a doer, as the doer in your body, you will be taking an
important step toward understanding the mystery of yourself and of others.
You are aware of your body, and of all else that is of nature, by means of the senses. It is only
by means of your body senses that you are able at all to function in the physical world. You
function by thinking. Your thinking is prompted by your feeling and your desire. Your feeling and
desiring and thinking invariably manifest in bodily activity; physical activity is merely the
expression, the exteriorization, of your inner activity. Your body with its senses is the instrument,
the mechanism, which is impelled by your feeling and desire; it is your individual nature machine.
Your senses are living beings; invisible units of nature-matter; these start forces that
permeate the entire structure of your body; they are entities which, though unintelligent, are
conscious as their functions. Your senses serve as the centers, the transmitters of impressions
between the objects of nature and the human machine that you are operating. The senses are
nature's ambassadors to your court. Your body and its senses have no power of voluntary
functioning; no more than your glove through which you are able to feel and act. Rather, that
power is you, the operator, the conscious self, the embodied doer.
Without you, the doer, the machine cannot accomplish anything. The involuntary activities of
your body--the work of building, maintenance, tissue repair, and so forth--are carried on
automatically by the individual breathing machine as it functions for and in conjunction with the
great nature machine of change. This routine work of nature in your body is being constantly
interfered with, however, by your unbalanced and irregular thinking: the work is marred and
nullified to the degree that you cause destructive and unbalancing bodily tension by allowing your
feelings and desires to act without your conscious control. Therefore, in order that nature might be
allowed to recondition your machine without the interference of your thoughts and emotions, it is
provided that you shall periodically let go of it; nature in your body provides that the bond which
holds you and the senses together is at times relaxed, partially or completely. This relaxation or
letting go of the senses is sleep.
While your body sleeps you are out of touch with it; in a certain sense you are away from it.
But each time you awaken your body you are immediately conscious of being the selfsame "I"
that you were before you left your body in sleep. Your body, whether awake or asleep, is not
conscious of anything, ever. That which is conscious, that which thinks, is you yourself, the doer
that is in your body. This becomes apparent when you consider that you do not think while your
body is asleep; at least, if you do think during the period of sleep you do not know or remember,
when you awaken your body senses, what you have been thinking.
Sleep is either deep or dream. Deep sleep is the state in which you withdraw into yourself,
and in which you are out of touch with the senses; it is the state in which the senses have stopped
functioning as the result of having been disconnected from the power by which they function,
which power is you, the doer. Dream is the state of partial detachment; the state in which your
senses are turned from the outer objects of nature to function inwardly in nature, acting in relation
to the subjects of the objects that are perceived during wakefulness. When, after a period of deep
sleep, you re-enter your body, you at once awaken the senses and begin to function through them
again as the intelligent operator of your machine, ever thinking, speaking, and acting as the
feeling-and-desire which you are. And from lifelong habit you immediately identify yourself as
and with your body: "I have been asleep," you say; "now I am awake."
But in your body and out of your body, alternately awake and asleep day after day; through
life and through death, and through the states after death; and from life to life through all your
lives--your identity and your feeling of identity persist. Your identity is a very real thing, and
always a presence with you; but it is a mystery which one's intellect cannot comprehend. Though
it cannot be apprehended by the senses you are nevertheless conscious of its presence. You are
conscious of it as a feeling; you have a feeling of identity; a feeling of I-ness, of selfness; you feel,
without question or rationalizing, that you are a distinct identical self which persists through life.
This feeling of the presence of your identity is so definite that you cannot think that the you
in your body ever could be any other than yourself; you know that you are always the same you,
continuously the same self, the same doer. When you lay your body to rest and sleep you cannot
think that your identity will come to an end after you relax your hold on your body and let go; you
fully expect that when you again become conscious in your body and begin a new day of activity
in it, you will still be the same you, the same self, the same doer.
As with sleep, so with death. Death is but a prolonged sleep, a temporary retirement from this
human world. If at the moment of death you are conscious of your feeling of I-ness, of selfness,
you will at the same time be conscious that the long sleep of death will not affect the continuity of
your identity any more than your nightly sleep affects it. You will feel that through the unknown
future you are going to continue, even as you have continued day after day through the life that is
just ending. This self, this you, which is conscious throughout your present life, is the same self,
the same you, that was similarly conscious of continuing day after day through each of your
former lives.
Although your long past is a mystery to you now, your previous lives on earth are no greater
wonder than is this present life. Every morning there is the mystery of coming back to your
sleeping body from you-do-not-know-where, getting into it by way of you-do-not-know-how, and
again becoming conscious of this world of birth and death and time. But this has occurred so
often, has long been so natural, that it does not seem to be a mystery; it is a commonplace
occurrence. Yet it is virtually no different from the procedure that you go through when, at the
beginning of each re-existence, you enter a new body that has been formed for you by nature,
trained and made ready by your parents or guardians as your new residence in the world, a new
mask as a personality.
A personality is the persona, mask, through which the actor, the doer, speaks. It is therefore
more than the body. To be a personality the human body must be made awake by the presence of
the doer in it. In the ever-changing drama of life the doer takes on and wears a personality, and
through it acts and speaks as it plays its part. As a personality the doer thinks of itself as the
personality; that is, the masquerader thinks of itself as the part that it plays, and is forgetful of
itself as the conscious immortal self in the mask.
It is necessary to understand about re-existence and destiny, else it is impossible to account
for the differences in human nature and character. To assert that the inequalities of birth and
station, of wealth and poverty, health and sickness, result from accident or chance is an affront to
law and justice. Moreover, to attribute intelligence, genius, inventiveness, gifts, faculties, powers,
virtue; or, ignorance, ineptitude, weakness, sloth, vice, and the greatness or smallness of character
in these, as coming from physical heredity, is opposed to sound sense and reason. Heredity has to
do with the body; but character is made by one's thinking. Law and justice do rule this world of
birth and death, else it could not continue in its courses; and law and justice prevail in human
affairs. But effect does not always immediately follow cause. Sowing is not immediately followed
by harvesting. Likewise, the results of an act or of a thought may not appear until after a long
intervening period. We cannot see what happens between the thought and an act and their results,
any more than we can see what is happening in the ground between seeding time and harvest; but
each self in a human body makes its own law as destiny by what it thinks and what it does, though
it may not be aware when it is prescribing the law; and it does not know just when the
prescription will be filled, as destiny, in the present or in a future life on earth.
A day and a lifetime are essentially the same; they are recurring periods of a continuous
existence in which the doer works out its destiny and balances its human account with life. Night
and death, too, are very much alike: when you slip away to let your body rest and sleep, you go
through an experience very similar to that which you go through when you leave the body at
death. Your nightly dreams, moreover, are to be compared with the after-death states through
which you regularly pass: both are phases of subjective activity of the doer; in both you live over
your waking thoughts and actions, your senses still functioning in nature, but in the interior states
of nature. And the nightly period of deep sleep, when the senses no longer function--the state of
forgetfulness in which there is no memory of anything--corresponds to the blank period in which
you wait on the threshold of the physical world until the moment you re-connect with your senses
in a new body of flesh: the infant body or child body that has been fashioned for you.
When you commence a new life you are conscious, as in a haze. You feel that you are a
distinct and definite something. This feeling of I-ness or selfness is probably the only real thing of
which you are conscious for a considerable time. All else is mystery. For a while you are
bewildered, perhaps even distressed, by your strange new body and unfamiliar surroundings. But
as you learn how to operate your body and use its senses you tend gradually to identify yourself
with it. Moreover, you are trained by other human beings to feel that your body is yourself; you
are made to feel that you are the body.
Accordingly, as you come more and more under the control of your body senses, you become
less and less conscious that you are something distinct from the body that you occupy. And as you
grow out of childhood you will lose touch with practically everything that is not perceptible to the
senses, or conceivable in terms of the senses; you will be mentally imprisoned in the physical
world, conscious only of phenomena, of illusion. Under these conditions you are necessarily a
lifelong mystery to yourself.