The length of the span is predetermined so as to let the person do the work and pass through the events called for by his destiny.
Within the span he generates new thoughts, does or refuses to do the work, makes new destiny, and he puts off some minor events. In a general way the course of his life and the salient events, and the time within which he must finish, are laid out for him, but he has choice as to how he will act in details and with what mental attitude he will view these salient events.
The manner of death is physical destiny, and is already predetermined at the end of the preceding life.
There is one exception, suicide. The mere disposition to commit suicide is predetermined, but even in that case the man can choose whether or not he
will die by his own hand. He may have contemplated the act and refused to do it, but if he continues to think and plan about suicide, the predetermined tendency together with his continued thinking will be exteriorized in the act of self-murder.
By committing suicide one does not escape from the allotted span of life or from the sorrow, dread, pain or disgrace he feared to endure by living on.
Death by one's own hand is not like the ordinary case of dying. In the case of self-murder the doer remains with the breath-form in the radiant state of the physical plane, experiencing all it dreaded to meet in life, and does not go into the after-death states until after the allotted span of life ends.
In the next life on earth he will have the same inclination to commit suicide, but coupled with that will be a dread of it. In that life he is liable to be murdered.
In no case can he escape by suicide that which he feared to suffer. The conditions from which he sought escape will confront him again, because they are exteriorizations of his own thoughts.
The physical body is the fulcrum on which thoughts are balanced. It is without feeling, almost as dead in life as it is after death. Decay, impermanence and
corruption are almost synonymous with the human body. It is the sediment of all the worlds, their dregs and lees. The doer during its life on earth feels and desires through such a body, and after death it is confronted with what it has felt and desired through the body during life.
The activity and vigor, the breath and life of the body, are due to the presence of the doer. The involuntary functions of the body continue only as long
as the doer and its breath-form inhabit it. What seems to be a lasting body is a moving mass, constantly changing, always coming and going and held in visibility only while it is in passage through the shape of the astral body, according to the breath-form.
A human body, however, is the thing on which all is set, around which all turns, upon which all that the doer longs for and hopes to have or to be is centered. Though a human body has no permanence or existence in itself, by means of it the doer is put into touch with matter of the worlds and even of the spheres.
By means of such a body the doer takes form, learns what its feelings and desires are and how to refine them, and what the feelings of others are and how to feel with them. By means of this body the doer learns how to think.
