11 Thoughts Death and Birth

The thoughts summarized at moment of death. Events determined then, for the next life. The flare-up in classic Greece. Something about the Jews. The stamp of a God at birth. Family. The sex. Cause of changing the sex.

The factors which affect the new human being during his life are of two classes.

• In one class are some of the thoughts of the doer portion now embodied which it had had in its previous life;
• in the other are thoughts of the present life.

The thoughts of a life are totalled at death as the ruling thought.

• The summary is like that at the end of a book or the totals of a business at the end of a year.
• The totalled thoughts of the past life form a sketchy program for the next life.
• Some of its incidents are determined definitely, others are open.

At the moment of death all thoughts and acts of the past life are reviewed and comprehended by the departing doer portion, which so confirms the dominating thought. Thereby are fixed the outstanding and some of the minor incidents of the coming life.

These irrevocable destinies have become such either by persistent thinking on and wishing for them,
or because they are thoughts the exteriorizations of which as destiny can be postponed no longer,
or because they are continuations of conditions, mostly oppressive, to which one has submitted slothfully without sufficient effort to get out of them.

The advent of these events has become gradually predestinate during the course of the past life, and at the moment of death the doer acknowledges them and binds itself.

Among the events determined at the moment of death as preordained for the next life of the same doer portion are

• the time when that life will begin, the race, the country and the nationality,
• the kind of family in which the body will be born, the sex,
• the kind of body, the physical heredity, inherent manners,
• the chief mundane occupations, particular diseases, some accidents,
• the critical events and the time and nature of death.

These inevitable happenings are marked on the aia and are, especially where they are involved with the actions of several or many, marshalled in physical
place and time by upper elementals under the direction of Intelligences and complete Triune Selves.

At the death of the body are determined the beginning and the end of the next life on earth.

• This does not mean that the hour, day and year are fixed according to reckoning by any earthly calendar.
• Time as measured by a calendar does not apply to the doer.
• Time applies to nature. There time is the change of units or of masses of units in their relation to each other.

The sequence of changes in the doer is measured by accomplishment.

• There is a relationship between nature time, and the accomplishment of changes in the doer.
• The arrival at accomplishment coincides with a date in the earthly calendar.
• This means that the predestined events must have occurred before death can take place and that a certain course must have been completed by the doer portion before the next life begins.

The race, country, nationality and religion are predestined.

• The symbolic lines on the aia which are confirmed at the time of death, call for certain characteristics which will appear in the traits of a race and a nationality and through birth in a certain country.
• The fundamental selfishness and sloth of human beings find expression in different development through different races.
• The ways of the development are traits of character.
• According to them humans are grouped in races; these are specialized in nationalities; and the latter are modified by soil, climate and environment.

Often these traits are not apparent, nevertheless they are present to a greater or lesser degree.
In many periods distinctions are not as marked as in others or they amalgamate, as social differences are sometimes displayed by costumes and at other times lack these tokens. However, under the outward level an interior distinction persists in races as in social layers. The Latin race is different from the Celtic and the Semitic. Birth on a hillside, a plain or on the shore, in a secluded region or in one which is a national capital further modifies the racial and national traits.

People have not wished for the particular racial condition into which they are born.

• Probably they did not consider the matter.
• What brought them in was their nature-imagination, their passive thinking. Of the probable effects of these they did not think.
• Self-suggestion developed into active thinking and that left its record for the future on the aia.
• Fundamental to the thinking were certain longings, feelings and desires.
• These and the manner of their expression are of the essence of a race.
• The thinking formerly cast the desires into a certain mold that represented the characteristics of the race with its specifications and modifications.
• The cryptic lines on the aia were made from that mold and are the prescription which elementals later work out in physical matter when they build the new body in the country of its birth.

A factor which draws the doer especially into an inferior or oppressed race, are thoughts leading to sexual relations with members of that race or to oppression, persecution or personal antagonism.

• Such re-existences are usually felt as oppressive and unjust, because the persons do not feel themselves to be really of the race.
• Persons who naturally belong to a derided race or mixture are happy in it because they belong there and because it expresses their feelings and desires. Sometimes one who has oppressed or injured a race will be born into it to atone by endeavors to improve its condition.
• Sometimes one whose antagonism has brought him into a race is made to feel the feelings of it and so is forced to put himself into the position he did not
• formerly understand.

Re-existences caused by these retributive principles last until the doers suffering from them have learned.

Doers re-exist in a race as long as their feelings and desires and the manners of expressing them are suitably externalized in the peculiarities of the race.

• Doers leave a race when it no longer enables them to exhibit this interior nature and then they appear in a fitting race.
• Doers appearing in the bodies of an abandoned race and country are usually different in quality from those who formerly dwelt in the bodies of that race.
• This is one reason why races seem to rise and fall. The fact is that doers of different character come in.

A remarkable flare-up of a race may be seen in classic Greece. There a stock from an ancient period had lapsed into a common people. But some of them had a tendency to rise. Among them suddenly appeared a few re-existing doers from the prehistoric period of glory, and they made classic Greece.

Usually degradation and mixing with others cause the disappearance of nations and races.

• The persons who live in certain localities are therefore often quite different from their ancestors and belong to a different race, even though features and some
• habits survive.
• So the doers of the ancient Egyptians were not the same doers as those that inhabit the bodies now born as Egyptians.
• It is slightly different with India. The doers that lived in bodies in ancient India have largely suspended their re-existences there and may not re-exist at all, until a new race appears for them. Most of those of the ancient race that still re-exist in India have debased themselves by an exalted selfishness and so, without the Light of the past, live in degraded forms. But the people of India are of the same races as were those doers who had knowledge. In this respect they are distinguished from the Egyptians.

A race that has survived almost unchanged from a distant past is the Jewish.

• It lives on because the desires of the doers re-existing in it were and are for the earth and things of the earth.
• The race as a whole worships one of the earth spirits as its God, with more or less loyalty.
• Therefore money, things of earthly value and fecundity, together with sensuous enjoyment of them, are its rewards from the God it worships.
• Its desires and thinking for these things are undivided.
• Its desires compelling the thinking are the worship.
• Other earth races have looked to a heaven, and to honor, valor and purity as ends in themselves and so have divided their desires and therefore have not worshipped the earth god with all their heart and desire and mind as the Jews have sometimes done.
• Not only does this earth god reward them for their worship, but it avenges them.
• The racial traits are so strong because of this worship, that they persist without a racial country and without subdivisions into the usual racial nationalities. Jews take the nationality of that country in which they live.
• This shows that their God is no longer local as tribal spirits usually are, but is of a somewhat universal character.
• This spirit has many tribes, but that tribe which remains while others disappear is the one that is closest to the earth and single in its worship of the things of the earth, procreation, money and possessions.

Races persist, increase or disappear in accordance with the feelings and desires and the ideals or ambitions of the people.

• Unless there is a race for them to come into, doers do not re-exist as a race. Only here and there are exceptions to be found.
• The historic age is not one in which the more enlightened doers can be embodied.
• The physical bodies furnished by any of the historical races have not been fit habitations.
• If from the enlightened doers one does re-exist, it finds itself in a hostile world. An instance is that of Socrates.

On the one hand the feelings and desires of certain doers predestinate them for certain races and nationalities, on the other there are definite nature ghosts, entities made up chiefly of any one of the four elements, which hold doers in these races and to nature and so mark their bodies at birth.

• These ghosts are racial and national. An outstanding instance is the Jewish God.
• They derive their strength from the collective desire of the doers, which gives to the nature-matter individual existence as a deity.
• These gods are perpetuated by the Light they get from doers, which send it out while worshipping them as racial gods.
• Often these gods receive a sacerdotal worship at the same time and so are believed to be the gods of particular religions as well as the gods of certain races.

As the existence of these gods depends on the worship, belief, desire and service of the doers of a race or a religion they hold the doers and urge them in all
the various conditions that arouse feeling, stimulate desire and draw out the Light of the Intelligences from the doers.

Even in historical times these gods have been the causes of cupidity and war, subjugation and oppression.

• Sometimes the reigns of kings and oligarchies, sometimes a rising of the slothful and at other times religious strife and persecution mark the activities of these gods among men.
• Behind the scenes these gods are created, changed and disappear as the races do before the scenes.
• During their lifetime, be it long or short, these gods are powerful beings and have a hold on the doers of their race and religion through feelings and desires.
• At the time of the death of the human devotee the ruling thought stamps the mark of these gods on the aia.
• That carries the mark after death, bears it at the new birth and stamps it on the breath-form.
• So Catholics and Jews are marked at birth as belonging to a certain religion.
• In the case of the Protestant sects the mark is not so strong, yet it is there.

Only the kind of family, usually not the particular one, into which the doer will be born is predestined.

• The religion, race and nationality are bestowed by birth in a family which has them.
• Ancestry furnishes an opportunity for breeding and manners, if the re-existing portion is to have them.
• The early influences of the family often affect behavior and speech throughout life.
• A family by its importance, wealth and ideals may furnish opportunities for development which in another family is stimulated by poverty and responsibility.

Formative influences come through birth in a family, whether they reach the child directly in the family or indirectly through persons with whom the family brings it into contact. Racial, national, and religious characteristics are distinguished in one's bearing, manners, conduct and general behavior.

Tendencies are developed or impeded by harsh treatment or by kindness, as the symbols of the breath-form call for.

• The heredity that brings the physical traits which are the exteriorizations of the child's own former thoughts, can come only through a family.
• A portion of the psychic disposition may be inherited in like manner from ancestors.
• The vocation and pursuits in life are often closely connected with the family in which the doer portion is born.
• An important aspect is that birth in a certain family often means access to or exclusion from a number of persons.

Usually the particular family is not predestined.

• But it is predestined when there is a strong destiny tie of love, hate or duty between the human beings who are so brought together as near relatives, so that they cohere until that which makes the tie is worn away.
• Or it may be that a family has characteristics which cannot be found elsewhere and which alone fulfill the requirements on the breath-form.

The active or the passive side of sex is predestined at the end of life, for the next life.

• The doer has no sex and the re-existing doer portion has none.
• The sex is of the physical body and carries with it the display of certain psychic qualities, just as it modifies the general outlines of the body as male or female. Of the twelve portions of the doer, six are desire and six are feeling.
• The male body is characteristic of and is determined by desire.
• The female body is characteristic of and is determined by feeling.
• The six desire portions re-exist successively in male bodies.
• Likewise, the six feeling portions re-exist in female bodies.
• The three parts of the Triune Self and three breaths are each active and passive, while each atmosphere is passive to the part and to the breath in the atmosphere.
• The three breaths are substantially these three parts in action.
• The positive and the negative portions of the doer as one entity are not male or female, and their functions could not be distinguished in that way;
• however the doer has both aspects undivided.
• The male and female sexes on the physical plane are exteriorizations of thought representing the dominance of the desire or of the feeling of the doer.

The sex organs demonstrate types of thinking, the geometrical symbols of which are the line and the circle.

• The line is a conveyor, and the circle a container.
• Out of many possible physical forms in which these symbols could manifest they appear as the male column and the female entrance, as the solid and the hollow column, and as the passage into the chamber.
• Thinking according to feeling or desire brings about these modifications of the universal types.

Men and women think according to the feeling and desire for the functions of their sex.

• Thinking pursuant to the desire for the function of the male generates a thought of the male sex, stamps the lines on the breath-form and so tends to determine the male sex.
• Thinking of the feeling of the functions of the female, generates a thought of the female sex, stamps the lines on the breath-form and so tends to determine the female sex.
• The cause of changing the sex in the next life of a re-existing portion is found in thinking subservient to the desire for and feeling of the opposite.
• The significant thinking is usually gradual and is done in consequence of a preponderance of feeling or of desire.
• The preponderance predisposes to thinking according to the corresponding type.

For instance, when the desire of the doer preponderates, the thinking will be according to the desire for the functions of the male and he will desire a woman as representing the feeling side in his psychic breath and will so determine the sex of his next body as male. In every case the development of the sex organs
takes place from the kidneys and adrenals.

On the common ground of the physical plane doer portions meet in physical bodies.

• These bodies are keyed to the sexes.
• As the doer portions go through life bound to such bodies they come into relations which constantly center around the male and female aspects of the bodies. Thereby those feelings and desires are stimulated by which the human beings unconsciously mark and determine the relations which exist between them and the non-embodied portions.

The human with his false "I", thinks on subjects connected with the sexes.

• Nearly all thinking turns around clothes, appearance, money, attractiveness, amusement, society, art and religion, with a background of the sexes.
• The tendency in all this is to bring to human beings the sex that is not expressed in them.

When six consecutive portions of the doer have existed in male bodies, their experiences with the female sex have, by degrees, brought about changes in the relation of the factors that determine the sex.

There is a gradual change in the feelings and desires, and when enough pressure is exercised by the non-embodied portions of the doer, thinking begins to make sharp lines on the breath-form which call for a change of the sex of the body. If the lines have become sufficiently powerful at the time of death, the re-existing portion acknowledges them, and a change of sex at its next embodiment is unavoidable, provided destiny permits this.