In the beginning of life the spirit is without form. A baby cannot make things, or create things, or wage war. Even if a baby had the physical strength, its spirit would not enable it to do these things. Yet even in a tiny baby the character, the spirit, is very much there although without form.
So I too will start with a spirit without form, and with the most elementary proposition of personal experience. Descartes, in his celebrated argument, “I think therefore I am”, postulated the personal consciousness as the one undoubted reality, beyond which other things did exist, but whose individual existence had to be verified by experience. He may well have been right; but one error that ordinary people tend to fall into, if they repeat Descartes' assertion to themselves, is that they tend to think of their consciousness as the one immutable, irrefrangible fact in their universe. Nothing could be further from the truth. And if we are honest with ourselves, we all know it isn't the truth; but we all tend to fall into the same error.
A man's consciousness is in a state of continuous change from birth to death; it is shaped by his heredity, his environment, and his upbringing. It is overshadowed by the opinions of his parents, (I do not mean his actual opinions…