1 result for (book:ur1 AND session:681 AND stemmed:histori)
[... 13 paragraphs ...]
In the same way that you latch upon one personal biological history, you latch upon but one mass earth history. Others go on about you all the time, and other probable selves of your own experience their “histories” parallel to yours. In practical terms of sense data, those worlds do not meet. In deeper terms they coincide. Any of the infinite number of events that could have happened to you and Ruburt [do] happen. Your attention span simply does not include such activity.
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
(Pause at 10:36.) Ruburt is at this moment feeling massive.* He is experiencing several things. The inner cellular body consciousness feels itself massive, while to you cells are minute. The sounds of the package, for example (as Seth, Jane crumpled an empty cigarette package), or the fingernails across the table (demonstrated), are magnified, for in the cellular world they are an important outside-the-self cosmic event — messages of great importance. The cellular consciousness experiences itself as eternal, though to you the cells have a brief life. But those cells are aware of the body’s history, in your terms, and in a much more familiar fashion than you are aware of the earth’s history.
The cells are also aware of probabilities in a more familiar fashion than you are, as they manipulate the past and future history of the body. Ruburt now, again, is experiencing massiveness, as in your idea of probabilities the cellular structure feels its vast endurance. Working with events not even real to you, it produces a physical structure that maintains identity and predictability out of a vastly creative network. That network is unpredictable, yet from it Ruburt can predictably put ashes into that shell. (Jane held up her favorite ashtray, the abalone shell we’d found in Baja California in 1958, and tapped some ashes into it from her cigarette.) The predictability of that gesture rests upon the basis of an unpredictability, in which multitudinous other actions could have occurred, and in other realities do occur.
[... 53 paragraphs ...]