1 result for (book:ur2 AND session:731 AND stemmed:subject)
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
In other words, your accepted concepts of selfhood would disappear if you ever allowed any significant subjective experience to intrude. “The Absent Self” — the absent or unknown self — is the portion of your own existence that you do not ordinarily perceive or accept, though there is within you a longing for it.
[... 2 paragraphs ...]
Give us a moment … Selfhood overspills with great luxurious outcroppings, yet you jealously guard against such creativity. To a certain extent you do carry the knowledge of your forefathers within your [cells’] chromosomes,1 which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible — one that in codified fashion endows you with the subjective living experience of those who, in your terms, have gone before. As Ruburt recently suspected, some very old cultures have been aware of this.2 Period. While being independent individuals their members also identified with their ancestors to some extent, accepting them as portions of their selfhoods. This does not mean that the individual self was less, but was more aware of its own reality. A completely different kind of focus was presented, in which the ancestors were understood to contribute to the “new” experience of the living; one in which the physically focused consciousness clearly saw itself as perceiving the world for itself, but also for all of those who had gone before — (gradually louder for emphasis:) while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generations past.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
Give us a moment … The information carried by the chromosomes is not general, but highly specific. It is codified data (itself alive) that contains within it the essence of ancestral knowledge — change that to ancestral experience — of specific ancestral experience. Biologically you do indeed carry within you, then, the memories of your particular ancestors. These form a partial basis for your subjective and physical existence, and provide the needed support for it.
[... 37 paragraphs ...]