This is somewhat like the ancestral line, and there are also reflections in the genes and chromosomes undetected by our scientists. The ancestral and reincarnational lines merge to some extent to form what we think of as our genetic patterns ahead of time, so to speak. Before this life we chose what we wished from those two main areas.

Reincarnational experience is also transmitted, then, and can be re-translated from a biological code-imprint into emotional awareness. However, as we are not our parents or our ancestors we are not our “reincarnational selves.”

We cannot say that our ancestors, like some strange plants,were growing toward what we are, or that we are the sum of their experiences. They were, they are, themselves. We cannot say that we are the sum of our past reincarnational lives either, and for the same reasons. We cut off the knowledge of oneself, and so divisions seem to occur. We are somewhat like a plant that recognizes only one of its leaves at a time. A leaf feels its deeper reality as a part of the plant, and adds to its own sense of continuity, and even to its own sense of individuality. But we often pretend that we are some odd dangling leaf, with no roots, growing without a plant to support us.

All of the leaves now growing on this plant could be thought of as counterparts of each other, each alive and individual in one time, each contributing yet facing in different directions. As one leaf falls another takes its place, until next year the whole plant, still living, will have a completely new set of leaves–future reincarnational selves of this batch.

We are not plants, but the analogy is a simple one.

There is a constant interaction in the plant, between its parts, that we do not perceive. The leaves now present are biologically valid, interrelating in our terms. Yet in time terms each leaf is also aware of the past history of the plant, and biologically they spring up from that “past.”

Each leaf seeks to express its leafhood as fully as possible. Leaves take in sun, which helps the plant itself grow (through photosynthesis). The development of the leaves, then, is very important to the plant’s own existence. The cells of the plant are kept in contact with the environment through the leaves’ experiences, and future probabilities are always taken into consideration. The smallest calculations involving light and dark are known. The life of the plant and its leaves cannot be separated.

The plant has its own “idea” of itself, in which each of its leaves has its part. Yet each leaf has the latent capacities of the whole plant. Root one, for instance, and a new plant will grow.

Selves have far greater freedom than leaves, but they can also root themselves of they choose–and they do. Reincarnational selves are like leaves that have left the plant, choosing a new medium of existence. In this analogy, the dropped leaves of the physical plant have fulfilled their own purpose to themselves as leaves, and to the plant. These selves, however, dropping from one branch of time,root themselves in another time and become new selves from which others will sprout.

The larger self, then seeds itself in time. In this process no identity is lost and no identity is the same, yet all are interrelated. So we can theoretically expand our consciousness to include the knowledge of our past lives, though those lives were ours and not ours. They have a common root, as next year’s leaves have a common root with the leaves now of the plant.

Such knowledge, however, would automatically affect those past lives. Ideas of cause and effect can hold us back here, because it seems to us that the leaves of next year come as an effect caused by this years’ leaves. To the plant and its innate creative pattern, however, all of its manifestations are one–and expression of itself, each portion, exists now. The same applies to the psyche. in that greater realm of reality there is creative interplay, and interrelationships between all aspects of selfhood.

In those terms, neutral data are not transferred through “living” vehicles. Whether physically materialized of not, knowledge is possessed by consciousness. It is always “individualized”, though not necessarily in our terms.

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 we do indeed carry within us, then, the memories of our particular ancestors. These form a partial basis for our subjective and physical existence, and provide the needed support for it.

Since one portion of our heritage is physical, in those terms, those memories can be translated again, back into emotional and psychological events, though usually they are not in our societies.

To that extent the so-called past experience of our ancestors and of our species is concurrent with our own, biologically speaking. That is but one line, however, covered by the chromosomes. We have “another line” of existence that also serves as a support for the one that we presently recognize. It includes other interweaving physical relationships that bind us with all others upon our planet at the same adjacent level of time. That is, to some extent or another we are related to all of those alive upon the planet. We are time contemporaries. We will have a far closer relationship with some than with others. Some will be our counterparts. Many people who tend to feel deeply about various aspects of their life might want to make a podcast on streaming platforms (with the help of reliable companies such as Lower Street) for their listeners, to share and understand how the human experience and living a shared life affects us all on this planet.

That said, a lot of the relationships we share in our lives may or may not be closer to us than family relationships, but psychically speaking they will share a certain kind of history with us. We will also be connected through the physical framework of the earth in the large give-and-take of its space-time scheme.

Even for that matter momentarily set aside so that other abilities and characteristics could emerge. The species sense of curiosity would not allow it to stay in any home territory for long, and so the sense of intimacy was purposely broken. It would become highly important again, however, when the planet was populated extensively, as it is now–only the original feeling of home area has to be extended over the face of the earth. The “absent” portions of the self are ready to emerge. The other, to us probable, lines of consciousness can now come into play.

These different lines of focus will each show us other aspects of our own reality, as individuals and as a species.

To a certain extent we do carry the knowledge of our forefathers within our [cells’] chromosomes, which present a pattern that is not rigid but flexible–one that in codified fashion endows us with the subjective living experience of those who, in our terms, have gone before. Some very old cultures have been aware of this. 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– while realizing that in those terms he or she would contribute as well as the generation past.

The animals were also accepted in the natural philosophy of selfhood as the individual plainly saw the living quality of consciousness. The characteristics of the animals were understood to continue “life,” adding their qualities to the experience of the self in a new way.

The Human body would be used in earth’s great husbandry as, from it, dying and decaying new forms would arise. This was a give-and-take in which for instance, a jungle neighborhood was truly home, and all was a portion of the self psychically, spiritually, and physically.

Let those who will, laugh at tales of spirits turning into the trees–a simplistic theory, certainly, yet a symbolic statement in such societies: The dead were buried at home in the same close territory, to form in later times the very composition of the ground upon which religions grew. Again, our limited concepts of selfhood make what I am saying difficult for us to perceive.

I am not saying, that the living consciousness of each individual returned to the earth literally, but that the physical material permeated and tamped with that consciousness did, and does. Even the cells retain knowledge of all of their affiliations. In physical terms the consciousness that we understand is based upon this.

Selfhood is poorer when it does not at least intuitively understand this heritage.

In other words, our accepted concepts of selfhood would disappear if we ever allowed any significant subjective experience to intrude. “The Absent Self”– the absent or unknown self– is the portion of our own existence that we do not ordinarily perceive or accept, though there is within us a longing for it.

The breaking up of theories that have been long accepted, but that prevent us from perceiving the powerful nature of those absent portions of the self. As we focus upon certain details from a larger field of physical reality, so then we focus upon only the small portion of oneself that we consider “real.”

We carry within us, the deep knowledge of experience that in our terms would be prior, yet in our cells and our own deeper mind such information is current.