All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.
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Context: Standing opens his memoir by describing a lifelong sense of having been other people.
Source: Chapter I
Flesh is a cheap, vain thing. Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing that abides and survives.
It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly different from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion. Life persists. Life is the thread of fire that persists through all…
The spirit is the reality that endures. I am spirit, and I endure. … Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on its forms perishes with the forms.
I have lived many lives through the long ages. Man, the individual, has made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years. I affirm this absolutely. … Under his thin skin of morality which he has…
There is no death. Life is spirit, and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes … Spirit alone endures and continues to build upon itself through successive and endless incarnations as it…