Volume 4, Issue 4, page 8

ious details, or those details of which he
has taken conscious note. With his eyes
open or closed, he can go back over every
item to see what he has missed. In a dark
place where vision is wholly -- or seems to
be wholly -- shut out, he can still see the
world and experience it, because he remembers.

Again the inevitable question: How far
back can man remember? There are people
in the world who are certain they can remember past lives, not very convincing to
other people, of whom there may be even
greater numbers, who do not believe man
lives more than once in earthly form.
However, whether or not one believes in
reincarnation, one may in some fashion
recapture the past, even to the most distant mists of time. Man lies or sits or
stands on a rock, or a mountain. He knows
that generations or ages of men have sat
or stood on that rock or mountain before
him, thinking thoughts alien to or much
like his own. He knows, because he reasons, that the rock is untold ages older
than he is. He can "imagine" the rock
back to ages during which it wasn't rock
at all, but sand in a stream long since
seeped away, or lava in a heated world
beyond human enduring. He may not have
read of such ancient worlds, but physical
evidence proves that they were, or his
father and grandfather may have told him
of standing or sitting on, or leaning
against, this rock or this mountain, and
he knows he wasn't in the world when his
father was a boy, nor his father in the
world when his grandfather was. But to
some extent he has regained the world of
his father and grandfather and the misty
world beyond his current knowing. He may
glimpse the possibility of wholly regaining the past which, in what he may call
actuality, he did not know, does not know.
He begins to catch glimpses of a technique of regaining, of contacting, of
becoming increasingly aware of.

That which is, or ever has been, radiates something of itself into its environment, else nothing in that environment
would be aware of it, nothing entering
that environment would find it, and this
radiation has always taken place, has
never ended. It is an emanation in which
all of that object may be regained, all
of its story, its history.

Let man do the same thing with a tree,
a big tree. Most big trees are older than
the men who feel them, smell their fragrance, eat of their fruit, hear their
varied myriad whisperings, see their
tree-activities. Yet because man knows,
because he can find something of the history of the tree in its fruit, its nuts,
its leaves, in some or many parts of it,
he can recapitulate that tree, and all
trees because of it. Men have devoted
lives to this sort of recapitulation,
even of just one sort of tree.

On the rock, or on the mountain, man
S
d
is aware of the sky, the grass, the
smaller rocks, smaller mountains, the
winds against his face and thru his hair;
he can close his eyes as he stands, and
fly or fall, in his imagination. He can
become a soaring bird, an angel, a god to
whom space is not to be feared.

And everything, every least thing, re