there it is, a hard physiological fact. At the moment of our
conception, the father nucleus fuses with the mother nucleus, and the
wonder emanates, the new self, the new soul, the new individual cell.
But in the new individual cell the father-germ and the mother-germ do
not relinquish their identity. There they remain still, incorporated
and never extinguished. And so, the blood-stream of race is one
stream, for ever. But the moment the mystery of pure individual
newness ceased to be enacted and fulfilled, the blood-stream would dry
up and be finished. Mankind would die out.

Let us go back then to the solar plexus. There sparkle the included
mother-germ and father-germ, giving us direct, immediate blood-bonds,
family connection. The connection is as direct and as subtle as
between the Marconi stations, two great wireless stations. A family,
if you like, is a group of wireless stations, all adjusted to the
same, or very much the same vibration. All the time they quiver with
the interchange, there is one long endless flow of vitalistic
communication between members of one family, a long, strange
_rapport_, a sort of life-unison. It is a ripple of life through many
bodies as through one body. But all the time there is the jolt, the
rupture of individualism, the individual asserting himself beyond all
ties or claims. The highest goal for every man is the goal of pure
individual being. But it is a goal you cannot reach by the mere
rupture of all ties. A child isn't born by being torn from the womb.
When it is born by natural process that is rupture enough. But even
then the ties are not broken. They are only subtilized.

From the solar plexus first of all pass the great vitalistic
communications between child and parents, the first interplay of
primal, pre-mental knowledge and sympathy. It is a great subtle
interplay, and from this interplay the child is built up, body and
psyche. Impelled from the primal conscious center in the abdomen, the
child seeks the mother, seeks the breast, opens a blind mouth and
gropes for the nipple. Not mentally directed and yet certainly
directed. Directed from the dark pre-mind center of the solar plexus.
From this center the child seeks, the mother knows. Hence the true
mindlessness of the pristine, healthy mother. She does not need to
think, mentally to know. She knows so profoundly and actively at the
great abdominal life-center.

But if the child thus seeks the mother, does it then kn