was laced I devoted myself to inducing the little death.
From practice it became simple and easy. I suspended animation and
consciousness so quickly that I escaped the really terrible suffering
consequent upon suspending circulation. Most quickly came the dark. And
the next I, Darrell Standing, knew was the light again, the faces bending
over me as I was unlaced, and the knowledge that ten days had passed in
the twinkling of an eye.

But oh, the wonder and the glory of those ten days spent by me elsewhere!
The journeys through the long chain of existences! The long darks, the
growings of nebulous lights, and the fluttering apparitional selves that
dawned through the growing light!

Much have I pondered upon the relation of these other selves to me, and
of the relation of the total experience to the modern doctrine of
evolution. I can truly say that my experience is in complete accord with
our conclusions of evolution.

I, like any man, am a growth. I did not begin when I was born nor when I
was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable
myriads of millenniums. All these experiences of all these lives, and of
countless other lives, have gone to the making of the soul-stuff or the
spirit-stuff that is I. Don't you see? They are the stuff of me. Matter
does not remember, for spirit is memory. I am this spirit compounded of
the memories of my endless incarnations.

Whence came in me, Darrell Standing, the red pulse of wrath that has
wrecked my life and put me in the condemned cells? Surely it did not
come into being, was not created, when the babe that was to be Darrell
Standing was conceived. That old red wrath is far older than my mother,
far older than the oldest and first mother of men. My mother, at my
inception, did not create that passionate lack of fear that is mine. Not
all the mothers of the whole evolution of men manufactured fear or
fearlessness in men. Far back beyond the first men were fear and
fearlessness, love, hatred, anger, all the emotions, growing, developing,
becoming the stuff that was to become men.

I am all of my past, as every protagonist of the Mendelian law must
agree. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in
me. My every mode of action, heat of passion, flicker of thought is
shaded, toned, infinitesimally shaded and toned, by that vast array of
other selves that preceded me and went into the making of me.

The stuff of life