Another Choice

But this is the least contribution we can and must make to the unity necessary to the cohesion of the group.

For it cannot be just a matter of a perfected assemblage of more or less rudimentary personalities whose angles all of a sudden would fit together and whose voices would magically attune to common accords and whose wills would mercifully agree on a shared direction.

Unity is a progress of consciousness.

If more extreme situations sometimes force us to wish for this progress and even to open ourselves to it more concretely, it is yet indispensable, for it to be achieved and realized in our nature and our physical consciousness, that our entire being comes to feel the living need of the true Consciousness, in which unity is a fact – an absolute fact, eternal and boundless.

***

We have, lying across our way, not only the sediments of a personal and individual subconscience but also those of a collective subconscience – that of our land, our caste or class, our people and our nation and our race, each of these degrees lodging itself in us as we become aware of the corresponding entities. And we have, notwithstanding our reason or our professions of faith, the spontaneous responses of our bodies which are themselves determined by ancient shocks or by situations and events which have particularly marked us in the childhood of this present life, when the defenses were not yet formed.

It is not the true awareness of our body which is affected here, but our most material vital substance.

However, there are such memories which this life alone cannot possibly explain away, memories which are as if engraved, inscribed within our body – but where?

The terror we suddenly happen to feel, a terror which has no foundation we could discern, is it a memory of this body or, no longer of just this particular individual body but of the human Body, or else of other bodies we may have once inhabited?

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