“If I existed before this life and yet can recall nothing of it, then there is no ‘I’ that can be sensibly discussed beyond its present manifestation. Yet I have no doubt that I have existed before, simply because to say otherwise is to commit the Ptolemaic error of declaring one’s present situation unique and miraculous. In this life my true family is a set with only one member; the minds of the others can be read but never penetrated. Nor can any fraternity be extended to the chain of my previous ‘I’s; all the links are uncoupled, and there is no lineage to pursue. Therefore my lives prior to this incarnation must encompass all the things that have ever been. Having no allegiance to any single mind, I discover myself nowhere and everywhere. My mind was there dispersed, and for fourteen billion years I partook of all lives, as the as-yet-uncondensed minds beyond my death now partake of my own. This leaves my present mind as a mere designated point, an inspissation of a universal mind that has condensed in me for no reason but the one it now chooses for itself: to uncover its own nature. I thought this a romantic fallacy, right up to the sudden and horrified registration of its demonstrable truth: we are matter; thinking is what we do here; therefore we are not slaves but the primary agents of that universal mind. I have sole responsibility.”
--Don Paterson from THE BLIND EYE
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