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What is evolution? It is something that can be read from DNA like a barcode. DNA has a beginning. When it began it was not a strand; it was just a fleck. That fleck is when the immortal thing was born. So if we want to say that something is immortal about us we have to say that it is whatever is saved as DNA. We are born as a reading of DNA. There is nothing else there at birth but this reading.

So if we wanted to say, "Let us save THIS thing of ourselves so that it will come back as a baby.", we would mean that we want to put THIS thing into the DNA. The question, then, is: What is it that can be put into the DNA? Some geneticists are saying that everything is in the DNA. It gives us that we are homo or hetero, that we are intellectually bright or slow, that we are cautious or risk-takers, that we are sickly or immune, etc. But! It does not give us anything to think with! It puts nothing into memory! There may be something in the DNA that determines the memory's susceptibilities to various input, but nothing in the DNA makes conscious memory. So we can safely say that if there is something we treasure in memory, we will have to convert it into something that will SAVE to the DNA, or it will die when the body dies.

Popular science gives us a crude idea of where our DNA comes from. Mother and father pool some genetic resources, and some of these select themselves in combination, perhaps through a very smart system that eliminates conflicting attributes. It sounds very much like gambling. So how could this become an individual who has already lived previous lifetimes? It sounds like the making of a random individual, and random individuals will not return. It is a problem in reasoning. In reality every event in the world is impossible, because it is significant. How can all these people and creatures living together actually perpetually mean something to each other every time? Especially since we try to maintain order. Order obviously eliminates spontaneity. As reason we have to discount that it can happen. It can only happen when something far more perceptive than reason is at the helm of every living (including every thinking) being (Thinking makes trouble, and there is need in the world for a lot of trouble, trouble to bring to those who have brought us all trouble.). Today science is actually coming around to admitting that this is so, that whatever people think they are doing, it is instinct that is doing something. The difficult place to achieve socially, then, is where what you are doing instinctively is good and fun, eliminating the bipolar nature of "getting along". (Am I digressing? Where were we?)

To save what is in memory is what we have been studying here in this class. You remember how your infancy was so serene, for example, but you discover that your mother was and is a liar; that your memory of infancy is simply victimisation, a sort of bruise you just never got over. You remember they unjustly locked you away. You were never guilty as charged, or crazy or whatever; or the law was unjust or excessively severe. Then you discover that you actually locked someone away yourself, someone you had as little respect for as the system has for you, be it a cat or a bird or a dog, etc. You remember that Jesus died for your sins, and then you realise that bible-thumping at that time in history meant promoting the already abolished ritual killing of animals on the Sabbath ("temple gifts" were a major debate at the time, with a lot of money riding on it). In other words, discovery cleans memory by saving the past as real past ("real" being a sensibility that makes DNA, a judging of a discovery's compatibility with the sum total of real past), a past that does not exert itself and does not really invite reminiscence, because it is in a format that is compatible with all previous lifetimes.

Real is when other is felt. How does it feel to be locked up? How does it feel to be that crow or cat or dog or whatever? If you feel it, can you do it again? When you discover the other of the feeling of being locked up you have displaced the memory of what you did to the creature with how it felt to be the creature. But if you add your experience of being locked up to your memories of injustices you have suffered, thus eliminating the universal beneficence from this particular event (which in turn pollutes all other events and perceptions, happy or sad), you CAN do it again. This is the nature of Hell, a place we bring our world to by being always able to do things again, which is a world where memory reasons.

We are born having eliminated nothing, not even the pain we are suffering at the time, from the sense of universal beneficence. This is innocence. It is not mere naivety. It is intense even when we are unhappy (remorse is the intense form of unhappiness). And as we "save" the things from memory, as other, we are restoring this intensity of life, until we are no different than we were as children.

When childhood is no longer distant the strand is complete.

Feeling as other is the strand building.