Nevertheless I did manage to do without water, as well as food, during my ten-days’ bouts.  I found it an intolerable nuisance, in the deeps of dream across space and time, to be haled back to the sordid present by a despicable prison doctor pressing water to my lips.  So I warned Doctor Jackson, first, that I intended doing without water while in the jacket; and next, that I would resist any efforts to compel me to drink.

Of course we had our little struggle; but after several attempts Doctor Jackson gave it up.  Thereafter the space occupied in Darrell Standing’s life by a jacket-bout was scarcely more than a few ticks of the clock.  Immediately I 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.