CHAPTER II

Assimilation and Disassimilation

Not only does each act of assimilation evoke a contrary process in which the assimilated tries to assimilate - the struggle between these two drives is an image of what happens universally - but a deeper insight lets us recognize that the process itself is always simultaneously one of disassimilation. We explain this curious contradiction in the following way.

When someone makes an inspired speech and affects the psyche of his listeners, then the speaker has formed his listeners to resemble himself to a certain extent. And as each listener went through a process in which the speaker and his line of thought became like him, it was the speaker who was assimilated.

As seen from a different point of view: the listener is possessed by the emotions emanating from the speaker and assimilates them in his psyche, his brain. And even if, as in hypnosis, the attention of the listener should be entirely passive, it would still be he, the listener, who is assimilated.

In the same way, the sight and contemplation of a natural scene exercises an influence upon the psyche of the viewer. Colorful beams excite the brain and transform themselves into psychic energies, into memory traces.

It is therefore the natural scene that influenced him, that formed his psyche, and that assimilated him to its image.

But it was also he, the onlooker, who absorbed an amount of nature’s beams and who made them his owns assimilated them.

A sculptor works on a stone. He molds the stone according to his inner vision. The stone adapts itself to the shape which had previously lived within the sculptor. Who assimilated whom?

But there exists even a second reciprocal process of assimilations the stone, according to its nature, resisted the changing of its shape, and forced the sculptor to overcome obstacles; these obstacles left an impression within his body which linked itself to his basic nature and character. Once again - who assimilated whom?

From these observations, just as from our comprehension of immortality, a picture of interaction and together-ness, and of the true unity of all that exists, appears with clarity.

In the absolute sense, there is no such thing as individual existence; everything becomes the common good, nothing knows an owner. For all eternity, everything in the assimilation process circles through stone and soul, everything acts reciprocally, everything is owned reciprocally.

There is nothing about which a man should say, “this is mine” . Not about possessions, not about the body, not about thoughts.

All things circle and stream through one another, and everything wants to shape everything else and leave something of itself in the thing reshaped. What shapes and what is reshaped become one. We call this phenomenon introgenesis.