Heredity and habit

Monday, October 25, 2010

7:30 AM. I knew I had missed something, a couple of months ago (August 19, to be exact) but it just slowed down long enough, as I re-read that session, that this time I snagged it. It is this. Traits are passed down through the generations but of course are progressively diluted by half in each new generation. We are told that seven generations represents the extinction point. But, if a trait is fully lived, fully accepted in some way by one of the descendants, that restarts the clock, and there are seven more generations in which that trait may manifest.

Well, if there is a trait that each new generation absorbs in turn and makes its own, that trait is essentially permanent, or is permanent as long as it continues to be adopted. So we might almost differentiate between the permanent and incidental traits. Yes?

It is in the refreshing of traits that your free will manifests externally. You choose what you will support and what you will, in effect, suppress. This is not merely a matter of physical heredity, though you may at first glance think so, because the inheritance of tendencies is not limited to the inheritance of the genetic matter of the parents at the time of conception. That is a static, mechanistic view of heredity that leaves many puzzles unresolved, and indeed sets more.

If heredity were merely a matter of the genetic inheritance from one’s parents, and if their genetic composition were only a matter of what they had inherited from their parents, the only mechanism of change would be the endless recombination of potential traits that is the physical element of sexual reproduction. Even that could be looked at more mechanistically or less, depending on temperament. If more, then one says the inheritance is the result of chance. If less, then it is the result of someone’s choice among possibilities – and this is how we ourselves presented it, for simplicity’s sake. But as usual it isn’t that simple. Life and interaction are not static. Relationship is not merely physical, and not merely “psychic” whatever that may mean to you. Or rather, the two are aspects of the same thing.

Non-material ties between people are not unheard of. Telepathy is what it is called when it happens only occasionally. When it happens habitually, continually, it is called something other. The two are considered to have some occult tie that cannot be explained or even explained away, and so it is merely noted and left unnamed. Identical twins, for instance, or newborns and their mothers.

But there is an intermediate level of tie, what one might call a habitual or repetitive but not continuous connection. This is often unsuspected by either, or felt as coincidence, or in the case of blood relatives (and this is what we are getting at) described as the younger one “taking after” the elder one. It is seen, that is, as somewhere between heredity and habit. We suggest that you might look at it in another way. You might look at it as an ongoing psychic link conveyed by physical heredity, in which changes in the one produce or allow changes in the other. And yes, influence may proceed in either direction, or in both. Influences may also be very intermittent, or may manifest at only one point in life, or at only a few, or repeatedly, or any possible frequency.

Therefore, the state of your DNA or RNA at the time of your conception of a child is not the final story for the child. It is not the end of the possibilities of its physical heredity. This, even though you continue to modify your genetics as you live.

So, one more nail in the materialist coffin, because how such links manifest, and what they do, and according to what rules, is unsuspected among those who think mind is an epiphenomenon, and spirit or soul nonexistent superstition. Given those pre-existent blinders, they cannot recognize such influences as they are, hence cannot explain resulting phenomena save by epicycles.

This whole subject tells me that we alter our physical heredity – maybe in both directions, backwards and forwards! – by what we are, which means by what we think, feel, value.

True enough.

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