[From Diane Ackerman's An Alchemy of Mind, p129-130:]
---Immune systems carry a grudge. When special immune system cells find bacteria, fungi, viruses, or other invaders, they collect them and take them to one of the thousands of lymph nodes scattered around the body. There T-helper cells receive the cargo and order B cells to manufacture antibodies, proteins that stick to the invaders and kill them. Other immune cells save pieces of the invaders as memory aids. They keep mumbling about the invader, and the next time it appears, the mumbling surges to an all-out war cry. . . .
---Yet as immunologist Gerald N. Callahan observes in Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion, we safely trade bits of self with loved ones all the time. Couples pick up some of each other's mannerisms, accents, habits, ideas. But we also absorb people in more visceral ways. When we pass along a flu or a cold sore, for instance, viruses pack some of our proteins and lipids in the viral envelope and release them inside another person, who will store some in his or her lymph nodes. Retroviruses—such as AIDS, for instance—can install pieces of someone else's DNA in one's chromosomes. But we're probably swapping gene fragments with people all the time, imperceptibly, through infection and lovemaking because "over the course of an intimate relationship, we collect a lot o pieces of someone else . . . . Until one day what remains is truly and thoroughly a mosaic, a chimera—part man, part woman, part someone, part someone else." Little by little, as bits of DNA make it to our chromosomes, intimate relationships help shape the immune system's cameo of us, and modify the brain, altering the self whose continuity we cherish. We don't just get under each other's skin, we absorb people. Everyone we've ever loved remains with us, and we're invisibly changed for having known them. That will make some people feel queasy, I suppose, but it warms me.
[Good morning, readers. A bit more clinical entry this morning, eh? But still a little warm and fuzzy nonetheless. I have loved Diane Ackerman's books—every single one i've come across, starting with A Natural History of the Senses, which was used as a supplementary text to a rigorous Perception class i took as an undergraduate: i thought it was fantastic!
Find joy in whatever you read, write, or speak. So, until tomorrow . . . .]
This reminds me of Meher Baba's description of "sanskaras." He described sanskaras in many different ways, but essentially as "impressions" which are picked up from contact with one another. It seems that your def. includes the possibility of these "lot o pieces" being more than physical. Sanskaras include emotional and mental energies that connect and bind. Thanks for further clarity on this!!!! :-)
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