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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: conceive of so much as exchanging our individuality for another's,
still less of abandoning it altogether; for gradually a man, as he
grows older, comes to regard his body as, after all, separable from
himself. It is the soul's covering, rendered indispensable by the
climatic conditions of our present existence, one without which we
could no longer continue to live here. To forego it does not
necessarily negative, so far as we yet know, the possibility of
living elsewhere. Some more congenial tropic may be the wandering
spirit's fate. But to part with the sense of self seems to be like
taking an eternal farewell of the soul. The Western mind shrinks
before the bare idea of such a thought.
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