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Too often we say that we are what we are by nature and heredity, but too often we leave out the more important ingredient of selfhood, the one most hidden and most elusive yet the very source of the personal life. That this omission is caused by ignorance, or by lack of any enlightening experience, is true, but does not pardon our inertia and apathy. For Consciousness gives us the "I," gives us the world, gives us wakefulness and sleep. It is the stuff of what we really are. Yet all we can say about it is to confuse it with a thing, the fleshly brain, and let it go at that dismissal.

-- Notebooks Category 8: The Ego > Chapter 1 : What Am I? > # 63