To conceive of the ‘self’ as an ontologically autonomous entity that is made actual (or becomes a person) through communication with the realm of good and evil also implies that the self is located in a historically continuous community and is aware, even if only dimly, of this belonging. In other words, a community, in order to be real, must include past and even hypothetical future generations, and to live in a spiritual space in which the past is actual. Respect for tombs and attempts to communicate with ancestral spirits are natural expressions of our awareness that this spiritual space is real. And here, again, the link between the reality of the self and our feeling of belonging to a historically defined community is confirmed by the way the two have declined together in our civilization. Our respect for tombs and for the bodies of the dead, our awareness of living in a human city that stretches back to the past and beyond the present to future generations, all fade away pari passu with the collapse of the reality of the self. The more the historical community is perceived as unreal, the less āIā am real myself.