Memories

Love is never wrong and definitely is its own reward.

In this earthly realm of risk/reward, trial and error favors those that truly try over those that never fail.

You are wise lady. Always focus on the light of love to keep us through our darkest hours.

May all your memories be joyous, filling your belly with sweetness wrapped in "raw skin". ;-)

Reviax

Thank you for your kind words.

Rudolf Steiner lecture 7 December 1919

As is essential for our inner integrity as human beings, we retain a picture in our memory of what we have thus experienced through our senses, of what we have thought out by means of our so-called reasoning intelligence; and it is ultimately this memory-picture which we retain from what we have initially received from the outside world by way of our senses and have made something out of through our intelligence. But what is it to us that we as human beings confront the world in the way I have described?

Let us take our start from a simple phenomenon of sense-perception to which I drew your attention a few days ago. You see a flame by means of your eyes. You close your eyes; and you have an after-image of the flame. This after-image of the flame which you have in your eye gradually disappears. Goethe, who always expressed himself graphically in such matters, speaks of it as echoing away. The original constitution of the eye and of the nerve-organisation associated with it is re-established after being modified by the impression which the light made upon it. What takes place in your sense-organ is but the simpler equivalent of what goes on in your memory when you take in outward impressions in general, think them over and retain them as memory-pictures.

The difference is simply that when your eye receives an impression of--let us say--a flame, you have the mental picture of the flame which then dies away again, it lasts only a short time.

But when you receive an impression with the whole of you, think it over and are later able to recall it again, this larger after-image of a memory lasts a long time--it may under certain conditions last all your life. What is the reason for this? If the simple after-image that you have in your eye lives on for only a few minutes or perhaps less than a minute before it fades, this is only because it does not go through your whole organisim but remains in a part of it. That which becomes a memory-picture goes through a considerable part of your entire organism, impresses itself on the etheric body and thrusts its way outward, it can remain as an after-image for one's whole life.

The point is that the impression must go deep enough and take hold of the etheric body, and that the etheric body does not retain it but transmits it to the outer ether of the cosmos and inscribes it there.

Do not suppose that when you remember things this is merely a process taking place within you. It is true that you cannot always write up what you experience in your notebook and read it again afterwards--although a number of people today do that with many of their experiences. But what you remember you inscribe in the cosmic ether, and the cosmic ether summons it forth in you again like the impress of a seal when you call it to mind.

Memory is no mere personal affair; through it you can relate yourself to the entire universe. You cannot be alone if, as someone with an inner hold on himself, you seek to remember your experiences. If a person does not remember his experiences, this destroys his very being.