Metade Fumaça continues

Looking first at memory, we can ask how it comes about. Obviously the process is quite different from how sensation or perception comes about. Without eyes, I could not have the sensation of blue. However, my eyes do not give me any memory of the blue; for them to provide the sensation, something blue must be in view at this moment. My bodily nature would allow all impressions to sink back down into oblivion if something were not also taking place in the relationship between the outer world and my soul—namely the formation of a current mental image through the act of perception, with the result that, through inner processes, I may later again have a mental image of something that originally brought about a mental image from outside. People who have become practiced at observing the soul will realize that it is all wrong to say that if I have a mental image today, the same mental image shows up again tomorrow in my memory, having stayed somewhere inside me in the meantime. On the contrary, the mental image that I have right now is a phenomenon that passes away with the present moment. But if memory intervenes, a process takes place in me that is the result of something additional that has gone on in the relationship between me and the outer world, something other than the evoking of the current mental image. The old mental image has not been “stored” anywhere; the one my memory calls up is a new one. Remembering means being able to visualize something anew; it does not mean that a mental image can come to life again. What appears today is something different from the original mental image.

Remembering means experiencing something that is no longer there, linking a past experience to my present life. This happens in every instance of remembering. Suppose I meet someone I recognize because I met him or her yesterday. This person would be a total stranger to me if I could not link the image formed through yesterday’s perception to my impression of today. Today’s image is given to me by perception, that is, by my sensory system. But who conjures up yesterday’s image into my soul? It is the same being in me who was present at both yesterday’s encounter and today’s. Throughout the preceding discussion, this being has been called “the soul.” Without this trusty keeper of the past, every external impression would be a new one for us. The soul imprints on the body the process by which something becomes a memory. However, the soul must first do the imprinting, and then perceive its imprint just as it perceives something outside itself. In this way, the soul is the keeper of memory.

Something happens to us, “bumps into us,” enters our life as if by chance—or so we tend to think at first. We can become aware, however, that each one of us is the result of many such “chance” occurrences. If at the age of forty I take a good look at myself and refuse to be content with an empty, abstract concept of the “I” as I ponder my soul’s essential nature, I may well conclude that I am nothing more and nothing less than what I have become through what has happened to me until now as a matter of destiny. I would probably have been a different person if, at age twenty, I had had a different series of experiences than what actually did happen to me. I will then look for my “I” not only in its developmental influences that come from within, but also in what exerts a formative influence on my life from outside. I will recognize my own “I” in what “happens to” me. If we give ourselves impartially to such a realization, we need to take only one more step in intimately observing life before we can see, in what comes to us through certain experiences of destiny, something that takes hold of the “I” from outside, just as memory works from inside to allow past experiences to light up again. In this way, we can become able to recognize an experience of destiny as a past action of the soul finding its way to the “I,” just as a memory is a past experience that is reinvoked by outer circumstances and finds its way into our minds as a mental image.

Extract from «Theosophy», by Rudolf Steiner