עברית The Problem of Memory
How to Work with Foundation Stone Meditation II
The Problem of Memory
Lecture in Global School of Spiritual Science
25 March 2023, Part II
This is the second part of the lecture delivered in the global school of spiritual science. Any opinion and judgment about its content must be based on a thorough aquinatance with this work, as presented, among others, in my books, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity, Cognitive Yoga, and The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century.
Of course, factual, sober, informative reports are necessary in the physical world and we have to share dead information about physical things. As I said, we admire, with deepest reverence, the spiritual mystery behind ordinary memory that makes it work. But concerning spiritual experiences we have to be so active and willing to repeat the experience again. We are the makers of spiritual memory, and I dedicated to this mystery the first chapter of The New Experience of the Supersensible, The Ur-Mystery of Remembrance, and in the second volume of the new edition I added a section to show how it is formed in spiritual practice.
If you meet a person and want to know the person deeply, you do not begin by telling him what he looks like, what you think about him, you don’t begin to analyze him, explain his behavior, explain to him why he did this and that. This will be of course only your lifeless projections, it has nothing to do with his real being. If you want to experience the real being of the other person, you have to forget yourself and only take in his/her feelings into your soul, her mood, her joy, her pain, the way she walks, talks, and eats. And this will reveal to you who she really is. I mean not her conscious ordinary self, not what she says about herself, not what you say about her, but what her real being reveals to you when you contemplate her real being deeply, lovingly, selflessly, when you forget yourself for a moment or two. Then her real being will speak about the great riddles and mysteries of her being and becoming. Do not doubt it, it will speak! And the same we do in any meditation. It becomes eventually our new spiritual habit and instinct, and the meditative and external life are spiritualized accordingly. And the same we do with the proceedings of the Christmas Foundation Conference and the formation and laying of the foundation stone.
We have learned much, we know it all or some parts, but we energetically forget it when we enter the sacred space of the school. We submerge our entire soul in the experience of the event itself. We let it speak to us. What it says to us is a revelation of its true essence. We may share it with our friends, of course. But pay attention, be aware and alert, sharing from the experience is not reporting about the experience. It must become our ingrained spiritual instinct not to lazily reflect with our heads about the event but kindle it again as living fire here and now. With time you will feel an instinctive healthy antipathy to intellectualism; it will become an essential soul disposition; it will make you veritably sick in soul, when you hear people intellectualize about Anthroposophy. You will of course also have meanwhile developed your compassion to the human condition to a much higher level, so you will not go around castigating and criticizing people’s weaknesses; but you will be aware of what is taking place, you will not be fooled by this ahrimanic cleverness any more, and you will be in a position to help others overcome it too.
This is the reason why the overcoming of intellectualism is exceedingly difficult in the present time. To develop the soul faculties required to do so, let us consider he main difference pertains to the function of memory, which is the foundation of all our soul life and consciousness in the physical world. Without memory, you lose your identity, you do not know what you did yesterday, and who you are today. You are totally lost in the physical world. The very opposite is the case with spiritual experiences. You cannot contain and preserve them in memory. Think about it for a moment. If you want to tell someone about an experience that you had yesterday, the memory picture will rise up by itself from the unconscious depths of your body and soul, and you will recall the thing. It comes up by itself, you have not done anything to awaken it. Let us say you saw a beautiful flower in the physical world, not in the spiritual world, and you tell your friend about it: ‘Yesterday I saw this beautiful flower in my garden.’ And the friend asks you: ‘ tell me about it, how it looks like, what color it has, what form?’ And most often than not, you will not retort: ‘I must go again to my garden to see it with my eyes now and report to you while I see it.’ Usually, you sit tight and passively tell him from your memory about the flower that you saw yesterday and describe it as it rises up from the unconscious depths of your body where your memory is activated. This is in the physical world quite all right. You do not do anything wrong by reporting out of memory. It is not a false thing to do, though as we know all too well, apart from remembering purely sensory things, when it comes to complicated events in life, memory is not the most reliable source of truth. But nevertheless, for all daily purposes it serves us well.
But now if you want to tell your friend about a spiritual experience that you had yesterday, you find out that you cannot passively recall it. Why you cannot? Because if it was a real spiritual experience - to be clearly distinguished from visionary experiences - you were out of your physical body when it took place. And our memory is rooted in the physical body. This is the cause of the radical difference between recalling supersensible experience and physical experience. Factually, you simply cannot re-call it because it will not appear again. If the physical and spiritual experiences had the same relation to memory, when your friend requests that you describe the flower you saw yesterday, you will have to tell him: ‘Dear friend, I cannot say anything about the flower, unless I go back to the garden to see it again with my very eyes and tell you, fresh in the experience itself, how it looks.’ Of course, this is not very practical in physical life, to go back again to the place where we saw the thing before and report from there. But this is how it is in spiritual experience. Just think about it: If in the physical world we did not have physical memory, we would have to repeat the experience again, but obviously, even this will not be possible, because to repeat it you must remember it. We will not remember that we saw the flower yesterday at all! All life will pass before us as a meaningless juxtaposition of momentary impressions, without before and after, yesterday, today and tomorrow. In the physical world this will not be very practical. Memory is our graceful savior and benefactor in the physical world.
However, spiritually, the case is exactly reversed. If you want to tell about a supersensible experience that you had yesterday, it already had vanished like a dream on awakening in the morning. You have to actively awaken it and experience it again now. Spiritual memory, ‘practice spirit recalling’, is the opposite of ordinary memory. Because all the laziness, all the passivity of ordinary physical memory is taken away from you, you will have nothing to tell if you do not stir up all your soul forces again, awaken and activate the spiritual organs of perception, and perceive again what you would want to communicate. It is like walking and talking physically, if you have to walk now, you have to exert yourself, send energy to your limbs, and move on. You cannot say - when you have to go to work - I will recall how I walked to work yesterday, this will do. You actually have to scramble up your forces and do it here and now. You must be active; it is a matter of activating and mobilizing the will forces. This is the opposite pole of the physically based passive memory.
If we want to communicate a real spiritual experience, or for that matter, just to repeat for ourselves an experience we had previously, we cannot rely on our passive memory which lets us sit back and say: ‘Oh, yesterday I saw this marvelous flower, I can simply sit down and without any effort I will have a mental image of the flower ready-made in my mind.’ This simply doesn’t work; the previous spiritual experience has long vanished without leaving a trace.
Spiritually I have to be so active in the moment to recall the experience again now. This means that I have to go to the spiritual garden to see the spiritual flower again with my spiritual eyes, to stand there spiritually before the flower. Spiritual experience and communication cannot be accomplished in any other way. You have to reactivate and reawaken the same experience now and if you want to talk about it, even to yourself, and communicate it to others you will have to communicate about it from the living experience itself during the real time of the event.
This is why we may feel such a justified, healthy repulsion when people offer us intellectual reports about spiritual things, because they think and speak from ordinary dead memory and mercilessly kill the spiritual substance of the unfortunate living thing they are talking about. Thus we materialize, intellectualize a real spiritual event that we had just a minute ago, or a week, or year ago. Of course, factual, sober, informative reports are necessary in the physical world and we have to share dead information about physical things. As I said, we admire, with deepest reverence, the spiritual mystery behind ordinary memory that makes it work. But concerning spiritual experiences we have to be so active and willing to repeat the experience again. We are the makers of spiritual memory, and I dedicated to this mystery the first chapter of The New Experience of the Supersensible, The Ur-Mystery of Remembrance, and in the second volume of the new edition I added a section to show how it is formed in spiritual practice.
I am just saying this on the side, as it were, as side commentary, but you will sense, I hope, how central this side issue is. If you contemplate it, it may change the way you grasp any event. And when you are requested to share about ‘what happened’ previously in the meeting, or in the last meeting, you will not drift instinctively into reportage mode, and let your automatic audiovisual brain apparatus do the reporting. You will stop. You will kindle the fire in your heart and enflame your enthusiasm. You will enter again into the event. And you will describe what happened yesterday because you experience now what happened yesterday. You will, in other words, begin to ‘practice spirit recalling’, the first activity required in the Foundation Stone meditation. Intellectually speaking, it is of course the ‘same’ flower today that I saw yesterday, but while the physical flower of yesterday has really changed and you cannot enter this same river twice, the spiritual flower contains all its past and future formations all the time, because here time becomes space. Cosmic memory is magical memory, and to access it you have to be as active as described. You must see the spiritual flower again now, and then you can zoom in and out and see all its stages of development from the beginning of the evolution of the earth until its end.
Dear friends, this is the great difficulty that we have, because we have to speak about spiritual events using earthly thoughts and articulate them in ordinary language in this horribly intellectual age, and then we have to write them in books. And you know how the Doctor spoke about the necessity to write books in the present time. We must write books because we don’t have spiritual perception and spiritual memory yet. We must first read about the spiritual in physical books, that we can understand with our intellect and remember with ordinary memory. This makes us free! And this freedom is after all the most important new step in human evolution. But this freedom is immediately lost to Lucifer and Ahriman if it is not spiritualized. Think about the Calvary, the martyrdom that Rudolf Steiner had to go through each time he had to deliver one of his thousands of lectures or write each of his books: To translate highly spiritual experiences, so totally remote from physical consciousness, into ordinary thinking, words, and onto printed paper. He had to kill the experiences, but this means also killing himself because he is one with the experiences. That was his work, as you know, one aspect of his great ordeals as the initiate of the age of intellectualism, of the consciousness soul.
But what is immediately forgotten is that spiritual scientific knowledge had to take on this dead form, as an unavoidable necessity of our time, to help our physical memory; people forget this, enjoy the intellectual study, and believe that their thoughts and concepts are spiritual. But this is not the goal of our study. When we read the books printed black on white, or in electric signals on our kindle screens, what we understand is only the corpse of what the text refers to. If we remain content with the corpse of the spirit, as most people do, we will join the huge crowd of the grave diggers of humanity. If we want to join the few life givers, we have to spiritualize it. Rudolf Steiner killed it for humanity’s sake to enable us to return it to the spiritual world in a new spiritual form. He gave us spiritual knowledge in dead physical form, counting on our freedom and love, that we will spiritualize it and return it to its living cosmic source. The higher beings do not understand intellectual thinking and physical language, they cannot read our books. If you memorize from the book and repeat what you read they do not get it. They cannot enter into your intellectualized dead thinking. For them this is something that blocks the path between them and us, us and them. This is what makes communication between human beings and the spiritual world impossible. Just think about it, if it was possible to communicate with the real spiritual world by reading anthroposophical books, after a whole century of anthroposophical books reading, humanity and earth were already in the seventh heaven. But exactly the opposite happened in the last century. Many thousands and even millions of people read those books, but they do not spiritualize them. They materialize and intellectualize them even more. If you investigate how many people have transformed their reading into true spiritual perception, you will find that their number is exceedingly small.