The Value of Thinking II

But in addition, it is said in “How to Know Higher Worlds” that one does well to trace the ideas one has formed in reverse order, that is, from the end back to the beginning; and if one wants to survey the day, to follow the stream of events backwards from evening to morning. In doing so, one must make a different effort than is made in the way of ordinary recollections. And this different effort of will brings one to grasp, as it were below the threshold of consciousness, what one has had as an experiential image. And in the course of trying, one comes to feel, to experience inwardly, how one runs after the images, runs after them below this threshold of consciousness. It is really a process of inner experiential probing that comes into play here. But it is important to do this review really seriously, not in a way that after a while you lose the seriousness of the matter. But then, if you do this process of looking back for a long time, or in general do the process of bringing up an experience from memory, an experienced world of ideas, so that you imagine the matter in reverse, thus applying a greater force than you when you remember in the usual sequence, then you also experience that you are no longer able to grasp the idea from a certain point on in the same way as you would have grasped it in ordinary life on the physical plane.