Memory and Love

During our life on earth between birth and death, our memories are extraordinarily fleeting; only pictures remain. Think how little these pictures retain of the events lived through. Just remind yourself of the unspeakable grief experienced at the death of someone very close to you, and imagine vividly the inner condition of soul attendant upon it, and then observe how this appears as an inner experience when after ten years you call it up. It has become a pale, almost abstract shadow. That is what our capacity for recollection is—pale and abstract compared with the full vigour of immediate life. Why is our recollection thus weak and shadowy? It is indeed the shadow of our experience of self between death and a new birth. Within it is the faculty of remembering, so that it really gives us our existence. That which gives us flesh and blood here on earth, between death and a new birth gives us the faculty of memory. Over there memory is robust and full-blooded—if I may use such expressions for what is spiritual—then it takes on flesh and becomes weak. When we die. for a few days—I have often described this—the last remnant of memory is still present in the etheric body. If when we go through the gate of death we look back over our past life on earth, memory fades out. And out of this memory there unwinds what the force of love on earth has given us as force for life after death. Thus the force of memory is the heritage we receive from our pre-earthly life, and the force of love is the seed for what we have after death. That is the relation between earthly life and the spiritual world.