V. Health and Illness I

Anyone engaged in spiritual scientific research must allow ordinary memory to run its course alongside what one experiences in the suprasensory realm. Ordinary memory must remain intact. In a way, a student of anthroposophy has to maintain a second personality that represents ordinary life and is always present. But the researcher knows full well that there is this other, first personality engaged in suprasensory knowledge that will not allow itself to become imprinted on the memory. In ordinary life we can retain only a memory image of a fish we have seen, not the fish itself. In suprasensory cognition, we have direct perceptions—not mental images—and thus we cannot carry them in our memory. Consequently one has to return to them again and again. However, it is possible to remember the process we used to gain suprasensory cognition, and if we repeat those efforts, suprasensory sight will reemerge, albeit only passively, since it cannot live in the memory. It can be attained only through renewed inner activity. The fact that these higher faculties are beyond the reach of memory is a characteristic of suprasensory cognition. One can regain it, but only by following a route similar to the one traveled earlier. One can remember the path taken previously, but not the suprasensory experience itself.