X. Why Don't We Remember Our Past Lives?

All this can be recognized through natural science. But now the question is: can all this, the memory that the Malay produces through illness, be achieved through healthy means? We must remember that the original inhabitants of the earth knew that people live on earth again and again. And Lessing, as I told you earlier, said: Why should it be stupid just because the original people believed in it? These original people, they didn't have abstract thoughts like we do. They didn't have any natural science. They looked at everything mythologically. When they looked at a plant, they didn't study: there are such and such forces in it, but they said: there is such and such spirituality in it. They saw everything in images. They lived more in the spiritual in general. ... (Gap in the shorthand.) The fact is that with progress, man can develop in such a way that he lives more in the physical. Only through this could he become a free man, otherwise he would always have been influenced. People in prehistoric times were not free; but they still saw spiritual things. Now we, gentlemen, as we are now, we really have the abstract thoughts that we are drilled in since school. You see, we can even say that the most important activities that humanity is so proud of today are actually something abstract.