II. The Psychological Foundations of Anthroposophy

What is here set forth becomes clearer if we refer to a special fact of the inner life of the soul. This shall be done with reference to memory. As a result of the freeing of the self from the bodily organization, the spiritual researcher experiences the act of recollecting differently from one with ordinary consciousness. For him, recollecting, which is otherwise a more-or-less undifferentiated process, is separated into partial factors. At first, he senses the attraction toward an experience which is to be remembered, like a drawing of the attention in a certain direction. The experience is thus really analogous to the spatial directing of one's look toward a distant object, which one has first seen, then turns away from, and then turns toward again. The essential aspect of this is that the experience pressing toward remembrance is sensed as something which has stopped far away within the temporal horizon, and which does not merely have to be drawn up from the depths below in the soul's life. This turning in the direction of the experience pressing toward remembrance is at first a merely subjective process. When the remembrance now actually occurs, the spiritual researcher feels that it is the resistance of the physical body which works like a reflecting surface and raises the experience into the objective world of representations. Thus the spiritual researcher feels, in connection with the process of remembering, an occurrence which (subjectively perceptible) takes place within the etheric body and which becomes his remembrance through its reflection by the physical body. The first factor in recollecting would give merely disconnected experiences of the self. Through the fact that every remembrance is reflected by being impressed upon the life of the physical body, it becomes a part of the ego-experiences.