This memory concerns several groups of realizations, either
active or latent; it deals with certain congeries of known factors, and these might be
enumerated as follows:
- The thought images of that which is tangible, [24] objective and which has been known by
the thinker upon the physical plane.
- Kama-manasic (or desire-lower mind) images of past desires and their gratification. The
"picture making faculty" of the average man is based upon his desires (high or
low desires, aspirational or degrading, in its sense of pulling down) and their known
gratification. This remains equally true of the memory of a gluttonous man, for instance,
and his latent image of a satisfactory dinner, and the memory of the orthodox saint, based
upon his picture making of a joyous heaven.
- That memory activity which is the result of mental training, the accumulation of
acquired facts, the consequence of reading or of teaching, and which is not purely based
upon desire, but which has its basis in intellectual interest.
- All the various contacts which the memory holds and recognises as emanating from the
five lower sense perceptions.
- Those mental images, latent in the memory making faculty, which are the total of the
knowledge contacted and the realisations evoked by the right use of the mind as a sixth
sense.
All these forms of the memory faculty have to be dropped and no longer held; they must
be recognised as modifications of the mind, of the thinking principle, and therefore as
part of that versatile psychic nature which has to be dominated before the yogi can hope
to attain liberation from limitation and from all lower activity. This is the goal. [25]
- Finally (for it is not necessary to enumerate more intricate subdivisions) memory
includes also the accumulated experiences gained by the soul through the many
incarnations, and stored up in the true consciousness of the soul.
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