Why do we reincarnate without our memories?

[Hedge90]

This question is mostly to Cleric / Ashvin, because I'm interested in how this fits into their worldview, but I'm also interested in general, why we are mostly blank slates (in terms of memory) when we are born if we are born from the ocean of all experience that has occurred before.
But Cleric / Ashvin, in your worldview Earthly life is a kind of school for the soul, where you prepare for exisence in some kind of higher spiritual state. My question is, in what way does the need to reincarnate without or memories of previous lifes facilitate this? Wouldn't it then make sense to keep what we've already learned, and not have to go through the process of learning the basics of Earthly existence once again, to even get to the point where any kind of spiritual realisation is possible?

[AshvinP]

This question is mostly to Cleric / Ashvin, because I'm interested in how this fits into their worldview, but I'm also interested in general, why we are mostly blank slates (in terms of memory) when we are born if we are born from the ocean of all experience that has occurred before.
But Cleric / Ashvin, in your worldview Earthly life is a kind of school for the soul, where you prepare for exisence in some kind of higher spiritual state. My question is, in what way does the need to reincarnate without or memories of previous lifes facilitate this? Wouldn't it then make sense to keep what we've already learned, and not have to go through the process of learning the basics of Earthly existence once again, to even get to the point where any kind of spiritual realisation is possible?

Hedge,

I know Cleric can illustrate an answer to your question more helpfully, but I will just make a few points.

- The integration of memory is a function of our Thinking organism. This is the case even within an incarnation. By strengthening and deepening our Thinking, we can begin remembering more and more of our current lives towards infancy. Eventually we can re-remember past incarnations. As usual, it is only a personal cognitive limitation which prevents that at this stage of metamorphosis.

- Related to above, it is a gradual and lawful process. In modern religious apologetic you will frequently hear various ways of trying to explain why God didn't create us with full knowledge and freedom etc. This is because it is simply assumed the spiritual is not structured and lawful like the physical. The answer is really simple once we realize how physical structure and lawfulness is a dim quantitative reflection of higher order spiritual (qualitative) processes.

- Just because our previous experience is not remembered, doesn't mean it is not subconsciously informing us and influencing our perception-cognition of the world content. But when it remains subconscious, we have no control over how it informs us. It acts more of a puppet-master rather than a useful tool for spiritual evolution. We transfigure it into a useful tool by making it conscious via Thinking.

[Cleric K]

This question is mostly to Cleric / Ashvin, because I'm interested in how this fits into their worldview, but I'm also interested in general, why we are mostly blank slates (in terms of memory) when we are born if we are born from the ocean of all experience that has occurred before.
But Cleric / Ashvin, in your worldview Earthly life is a kind of school for the soul, where you prepare for exisence in some kind of higher spiritual state. My question is, in what way does the need to reincarnate without or memories of previous lifes facilitate this? Wouldn't it then make sense to keep what we've already learned, and not have to go through the process of learning the basics of Earthly existence once again, to even get to the point where any kind of spiritual realisation is possible?

Hedge, I don't have time to write a full response today, I'll write in the following days. Meanwhile it can be useful if you write few things about what your understanding of memory is. These things go largely taken for granted. It's similar to the other thread about "why am I me ...". We're not very conscious of this today but the very way in which these questions are posed already presupposes quite a lot. In other words, we're looking for answers in a framework of thinking that we take for granted. It's quite the same in the way the physicalist asks "How consciousness emerges from non-living matter" - the question in itself already presupposes a whole metaphysical framework.

So before elucidating details about memories of past lives we should be clear on what Time is and what Memory is. Maybe others can give their opinion too. In a classic MAL scenario (BK-type), what do you think memory is? Everyone agrees that there's such thing as awareness being aware of itself. But what is memory? Some kind of 'storage'? Is it finite or infinite? Or is it something different altogether?

Happy welcoming of the New Year!

[Eugene I.]

Did you get your answers Hedge?

[Hedge90]

This question is mostly to Cleric / Ashvin, because I'm interested in how this fits into their worldview, but I'm also interested in general, why we are mostly blank slates (in terms of memory) when we are born if we are born from the ocean of all experience that has occurred before.
But Cleric / Ashvin, in your worldview Earthly life is a kind of school for the soul, where you prepare for exisence in some kind of higher spiritual state. My question is, in what way does the need to reincarnate without or memories of previous lifes facilitate this? Wouldn't it then make sense to keep what we've already learned, and not have to go through the process of learning the basics of Earthly existence once again, to even get to the point where any kind of spiritual realisation is possible?

Hedge, I don't have time to write a full response today, I'll write in the following days. Meanwhile it can be useful if you write few things about what your understanding of memory is. These things go largely taken for granted. It's similar to the other thread about "why am I me ...". We're not very conscious of this today but the very way in which these questions are posed already presupposes quite a lot. In other words, we're looking for answers in a framework of thinking that we take for granted. It's quite the same in the way the physicalist asks "How consciousness emerges from non-living matter" - the question in itself already presupposes a whole metaphysical framework.

So before elucidating details about memories of past lives we should be clear on what Time is and what Memory is. Maybe others can give their opinion too. In a classic MAL scenario (BK-type), what do you think memory is? Everyone agrees that there's such thing as awareness being aware of itself. But what is memory? Some kind of 'storage'? Is it finite or infinite? Or is it something different altogether?

Happy welcoming of the New Year!

Well, I'd say memory is an archive of my previous experiential states, organised in order of their perceived significance or usefulness by some faculty of my mind. Things that had a great emotional impact, for example, will be easy to recall, while the name of a small grocery store I walked by once yesterday will be almost impossible to.
Secondly, memory also seems to serve the purpose of creating a sense of continuity and a way to identify patterns. It is memory that makes me able to identify myself in any manner, as well as to steer my actions based on what I can conclude to be the best course based on the archived states I can recall (or at least integrated subconsciously).
I have no idea about where memory is stored though (and neither do scientists, really), and what the mechanism of retrieval is.

[AshvinP]

This question is mostly to Cleric / Ashvin, because I'm interested in how this fits into their worldview, but I'm also interested in general, why we are mostly blank slates (in terms of memory) when we are born if we are born from the ocean of all experience that has occurred before.
But Cleric / Ashvin, in your worldview Earthly life is a kind of school for the soul, where you prepare for exisence in some kind of higher spiritual state. My question is, in what way does the need to reincarnate without or memories of previous lifes facilitate this? Wouldn't it then make sense to keep what we've already learned, and not have to go through the process of learning the basics of Earthly existence once again, to even get to the point where any kind of spiritual realisation is possible?

Hedge,

I know Cleric can illustrate an answer to your question more helpfully, but I will just make a few points.

- The integration of memory is a function of our Thinking organism. This is the case even within an incarnation. By strengthening and deepening our Thinking, we can begin remembering more and more of our current lives towards infancy. Eventually we can re-remember past incarnations. As usual, it is only a personal cognitive limitation which prevents that at this stage of metamorphosis.

- Related to above, it is a gradual and lawful process. In modern religious apologetic you will frequently hear various ways of trying to explain why God didn't create us with full knowledge and freedom etc. This is because it is simply assumed the spiritual is not structured and lawful like the physical. The answer is really simple once we realize how physical structure and lawfulness is a dim quantitative reflection of higher order spiritual (qualitative) processes.

- Just because our previous experience is not remembered, doesn't mean it is not subconsciously informing us and influencing our perception-cognition of the world content. But when it remains subconscious, we have no control over how it informs us. It acts more of a puppet-master rather than a useful tool for spiritual evolution. We transfigure it into a useful tool by making it conscious via Thinking.

Another point to consider here - our relationship to Thinking, and therefore to Memory, has not remained static. That is generally the view held by materialists-dualists, Kantian and mystical idealists alike. Everything prior to birth, prior to human self-awareness on Earth, after physical death, etc. has been black holed, i.e. reified into domains of existence devoid of all perceptible meaning. They will tell you "there is no reincarnation" or "there is no way to recall memories because you brain storage has maxed out", etc. If we simply recognize the cognitive metamorphic progression over the epochs, as a concrete reality of both collective and individual experience, then we can avoid those dead-ends. For our ancient ancestors, Memory actually served the role of Thinking-Revelation provided from without. With the dawn and development of self-awareness, memories came to be formed inwardly. Now, the Thinking power emanates from within and, as Cleric illustrated in the other thread, we are as the spiritual unborn in a sense. Our thinking organism is extremely fragile and dependent on the sense-world. As we develop our living Reason and higher cognition, we attain Thinking degrees of freedom which allow our organism to expand into the spiritual, with less dependency on the sense-world, and thereby integrating Memory into present consciousness.

These are just basic points before Cleric can respond. They presuppose that the standard view of us existing in a flow of abstract linear time independent of us and/or memories held in storage container are not assumed.

[Hedge90]

Happy new year Ashvin!
I have to be honest with you, I don't understand 90% of what you said And I'm pretty skepetical about this thing with the metamorphosis of cognition. Of course our thinking must have changed concurrently with language, but I don't think our fundamental living experience could have changed that much. If it were so, we would basically not be able to understand anything that ancient authors wrote, and this is not the case. In fact we still read the ancient philosophers and make use of their thoughts, and while there are currents that were more metaphorical and picturesque than we are used to in these times (though these were mostly of the East), there are also those who formulated their thoughts pretty formaically (starting from Anaximander).

[AshvinP]

Happy new year Ashvin!
I have to be honest with you, I don't understand 90% of what you said And I'm pretty skepetical about this thing with the metamorphosis of cognition. Of course our thinking must have changed concurrently with language, but I don't think our fundamental living experience could have changed that much. If it were so, we would basically not be able to understand anything that ancient authors wrote, and this is not the case. In fact we still read the ancient philosophers and make use of their thoughts, and while there are currents that were more metaphorical and picturesque than we are used to in these times (though these were mostly of the East), there are also those who formulated their thoughts pretty formaically (starting from Anaximander).

Hedge,

Happy new year!

I guarantee that if you read Barfield's Saving the Appearances or Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin, without prejudice as to what the evidence shows, you will not be skeptical of this metamorphic progression of cognition. Again, it is only our assumption that we understand exactly how they perceived and cognized the world, because we crave certainty in all things unfamiliar. This has really been taken to an extreme in the modern age, where it is also assumed we understand how non-humans perceive the world. But the facts show something entirely different. It is true, what we call philosophy and logic, not entirely unlike our own, began with the pre-Socratics, but we cannot make sense of their reasoning without understanding how their perception-cognition existed on the threshold of the spiritual. It helps to think about the development of mythology and philosophy as a whole, as temporal phenomena, rather than modern commentaries on what they meant when writing this or that. Steiner also outlines this progression very well in Riddles of Philosophy.

[Hedge90]

Thanks, I'll make sure to check out these books... Once I'm done with The Master and His Emissary, which may be some time though

[AshvinP]

Thanks, I'll make sure to check out these books... Once I'm done with The Master and His Emissary, which may be some time though

TMAHE also describes this progression in a more indirect way. LB is abstract intellect and RB is holistic Reason and higher cognition.