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WEB 4 - ARCHIVE
Commentary 1 - Page 8 | ||||||
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There was an ancient image in which memory was compared to a wax tablet The facts behind this view are confirmed by Plato, and it is worth remembering that before the time of Christ he had echoed many aspects of the Christian teaching, although without that completeness [i] that led to practical results. The esoteric model of memory, properly understood, will tell us that we must transform our memory by increasing its sensitivity so that it registers things other than the merely sensory, by becoming more discriminating, that is, by registering the subtle and meaningful, not the coarse and purely external, and in this way purifying the memory of illusions. The parable of the Sower, written in the time of Christ to describe memory in terms understandable to a population predominantly of farmers, uses a model very similar to that used by Plato. Plato conveyed the same basic principles as the Gospel parable, but did so by describing the memory as being like one of the wax tablets they used for writing on. In that Greek analogy, what happens to the 'impressions' that fall on the memory depends on the condition or 'temperature' of the wax. The similarities of the two models make one suspect that they are different versions of a standard model of memory once used in classical esoteric teaching. Like the parable of the Sower, Plato's model described three conditions of memory: If it is too hard, nothing is retained; this is like the seed that falls on the edge of the road, where the earth is too hard packed and the seeds cannot root. This leads to forgetting of all but the strongest impressions, and so the gentle impressions of spiritual experience are not retained. If it is too soft, too much is retained, the memory is not sufficiently selective, but instead retains irrelevancies and untested delusions, which blanket the memories we wish to retain. In this case the impressions of spiritual experience are usually obscured, a few may survive, but they will not be remembered often enough to lead to any change in our lives. If the wax is in perfect condition, at a perfect temperature, we retain what we wish to retain. |
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