Letter 13: DEATH

"With respect to moral memory, it is above all in old age that it replaces more and more not only mechanical memory but also logical and intellectual memory. It is the heart then which supplies the energy which nourishes and maintains memory and which supplements the growing lapse of mechanical memory and intellectual memory. Senile lapse of memory is due to the fact that the person who suffers from it failed to replace in time the functions of intellectual memory -- without mentioning mechanical memory -- by those of moral memory. People who are able to and who know how to give everything a moral worth and to see a moral sense in everything will not forget anything; they will have a normal, if not excellent, memory to a very advanced age.

Beyond the three types of memory -- mechanical, logical and moral ..., there is still the kind of memory that we have designated as "vertical or revelatory memory". It is not a memory of the past in the sense of the horizontal line: today, yesterday, the day before, etc., but rather in the sense of the vertical line: here, higher, still higher, etc. It is a "memory" which does not link the present to the past on the plane of the physical, psychic and intellectual life, but which links the plane of ordinary consciousness to planes or states of consciousness higher than ordinary consciousness. It is the faculty of the "lower self" to reproduce the experience and knowledge of the "higher self" or, if you like, the faculty of the "higher self" to imprint its experience and knowledge upon the consciousness of the "lower self". It is the link between the 'higher eye" and the "lower eye", which renders us authentically religious and wise, and immune to the assaults of skepticism, materialism and determinism. It is this also which is the source of certainty not only of God and the spiritual world with its hierarchical entities but also of the immortality of our being and reincarnation, wherever it is a matter of reincarnation." --VT

"Religious Man"
watercolor  11"x15"