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CHAPTER IX
Memory, Ego and Self-Experience
Here this God, the Mind, in its dream experiences again and
again
what once was experienced, what has been seen and what has not
been seen, what has been heard and what has not been heard; what
has been experienced and what has
not been experienced, what is
and what is not, all it sees, it is all and sees.
Prasna Upanishad. 1
To dwell in our true being is liberation; the sense of ego is a fall
from the
truth of our being.
Mahopanishad. 2
One in many births, a single ocean holder of all streams of movement,
sees our hearts.
Rig Veda. 3
THE
direct self-consciousness of the mental being, that by which it becomes
aware of its own nameless and formless
existence behind the flow of a differentiated self-experience, of its
eternal soul-substance behind the mental formations of
that substance, of its self behind the ego, goes behind mentality to
the timelessness of an eternal present; it is that in it which
is ever the same and unaffected by the mental distinction of past,
present and future. It is also unaffected by the distinctions
of space or of circumstance; for if the mental being ordinarily says of
itself, “I am in the body, I am here, I am there, I shall
be elsewhere”, yet when it learns to fix itself in this direct
self-consciousness, it very soon perceives that this is the language
of its changing self-experience which only expresses the relations of
its surface consciousness to the environment and to
externalities. Distinguishing these, detaching itself from these, it
perceives that the self of which it is directly conscious does
not in any way change by these outward changes, but is always the same,
unaffected by the mutations of the body or of the
mentality or of the field in which these move and act. It is in its
essence featureless, relationless, without any other
character than that of pure conscious existence self-sufficient and
eternally satisfied with pure
1 IV. 5.
2 V. 2
3 X. 5. 1.
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being, self-blissful. Thus we become aware of the stable Self, the eternal “Am”, or rather the immutable “Is” without any
category of personality or Time.
But this consciousness of Self, as it is timeless, so is capable also
of freely regarding Time as a thing reflected in it and
as either the cause or the subjective field of a changing experience.
It is then the eternal “I am”, the unchanging
consciousness on whose surface changes of conscious experience occur in
the process of Time. The surface consciousness
is constantly adding to its experience or rejecting from its
experience, and by every addition it is modified and by every
rejection also it is modified; although that deeper self which supports
and contains this mutation remains unmodified, the
outer or superficial self is constantly developing its experience so
that it can never say of itself absolutely, “I am the same
that I was a moment ago.” Those who live in this surface Time-self and
have not the habit of drawing back inward towards
the immutable or the capacity of dwelling in it, are even incapable of
thinking of themselves apart from this ever
self-modifying mental experience. That is for them their self and it is
easy for them, if they look with detachment at its
happenings, to agree with the conclusion of the Buddhist Nihilists that
this self is in fact nothing but a stream of idea and
experience and mental action, the persistent flame which is yet never
the same flame, and to conclude that there is no such
thing as a real self, but only a flow of experience and behind it
Nihil: there is experience of knowledge without a Knower, experience of
being without an Existent; there are simply a number of elements, parts
of a flux without a real whole, which combine to create the illusion of
a Knower and Knowledge and the Known, the illusion of an Existent and
existence and the experience of existence. Or they can conclude that
Time is the only real existence and they themselves are its creatures.
This conclusion of an illusory existent in a real or unreal world is as
inevitable to this kind of withdrawal as is the opposite conclusion of
a real Existence but an illusory world to the thinker who, dwelling on
the immobile self, observes everything else as a mutable not-self; he
comes eventually to regard the latter as the result of a deluding trick
of consciousness.
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But let us look
a little at this surface consciousness without theorising, studying it
only in its facts. We see it first as a
purely subjective phenomenon. There is a constant rapid shifting of
Time-point which it is impossible to arrest for a moment.
There is a constant changing, even when there is no shifting of
Space-circumstance, a change both in the body or form of
itself which the consciousness directly inhabits and the environing
body or form of things in which it less directly lives. It is
equally affected by both, though more vividly, because directly, by the
smaller than by the larger habitation, by its own body
than by the body of the world, because only of the changes in its own
body is it directly conscious and of the body of the
world only indirectly through the senses and the effects of the
macrocosm on the microcosm. This change of the body and
the surroundings is not so insistently obvious or not so obviously
rapid as the swift mutation of Time; yet it is equally real
from moment to moment and equally impossible to arrest. But we see that
the mental being only regards all this mutation so
far as it produces effects upon its own mental consciousness, generates
impressions and changes in its mental experience
and mental body, because only through the mind can it be aware of its
changing physical habitation and its changing
world-experience. Therefore there is, as well as a shifting or change
of Time-point and Space-field, a constant modifying
change of the sum of circumstances experienced in Time and Space and as
the result a constant modification of the mental
personality which is the form of our superficial or apparent self. All
this change of circumstance is summed up in
philosophical language as causality; for in this stream of the cosmic
movement the antecedent state seems to be the cause
of a subsequent state, or else this subsequent state seems to be the
result of a previous action of persons, objects or forces:
yet in fact what we call cause may very well be only circumstance. Thus
the mind has over and above its direct
self-consciousness a more or less indirect mutable self-experience
which it divides into two parts, its subjective experience
of the ever-modified mental states of its personality and its objective
experience of the ever-changing environment which
seems partly or wholly to cause and is yet at the same time itself
affected by the workings
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of that personality. But all this experience is at bottom subjective; for even the objective and external is only known to mind
in the form of subjective impressions.
Here the part played by Memory increases greatly in importance; for
while all that it can do for the mind with regard to
its direct self-consciousness is to remind it that it existed and was
the same in the past as in the present, it becomes in our
differentiated or surface self-experience an important power linking
together past and present experiences, past and present
personality, preventing chaos and dissociation and assuring the
continuity of the stream in the surface mind. Still even here
we must not exaggerate the function of memory or ascribe to it that
part of the operations of consciousness which really
belongs to the activity of other power-aspects of the mental being. It
is not the memory alone which constitutes the
ego-sense; memory is only a mediator between the sense-mind and the
co-ordinating intelligence: it offers to the intelligence
the past data of experience which the mind holds somewhere within but
cannot carry with it in its running from moment to
moment on the surface.
A little analysis will make this apparent. We have in all functionings
of the mentality four elements, the object of mental
consciousness, the act of mental consciousness, the occasion and the
subject. In the self-experience of the self-observing
inner being, the object is always some state or movement or wave of the
conscious being, anger, grief or other emotion,
hunger or other vital craving, impulse or inner life-reaction or some
form of sensation, perception or thought activity. The act
is some kind of mental observation and conceptual valuation of this
movement or wave or else a mental sensation of it in
which observation and valuation may be involved and even lost,—so that
in this act the mental person may either separate
the act and the object by a distinguishing perception or confuse them
together indistinguishably. That is to say, he may either
simply become a movement, let us put it, of angry consciousness, not at
all standing back from that activity, not reflecting or
observing himself, not controlling the feeling or the accompanying
action, or he may observe what he becomes and reflect
on it, with this seeing or perception in his mind “I am angry”. In the
former
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case the subject or mental person, the act of
conscious self-experience and the substantial angry becoming of the
mind
which is the object of the self-experience, are all rolled up into one
wave of conscious-force in movement; but in the latter
there is a certain rapid analysis of its constituents and the act of
self-experience partly detaches itself from the object. Thus
by this act of partial detachment we are able not only to experience
ourselves dynamically in the becoming, in the process of
movement of conscious-force itself, but to stand back, perceive and
observe ourselves and, if the detachment is sufficient, to
control our feeling and action, control to some extent our
becoming.
However, there is usually a defect even in this act of
self-observation; for there is indeed a partial detachment of the
act from the object, but not of the mental person from the mental act:
the mental person and the mental action are involved
or rolled up in each other; nor is the mental person sufficiently
detached or separated either from the emotional becoming. I
am aware of myself in an angry becoming of my conscious stuff of being
and in a thought-perception of this becoming: but
all thought-perception also is a becoming and not myself, and this I do
not yet sufficiently realise; I am identified with my
mental activities or involved in them, not free and separate. I do not
yet directly become aware of myself apart from my
becomings and my perception of them, apart from the forms of active
consciousness which I assume in the waves of the
sea of conscious force which is the stuff of my mental and life nature.
It is when I entirely detach the mental person from
his act of self-experience that I become fully aware first, of the
sheer ego and, in the end, of the witness self or the thinking
mental Person, the something or someone who becomes angry and observes
it but is not limited or determined in his being
by the anger or the perception. He is, on the contrary, a constant
factor aware of an unlimited succession of conscious
movements and conscious experiences of movements and aware of his own
being in that succession; but he can be aware
of it also behind that succession, supporting it, containing it, always
the same in fact of being and force of being beyond the
changing forms or arrangements of his conscious force. He is thus the
Self that is
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immutably and at the same time the Self that becomes eternally in the succession of Time.
It is evident that there are not really two selves, but one conscious
being which throws itself up in the waves of
conscious force so as to experience itself in a succession of changing
movements of itself, by which it is not really changed,
increased or diminished, — any more than the original stuff of Matter
or Energy in the material world is increased or
diminished by the constantly changing combinations of the elements, —
although it seems to be changed to the experiencing
consciousness so long as it lives only in the knowledge of the
phenomenon and does not get back to the knowledge of the
original being, substance or Force. When it does get back to that
deeper knowledge, it does not condemn the observed
phenomenon as unreal, but it perceives an immutable being, energy or
real substance not phenomenal, not subject in itself to
the senses; it sees at the same time a becoming or real phenomenon of
that being, energy or substance. This becoming we
call phenomenon because, actually, as things are with us now, it
manifests itself to the consciousness under the conditions of
sense-perception and sense-relation and not directly to the
consciousness itself in its pure and unconditioned embracing and
totally comprehending knowledge. So with the Self, — it is, immutably,
to our direct self-consciousness; it manifests itself
mutably in various becomings to the mind-sense and the mental
experience — therefore, as things are with us now, not
directly to the pure unconditioned knowledge of the consciousness, but
to it under the conditions of our mentality.
It is this succession of experiences and it is this fact of an indirect or secondary action of the experiencing
consciousness under the conditions of our mentality that bring in the device of Memory. For a primary condition of our
mentality is division by the moments of Time; there is an inability to get its experience or to hold its experiences together
except under the conditions of this self-division by the moments of Time. In the immediate mental experience of a wave of
becoming, a conscious movement of being, there is no action or need of memory; I become angry, — it is an act of sensation,
not of memory; I
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observe that I am angry, — it is an act of
perception, not of memory. Memory only comes in when I begin to relate
my
experience to the successions of Time, when I divide my becoming into
past, present and future, when I say, “I was angry a
moment ago”, or “I have become angry and am still in anger”, or “I was
angry once and will be again if there is the same
occasion”. Memory may indeed come immediately and directly into the
becoming, if the occasion of the movement of
consciousness is itself wholly or partly a thing of the past, — for
example, if there is a recurrence of emotion, such as grief or
anger, caused by memory of past wrong or suffering and not by any
immediate occasion in the present or else caused by an
immediate occasion reviving the memory of a past occasion. Because we
cannot keep the past in us on the surface of the
consciousness, — though it is always there behind, within, subliminally
present and often even active, — therefore we have to
recover it as something that is lost or is no longer existent, and this
we do by that repetitive and linking action of the
thought-mind which we call memory, — just as we summon things which are
not within the actual field of our limited
superficial mind-experience by the action of the thought-mind which we
call imagination, that greater power in us and high summoner of all
possibilities realisable or unrealisable into the field of our
ignorance.
Memory is not the essence of persistent or continuous experience even
in the succession of Time and would not be
necessary at all if our consciousness were of an undivided movement, if
it had not to run from moment to moment with a
loss of direct grasp on the last and an entire ignorance or
non-possession of the next. All experience or substance of
becoming in Time is a flowing stream or sea not divided in itself, but
only divided in the observing consciousness by the
limited movement of the Ignorance which has to leap from moment to
moment like a dragon-fly darting about on the surface
of the stream: so too all substance of being in Space is a flowing sea
not divided in itself, but only divided in the observing
consciousness because our sense-faculty is limited in its grasp, can
see only a part and is therefore bound to observe forms
of substance as if they were separate things in themselves, independent
of the one substance.
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There is indeed an arrangement of things in Space and Time, but no gap or division except to our ignorance, and it is to
bridge the gaps and connect the divisions created by the ignorance of Mind that we call in the aid of various devices of the
mind-consciousness, of which memory is only one device.
There is then in me this flowing stream of the world-sea, and anger or
grief or any other inner movement can occur as
a long-continued wave of the continuous stream. This continuity is not
constituted by force of memory, although memory
may help to prolong or repeat the wave when by itself it would have
died away into the stream; the wave simply occurs and
continues as a movement of conscious-force of my being carried forward
by its own original impulsion of disturbance.
Memory comes in to prolong the disturbance by a recurrence of the
thinking mind to the occasion of anger or of the feeling
mind to the first impulse of anger by which it justifies itself in a
repetition of the disturbance; otherwise the perturbation
would spend itself and only recur when the occasion itself was actually
repeated. The natural recurrence of the wave, the
same or a similar occasion causing the same disturbance, is not any
more than its isolated occurrence a result of memory,
although memory may help to fortify it and make the mind more subject
to it. There is rather the same relation of repeated
occasion and repeated result and movement in the more fluid energy and
variable substance of mind as that we see
presented mechanically by the repetition of the same cause and effect
in the less variable operations of the energy and
substance of the material world. We may say, if we like, that there is
a subconscious memory in all energy of Nature which
repeats invariably the same relation of energy and result; but then we
enlarge illimitably the connotation of the word. In
reality, we can only state a law of repetition in the action of the
waves of conscious-force by which it regularises these
movements of its own substance. Memory, properly speaking, is merely
the device by which the witnessing Mind helps itself
to link together these movements and their occurrence and recurrences
in the successions of Time for Time-experience, for
increasing use by a more and more co-ordinating will and for a
constantly developing valuation by a more and
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more co-ordinating reason. It is a great, an indispensable but not the only factor in the process by which the Inconscience
from which we start develops full self-consciousness, and by which the Ignorance of the mental being develops conscious
knowledge of itself in its becomings. This development continues until the co-ordinating mind of knowledge and mind of will
are fully able to possess and use all the material of self-experience. Such at least is the process of evolution as we see it
governing the development of Mind out of the self-absorbed and apparently mindless energy in the material world.
The ego-sense is another device of mental Ignorance by which the mental
being becomes aware of himself, — not only
of the objects, occasions and acts of his activity, but of that which
experiences them. At first it might seem as if the
ego-sense were actually constituted by memory, as if it were memory
that told us, “It is the same I who was angry some
time ago and am again or still angry now.” But, in reality, all that
the memory can tell us by its own power is that it is the
same limited field of conscious activity in which the same phenomenon
has occurred. What happens is that there is a
repetition of the mental phenomenon, of that wave of becoming in the
mind-substance of which the mind-sense is
immediately aware; memory comes in to link these repetitions together
and enables the mind-sense to realise that it is the
same mind-substance which is taking the same dynamic form and the same
mind-sense which is experiencing it. The
ego-sense is not a result of memory or built by memory, but already and
always there as a point of reference or as
something in which the mind-sense concentrates itself so as to have a
co-ordinant centre instead of sprawling incoherently
all over the field of experience; ego-memory reinforces this
concentration and helps to maintain it, but does not constitute it.
Possibly, in the lower animal the sense of ego, the sense of
individuality would not, if analysed, go much farther than a
sensational imprecise or less precise realisation of continuity and
identity and separateness from others in the moments of
Time. But in man there is in addition a co-ordinating mind of knowledge
which, basing itself on the united action of the
mind-sense and the memory, arrives at the distinct idea, — while it
retains also the
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first constant intuitive perception, — of an ego which senses, feels, remembers, thinks, and which is the same whether it
remembers or does not remember. This conscious mind-substance, it says, is always that of one and the same conscious
person who feels, ceases to feel, remembers, forgets, is superficially conscious, sinks back from superficial consciousness
into sleep; he is the same before the organisation of memory and after it, in the infant and in the dotard, in sleep and in
waking, in apparent consciousness and apparent unconsciousness; he and no other did the acts which he forgets as well as
the acts which he remembers; he is persistently the same behind all changes of his becoming or his personality. This action
of knowledge in man, this co-ordinating intelligence, this formulation of self-consciousness and self-experience is higher than
the memory-ego and sense-ego of the animal and therefore, we may suppose, nearer to real self-knowledge. We may even
come to realise, if we study the veiled as well as the uncovered action of Nature, that all ego-sense, all ego-memory has at
its back, is in fact a pragmatic contrivance of a secret co-ordinating power or mind of knowledge, present in the universal
conscious-force, of which the reason in man is the overt form at which our evolution arrives, — a form still limited and
imperfect in its modes of action and constituting principle. There is a subconscious knowledge even in the Inconscient, a
greater intrinsic Reason in things which impose co-ordination, that is to say, a certain rationality, upon the wildest
movements of the universal becoming.
The importance of Memory becomes apparent in the well-observed phenomenon of double personality or dissociation of
personality in which the same man has two successive or alternating states of his mind and in each remembers and
co-ordinates perfectly only what he was or did in that state of mind and not what he was or did in the other. This can be
associated with an organised idea of different personality, for he thinks in one state that he is one person and in the other
that he is quite another with a different name, life and feelings. Here it would seem that memory is the whole substance of
personality. But, on the other side, we must see that dissociation of memory occurs also
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without dissociation of personality, as when a man
in the state of hypnosis takes up a range of memories and experiences
to
which his waking mind is a stranger but does not therefore think
himself another person, or as when one who has forgotten
the past events of his life and perhaps even his name, still does not
change his ego-sense and personality. And there is
possible too a state of consciousness in which, although there is no
gap of memory, yet by a rapid development the whole
being feels itself changed in every mental circumstance and the man
feels born into a new personality, so that, if it were not
for the co-ordinating mind, he would not at all accept his past as
belonging to the person he now is, although he remembers
perfectly well that it was in the same form of body and same field of
mind-substance that it occurred. Mind-sense is the
basis, memory the thread on which experiences are strung by the
self-experiencing mind: but it is the co-ordinating faculty
of mind which, relating together all the material that memory provides
and all its linkings of past, present and future, relates
them also to an “I” who is the same in all the moments of Time and in
spite of all the changes of experience and personality.
The ego-sense is only a preparatory device and a first basis for the
development of real self-knowledge in the mental
being. Developing from inconscience to self-conscience, from nescience
of self and things to knowledge of self and things,
the Mind in forms arrives thus far that it is aware of all its
superficially conscious becoming as related to an “I” which it
always is. That “I” it partly identifies with the conscious becoming,
partly thinks of it as something other than the becoming
and superior to it, even perhaps eternal and unchanging. In the last
resort, by the aid of its reason which distinguishes in
order to co-ordinate, it may fix its self-experience on the becoming
only, on the constantly changing self and reject the idea
of something other than it as a fiction of the mind; there is then no
being, only becoming. Or it may fix its self-experience
into a direct consciousness of its own eternal being and reject the
becoming, even when it is compelled to be aware of it, as
a fiction of the mind and the senses or the vanity of a temporary
inferior existence.
But it is evident that a self-knowledge based on the
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separative ego-sense is imperfect and that no
knowledge founded upon it alone or primarily or on a reaction against
it can be
secure or assured of completeness. First, it is a knowledge of our
superficial mental activity and its experiences and, with
regard to all the large rest of our becoming that is behind, it is an
Ignorance. Secondly, it is a knowledge only of being and
becoming as limited to the individual self and its experiences; all the
rest of the world is to it not-self, something, that is to
say, which it does not realise as part of its own being but as some
outside existence presented to its separate consciousness.
This happens because it has no direct conscious knowledge of this
larger existence and nature such as the individual has of
his own being and becoming. Here too there is a limited knowledge
asserting itself in the midst of a vast Ignorance. Thirdly,
the true relation between the being and the becoming has not been
worked out on the basis of perfect self-knowledge but
rather by the Ignorance, by a partial knowledge. As a consequence the
mind in its impetus towards an ultimate knowledge
attempts through the co-ordinating and dissociating will and reason on
the basis of our present experience and possibilities to
drive at a trenchant conclusion which cuts away one side of existence.
All that has been established is that the mental being
can on one side absorb himself in direct self-consciousness to the
apparent exclusion of all becoming and can on the other
side absorb himself in the becoming to the apparent exclusion of all
stable self-consciousness. Both sides of the mind,
separating as antagonists, condemn what they reject as unreal or else
as only a play of the conscious mind; to one or the
other, either the Divine, the Self, or the world is only relatively
real so long as the mind persists in creating them, the world
an effective dream of Self, or God and Self a mental construction or an
effective hallucination. The true relation has not
been seized, because these two sides of existence must always appear
discordant and unreconciled to our intelligence so
long as there is only a partial knowledge. An integral knowledge is the
aim of the conscious evolution; a clean cut of the
consciousness shearing apart one side and leaving the other cannot be
the whole truth of self and things. For if some
immobile Self were all, there could be no possibility of
world-existence; if mobile
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Nature were all, there might be a cycle of universal becoming, but no spiritual foundation for the evolution of the Conscient
out of the Inconscient and for the persistent aspiration of our partial Consciousness or Ignorance to exceed itself and arrive
at the whole conscious Truth of its being and the integral conscious knowledge of all Being.
Our surface existence is only a surface and it is there that
there is the full reign of the Ignorance; to know we have to
go within ourselves and see with an inner knowledge. All that is
formulated on the surface is a small and diminished
representation of our secret greater existence. The immobile self in us
is found only when the outer mental and vital
activities are quieted; for since it is seated deep within and is
represented on the surface only by the intuitive sense of
self-existence and misrepresented by the mental, vital, physical
ego-sense, its truth has to be experienced in the mind's
silence. But also the dynamic parts of our surface being are similarly
diminished figures of greater things that are there in
the depths of our secret nature. The surface memory itself is a
fragmentary and ineffective action pulling out details from an
inner subliminal memory which receives and records all our
world-experience, receives and records even what the mind has
not observed, understood or noticed. Our surface imagination is a
selection from a vaster more creative and effective
subliminal image-building power of consciousness. A mind with
immeasurably wider and more subtle perceptions, a
life-energy with a greater dynamism, a subtle-physical substance with a
larger and finer receptivity are building out of
themselves our surface evolution. A psychic entity is there behind
these occult activities which is the true support of our
individualisation; the ego is only an outward false substitute: for it
is this secret soul that supports and holds together our
self-experience and world-experience; the mental, vital, physical,
external ego is a superficial construction of Nature. It is only when
we have seen both our self and our nature as a whole, in the depths as
well as on the surface, that we can acquire a true basis of knowledge.
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