The Peculiar Forms Of Memory, continued

The Elephant Speaks, part IV

The masters and the saints commonly say that the soul has three powers, thus resembling the Trinity. The first power is memory, meaning a secret, hidden art: this denotes the Father. The second is called intelligence, ever-presence/ knowing, wisdom. The third power is called will, a flooding of the Holy Ghost.

Meister Eckhart, Sermon 50.

Continuing the discussion:

Life is a single whole thing. When it’s lived through individual centers it only gives partial impressions. We then lack a certain kind of spiritual food which can only arrive in a whole form.

The same goes for recalled and related memory: it provides “nutritional catalysts” (we could think of them conceptually as vitamins, essential elements needed to help impressions deposit) for new impressions to bind deeper in being.

These “spiritually nutritional” qualities of memory need to be balanced in order to function properly, in the same way that a balance of vitamins is necessary in order to preserve physical health. We rarely think of inner, spiritual properties as having the same general effect and requirement as strictly physical ones, but they do. In fact, the way that vitamins relate to outer, physical health is simply an inferior (for it is of the lower) material reflection of the way that impressions relate to spiritual health; the origin of actual overall organic health rests first in the spiritual and translates only afterwards to the material, nerver the other way around. Memory plays an essential role in this action.