Memory is that faculty of the mind by which it retains knowledge of association with persons, things, and events. While the apparent office of memory is universally familiar, it has an interior use which, though known to the few, is undreamed of by the many. In this brief chapter let us throw upon that use a ray from the Secret Science.

Because mind is an active principle, its expression is always dynamic. If one holds in his mind's eye an absent friend or loved one, forthwith the effort causes a vibration in the mental substance of the seven-fold world. Then, guided by the higher mind of the transmitter, this vibration finds the mind of the remembered. Should that vibration contact those peculiar to the physical brain mind of the receiver, in other words, his lower mind, it results that the finer mental vibrations, proper to the act of mental visualizing, are overpowered and even obliterated by the coarser ones of the material mind contacted. Should now the higher mind of the receiver at the time be in rapport with the corresponding mind of the sender, then a drawing near of these two minds will result.

The human material body must of course wholly conform to the laws of time and of space obtaining on the material plane. Not so the mind bodies, especially the higher of the two linked with the material body. This higher is in its own definite aspect of time and space; and, if freed from physical hinderings, it would obey only the law of the high mental plane. As it is, every human material body has more or less of a separative effect on its purely mental associate when the latter would come into conjunction with another of its kind.

If a loved one has passed out of material conditions, then but a single physical obstacle to conjunction of separated minds remains. Desire to visit the grave, or else some scene where, as earthly beings, friends or lovers have passed unforgettable hours, is an urge originating in the law on which we are touching. These places are potent aids to the yet-incarnated higher mind that would visualize most clearly the being now beyond the veil of the physical, and thus bring about the near approach of both higher minds, those which, in the course of nature, are destined to complete union.

Because in the world, and environed by physical conditions, we can picture heaven and its inhabitants only by giving to them certain physical characteristics. By the same law, those who have passed from earth can hold in memory the world and its dwellers only by giving to them certain characteristics of the heavenly places and their peoples.

As the discarnate higher mind rises to more and more appropriate planes of being, memory of the physical world and its contents - because increasingly influenced by environment - becomes more and more unlike the original. The belief that, in the last analysis, the physical world is mere delusion, no doubt originated with those who, in the profound trance known as samadhi, looked at or remembered it from the super-physical planes.

The law which influences memory in the discarnate upon the higher planes, and causes them to idealize the physical earth and its inhabitants, is operative in an opposite way in those who, after death, have sunken to the lower divisions of the astral plane. Especially is that law active in those unfortunates who have gravitated to that lowest division of the astral known as the eighth sphere.

As Swedenborg discovered, these remember and even see the sun itself as a black sphere. As for the physical earth, the distorted memory of these makes of it a vile abode of evil beings resembling themselves. Those who yet in physical life remember this class with hatred in their hearts, are in danger of forming the very tie which of all possible ones they would abhor; for let it be emphasized that while love is the potent binder of hearts and destinies, hate is equally efficient in its own field of operations.