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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali - Book 1 - The Problem of Union
11. Memory is the holding on to that which has been known. This memory concerns several groups of realizations, either active or latent; it deals with certain congeries of known factors, and these might be enumerated as follows: The thought images of that which is tangible, [24] objective and which has been known by the thinker upon the physical plane. Kama-manasic (or desire-lower mind) images of past desires and their gratification. The "picture making faculty" of the average man is based upon his desires (high or low desires, aspirational or degrading, in its sense of pulling down) and their known gratification. This remains equally true of the memory of a gluttonous man, for instance, and his latent image of a satisfactory dinner, and the memory of the orthodox saint, based upon his picture making of a joyous heaven. That memory activity which is the result of mental training, the accumulation of acquired facts, the consequence of reading or of teaching, and which is not purely based upon desire, but which has its basis in intellectual interest. All the various contacts which the memory holds and recognizes as emanating from the five lower sense perceptions. Those mental images, latent in the memory making faculty, which are the total of the knowledge contacted and the realizations evoked by the right use of the mind as a sixth sense. All these forms of the memory faculty have to be dropped and no longer held; they must be recognized as modifications of the mind, of the thinking principle, and therefore as part of that versatile psychic nature which has to be dominated before the yogi can hope to attain liberation from limitation and from all lower activity. This is the goal. [25] Finally (for it is not necessary to enumerate more intricate subdivisions) memory includes also the accumulated experiences gained by the soul through the many incarnations, and stored up in the true consciousness of the soul.
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