Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 1, sect. 210

210. Just as physical sensing is limited by the physical body's sensory capacity, so naturally the experience of memory has limits according to the body of memory's ability to sense. And, as we have already mentioned, the standard of the body of memory in terrestrial man is so low that it can be compared with the condition of the physical body before it has developed physical senses, and therefore we can understand that the individual can be aware of very little memory material. Only memories of the last and strongest experiences - meaning those which have taken place within the limits of the present life - have the necessary power to make the primitive body of memory react. To the memories of more distant experiences - that is to say those which have disappeared during that individual's first years of his present life - the body of memory cannot react, and so it is here that terrestrial man's conscious memory about his existence reaches its extreme periphery or horizon. As this horizon remains within the limits of his present life, the irrational belief has become common in his zone of evolution that his existence began with the commencement of his present life, in that he is unable in physical day-consciousness to be aware of any memory at all of his previous existences or separate lives. However, it must be noted here that the individual, when in the spiritual existence experienced between his physical lives (according to later sections of Livets Bog), passes through that plane of existence in which the sixth basic energy, memory energy, is the dominating one, then through his body of memory he reacts to memories of experiences which go as far back as two or three preceding lives. Translated into physical time this means experiences up to some hundreds of years back in the past. But these memory experiences fortunately cannot be transferred to the forms of day-consciousness on the physical plane in the lower zone, and therefore they will disappear with the beginning of the individual's faculty for sensing on that plane in every new physical life, much to the advantage of the memories of the new physical happenings, turning them unimpeded into experience material. But this analysis must be left to later chapters in this book.
And so terrestrial man has a vast mass of memories which constitute his inner world and of which he is largely unaware; they therefore belong to his subconscious, and in an unconscious way are a contributory cause of the present formation of his fate.