It is useful in trying to understand the action of Mind, to first view the action of memory, given its major role in the mental functioning.
Sri Aurobindo reviews this: “We see that there are two applications which the mind makes of its faculty or process of memory, memory of self, memory of experience. First, radically, it applies memory to the fact of our conscious-being and relates that to Time. It says, “I am now, I was in the past, I shall therefore be in the future, it is the same I in all the three ever unstable divisions of Time.” Thus it tries to render to itself in the terms of Time an account of that which it feels to be the fact, but cannot know or prove to be true, the eternity of the conscious being.”
Memory ties together the awareness of the process of change through Time, and it is through extrapolation, not through Knowledge that it projects itself into the future. Sri Aurobindo continues: “By memory Mind can only know of itself in the past, by direct self-awareness only in the moment of the present, and it is only be extension of and inference from this self-awareness and from the memory which tells us that for some time awareness has been continually existent that mind can conceive of itself in the future.”
Memory provides mind “this sense of a persistent continuity which easily extends itself into a conviction of eternity.”
There are of course multiple different possible underlying causes or reasons for this sense of continuity and this conviction, and we shall begin the exploration of these possibilities in the next post.
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part I, Chapter 8, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, pp. 502-503
Sri Aurobindo Studies 