Originally, 'memory' means as much as devotion: a constant concentrated abiding with something - not just with something that has passed, but in the same way with what is present and with what may come.

- Martin Heidegger

Today popular accounts of the implications of modern physics vie with spiritual practices and orientations from many corners of the world to indicate paths by which we may further 'realize' our experience. When we are promised new kinds of experience, we are led to suppose that we have long been involved in illusion, ignorance, or error. We may regard both ourselves and the patterns and meanings of the world's claims upon our life as at fault: so if we awaken it will be because we have somehow escaped from what we have become used to - and often our shackles are named to be the entire western tradition.

People most anointed to speak for the essential continuity of the western tradition, for example from Catholic Christianity, have felt called to cross-fertilize their path with, for instance, the teachings of Buddhism. The desire to shift toward novel, foreign, or iconoclastic teachings - or to reconcile more familiar faiths to unfamiliar ones - expresses a timely and healthy impulse to include a wider world in our humanity.

"Have you no compassion for the past? Do you not see how in its abandonment it depends . . . on the mercy, the spirit, the fairness of each generation? Could not, at any moment, a great monster appear who would force us to deny it completely, who would make our ears deaf to it or even hand us a whip to mistreat it?"

- Friedrich Nietzsche   

In the history of thought, more than any other branch of historical reflection, it is necessary to let the present grow out of the past. For in the comprehension of those ideas that satisfy the demand of the present, we have the foundation for the insight that spreads the right light over the past.

- Rudolf Steiner   

Yet our own tradition may keep essential elements relevant to the evolution of experience from which we have been cut off: Besides the natural tendency to take for granted what is familiar, exacerbated by meanings exercised too casually or meanings subjected to cycles of fashion, civilizations demonstrate common tendencies to crystallize dogmatic institutions around once living forms of meaning. If we would meet the actual dynamics which have belonged to the becoming of our own tradition we must get past how those dynamics have fossilized, or turned into academic 'businesses', or been distorted into forms of power when they have been brought toward reductive 'bottom lines‡.'

Thinking, as it arrives through our history, has suffered every one of the demeanings and distortions enumerated above. In what follows you will find an account of the recent history of thinking, intensively connecting its impulses and explorations, to exhibit and resurrect for the reader a 'genetic' covenant in our own tradition between mind's past and its future. First, that the thinkers of our own recent past were as concerned as we to 'expand their consciousness' and to awaken outside of cultural hypnosis. Second, that the influence which they felt from each other have been links in an 'underground railway' which has borne the possibilities for mind's realization much further than the current high-water mark of the deadening institutionalization of our tradition. Finally, I will sketch some of the crucial contributions of thinking in our time toward transforming Mind's experience - and how these can work together in opening a path for evolving consciousness.

What the human spirit is can be revealed only by the historical consciousness of that which the mind has lived through and brought forth.

-Wilhelm Dilthey      

My hopes are that the weave of the text can offer the reader transformative participation in the especially decisive historical interval which spans the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.