455. But beings cannot always be victorious. They must also go through a long succession of stages of defeat, persecution and oppression similar to that which their own victorious existence had caused to other beings. This state of suffering, which will always be the consequence of a form of existence where "might" and not "right" constitutes the authorised principle of life, cannot but develop the being's mentality. Instinct has not been adequate when confronted by this permanent state of danger, so the being's faculties of sensing and thinking have been enormously sharpened, just as the countless sufferings it has gone through have set a mark in its consciousness in the form of an ability. This ability is a "feeling of compassion" or the first beginnings of a weak basis for all the development of humane tendencies in the being. In reality "compassion" is nothing less than an unconscious recognition in the memory of experienced suffering. It differs from the ordinary way of experiencing memories in that there is no memory of any time or place. Only the area of memory involving pain and suffering itself can, in this case, pass into day-consciousness by memory experience. This recollection, therefore, is not sensed by the individual as a memory, but on the contrary as a kind of imagined picture.
      In an ordinary complete memory experience in the I's day-consciousness there occurs both a time and a place in the experience of the remembered event. And the I "remembers" this occurrence as a past personal experience. This is not the case with memories from former incarnations. Here any indication of time and place, indeed, any connection of the remembered event to the I as its own personal experience, has disappeared from its day-consciousness. Only the actual picture of pain, or the details of suffering, remain in the consciousness of the I in a new incarnation where it has become "C knowledge" and is automatically evoked every time the individual is aware of events which resemble the picture of suffering in the unconscious memory inherited from the past.
      But as this memory is thus unconscious, in that the I does not remember it as its own personal experience, and does not remember any time or place of occurrence, then it is not perceived by that "I" as a memory at all. The details of this suffering, which are the only ones transferred into the new day-consciousness, are therefore only experienced by the being as "imaginary pictures". As mentioned above, these come about automatically when the being becomes aware of another being's misfortune or suffering. Then there arises a confrontation between the being's "imaginary pictures" and the event which has actually happened to the other being in the form of misfortune or suffering. So by means of this automatic confrontation with the external event and the being's "imaginary pictures" – which are in fact, although unconscious, a composition of mobilized memory-pictures from the being's own experience – he acquires the ability to assess the external event. How correct this assessment is will depend on how nearly related is the being's composition of "imaginary pictures" with the outside event. Any connection will again depend on whether the being has actually experienced a similar event or circumstance as that conveyed by the outside event. If he has not done so then he will not have the ability to assess it or even render it comprehensible. Indeed, in the most favourable cases there might be an attempt towards the automatic mobilizing of unconscious memory-pictures, but if none of these are related to the details of the outer event, the being cannot react emotionally, however painful or worthy of sympathy it may appear. The being will remain quite cool about it.
      But if the outside event concerning the fellow being is of such a nature that the observer possesses many related details to it in his unconscious memory-material, then the automatic mobilization will, of course, make the "imaginary pictures" correspondingly more correct, and their instigator will correspondingly feel the fellow being's suffering and can thus fully comprehend it. And if strongly retarding forces do not interfere, he will react in the interest of relieving his fellow being's suffering. This is a reaction which we would term "compassionate".