Steiner's name for the rate at which an earthly life forgets its pre-birth wisdom, and the arithmetic that turns that rate into centuries between incarnations.
What is the Forgetting Time?
The Forgetting Time in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's measure for the length of a human being's stay between death and rebirth. He set it out on 9 April 1923 at Dornach, in the workmen's lecture printed as The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity (GA 349). Steiner held that a child brings down an unconscious wisdom that builds its body, strongest in the earliest years, and that earthly life spends this wisdom until nothing is left. A lifetime is therefore the time it takes to forget, in German the Vergessenszeit. Steiner took the age of a person's first memory as the point where forgetting begins, divided the remaining years by that age to get a rate, then applied the rate to the whole lifespan. His example, a man of sixty whose first memory falls at four, gives fourteen times sixty, or 840 years before return. The same shape of reasoning, forgetting measured as a rate, underlies modern memory science.
The Forgetting Time is the plainest arithmetic Steiner ever offered his Goetheanum workmen: count the years from your first memory to your death, see how many times over you have forgotten what you brought with you, and you have the centuries you will need in the spiritual world to gather it again. The measure is a rate, not a fixed term, so no two people carry the same interval.
In Steiner's Own Words
When someone takes an exam, it often takes two years to pass it. But they forget it quickly, terribly quickly. This is also the case with the knowledge we need to build our body: we can forget it quickly. Only here the “quick” is somewhat different than with an exam or a test. The “quick” is our whole life on earth. When we have died, we have forgotten approximately what we brought down into physical life at our birth. Our lifetime is approximately the forgetting time.
What it Means Today
Hermann Ebbinghaus published Über das Gedächtnis in Leipzig in 1885, after years of memorising nonsense syllables and testing himself at fixed intervals. His instrument was the savings method: he did not ask whether a list survived, he asked how much less time relearning it took. Out of that came the forgetting curve, the first curve in psychology to treat memory loss as a measurable rate rather than an accident. Steiner, lecturing thirty-eight years later to the men building the Goetheanum, reached for exactly the same instrument and pointed it at something Ebbinghaus never considered measuring. He too asked how long relearning takes relative to learning. He too read forgetting as a slope rather than a switch. The difference is the material: Ebbinghaus tracked syllables held by the brain, Steiner tracked the formative wisdom that shapes the brain in the first place, and he set his zero at the age of a person's first memory. That anchor is not arbitrary. Memory researchers still find the earliest retrievable memory clustering around age three to four, the boundary they call childhood amnesia, and Steiner puts his starting point exactly there.
Thalira synthesis: the Forgetting Time is best read as an ether-body forgetting curve, an Ebbinghaus experiment run on the wisdom that builds the body rather than on the syllables it later stores, which is why the figure changes with every biography and cannot be quoted as a fixed span.
Where to Read More
- The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity, GA 349
- Find related Steiner titles at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]