“We here meet a question that will arise in the minds of nearly all who read the foregoing: Does not this idea, in place of saving man, destroy him and save that which man is not? It appears so from a surface view; but when we remember the fact that man, like all growing vegetation, is constantly changing, taking on the new and throwing off the old, then we realize that this is not the destroying of the man, but is creating in him a center which only is immortal, which only can perpetuate his consciousness.
If you should retire at night and fall into a deep sleep and on awakening find that you had forgotten everything that you had ever known, what would be the difference between your condition and that of a child just born? There would be no difference except in the development of the body and the mind organs, formed by the habit of the mind running in a certain channel, but so far as the individual man (consciousness) is concerned, your life would begin at that point. You would have an existence only from that point as a beginning. We think that this is clear to all who have given any thought to the subject.
This thought brings to our mind the fact that we live in our memories and we die in forgetting. The conditions that exist today will have passed away forever tomorrow, and new ones will have come in their place. Thus, tomorrow we shall have died to much that exists today (“I die daily.”, 1 Corinthians 15:31); and we shall live again in the new experiences, the new desires and aspirations that the occasion creates, and when these are of the earth, earthy, they continue to be as transient as the days, hours, and minutes that succeed each other.
But when this newly begotten soul, this spiritual form, begotten of God, enters into the individual organism, his consciousness is then of his heavenly Father, and the absorption of all that belongs to the old man adds to, but does not take from the person, for all useful memories possessed by the person before the advent of the spiritual child, remain intact; but, as we have said these memories will be carried up and refined, and this spirit-life, this spirit-child that lives from God and is conscious in the cause world, throws a new light upon all things.
In that new light all the desires, as well as all the happenings of the past life, are seen, understood, and comprehended, even as God sees and knows. Then the wisdom and knowledge of God begins to take form in the individual, and as they take form and succeed in overcoming the hypnotized state of the human consciousness – which causes man to think and to feel that the material world, the physical externality, is all there is, facts in nature begin to be realized, and things appear as they are.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 