Memory is an illusion

Try to keep in mind; never ever is only some one thing true. While I may be, in the paragraphs to come, stating some things about memory in a definitive way, there are many other layers to it. It’s a trick, an illusion, to identify with thoughts, to think that something thought is actually true, or even worse that a thought is the only thing true. It is definitely a limitation on our thinking the way this culture has taught us to think.

Consciousness is more like the light spectrum. Look around at all the different shades and hues of color. All that exist; so many it’s infinite. Imagine them each one being a film like paper, super sheer. All the colors are reality, laid together, as if to see reality one would have to be looking through all the sheets of film, like looking through a lens, to get the total picture. In our monkey suits, in this culture, we can only see one or two colors at a time with our thinking consciousness. We’ve been dumbed down incredibly in order to maintain a system built by kings who farmed their fellow monkeys.

It’s like each moment in time is a painting of some kind, but in order to see all the colors used in the painting, one must have the corresponding sheer colored film to see it. If one of your colors is wrong, the view of the painting is incorrect.  

Put your hand out to the side of your face with your arm fully extended. Keep your hand level with your eyes, but making sure your hand is not out in front of your eyes. Keep looking straight ahead, but don’t focus ahead, using what they call peripheral vision try to see your hand. Do you see your hand? If you are like me you can move your hand back behind your head and still see your hand. Now consider there is no way light is reflecting off your hand and then hitting the back of your eyes. It is your mind's eye creating that vision of your hand. Practice doing that while walking and you will learn to meditate. Not holding your hand out to the side while you walk, but walk while not focusing on anything like you do in order to see your peripheral.

But this is not the point of what I’m writing about today. Meditation is another conversation. All our eyes do is detect changes in light patterns. Your mind's eye is creating that hand you see. You could almost think of it as your third eye being used in a very mundane way. It is how blind people can learn to “see”, using technology that expresses their environment by sending tingles to another part of the body instead of the eyes, like their back or tongue. It is not your eyes that creates what you “see” it is your mind.

This is a great deal of spirituality in a very small paragraph compared to all that has been written about the illusions of life. When you hear those Indian mystics saying everything is illusion this is exactly what they are talking about. Volumes and volumes have been written about this subject in spiritual jargon, and really all you have to do is stick your hand out to the side of your face to witness it first hand. Now, coming to terms with this illusion emotionally is another story…..Thinking about abstract things is not enough to know…..All the layers must be the proper color not just some one or two.  

Another layer to this besides this "peripheral vision" is that what one is really seeing with their physical eyes is the light reflected off the object being looked at. This means technically you are not seeing what you are looking at at all, only the reflection of light off of it. There is a high probability though, that one of the reasons our vision seems so detailed is because our mind is perpetually adding this "peripheral vision" to everything we see with our physical eyes. So technically, as the spiritual people say, all life is an illusion. Everything not seen by the eyes is created by the mind, and everything seen with the eyes is only reflected light off of an object. What does the reflection of light off of water tell you about water? That it's surface is reflective? You have never in your life actually seen water. One never actually sees what is going on; ever. Osho says to be a mirror, and merely reflect back.  

This is not to say that these objects we are interacting with are not emitting a light of their own as we are, but because of how we are raised in this culture, we are not raised to be sensitive to it, so therefore we do not “see” it. It is not in our peripheral vision so to speak. As I’ve said, our consciousness is many layers of the color put together at once. It’s own painting, anew, every moment. Our moment to moment view of the world is mostly created by the mind in the same way it creates that vision of our hand out to the side, which we cannot in actuality see with our eyes.  

Just think of the experiment done on kittens blindfolded at birth, for some no small number of weeks, whom end up blind for life. Use it or lose it, when things are developing in the brain/body/mind (they are one in the same thing). Just a biological fact. When kittens, any animal actually, are in the stage of developing eyes/sight, or any function; if the function can’t be used, it doesn’t develop.

How much more acute were the other senses of those poor kittens in order to compensate for their loss of vision? Perhaps this is why we become so focused on thoughts in our culture; we lost the use of other functions? Like “seeing” the energy coming from all matter. I am saying that at the time in our lives when we are actively adapting to the environment, we are not encouraged, or taught in anyway how to see the energy, of what seems to us, inanimate objects. We are absolutely immersed in the energy of mass at all times. Light/energy coming from stars billions of light years away is bouncing off, or going through, your body right this moment.   

Think of those recent experiments with LSD. They are showing the brain lit up like that of a child's. If you have ever done LSD you would know what you can see things in immediate proximity that cannot be seen without one's brain being all lit up; that is, hyper connected. If two people, on the same LSD, “see” the same things, the same hallucinations, how do you explain that with the standard model of how things are?  You cannot. If two people see the same thing: that is how all science is verified. Every science experiment you have ever seen is based on one person seeing what another person sees.  

Another important layer to this peripheral illusion of ours deals with memory. Memory is this “peripheral vision” in effect. Just like the creation of the hand to the side of your face is a “vision” in your mind, so is all memory. When I used to read Krishnamurti a lot, he would often repeat the need to live in the present with no memory of the past. The past is gone. It no longer exists. If you meet a person you once knew, they are no longer that same exact person. In this way alone your memory is of no use to you, at least in regards to seeing the present for what it is. The same is true of objects, they change regardless of the label inanimate. Mystics speak a great deal about this illusion of thinking, of consciousness. I tend to be more logical in my spirituality than the poet. I figured out how to forget my past in a different way than these abstract poetic means that are so often found in spiritual books. .

I’ll prove here and now your past cannot possibly be correct. Look back on yourself ten years ago. Are you not like me, in that you can say, if only I knew then what I know now? Can you not like me, say, “I really didn’t know what I was doing ten years ago. I was, if not totally wrong, at least incomplete in the way I thought things were.” Think of how much more you know now, compared to then. How many worldview changes? Lessons learned? New ways of looking at things? I may be taking it for granted that I change more than others, simply because I seek it in certain ways, and have become good at changing, in certain ways, but I think everyone has to change to some degree or other over time. We are evolution in effect, moment to moment. I see the world totally different than I did ten years ago. I assume, as humans, we are all constantly changing, even the most stubborn and dumb among us change. Anyways, if one wasn’t a growing type, they wouldn’t be reading this.  

So looking back, we can “see” that we really weren’t aware of what was really going on. Sure, we may have perfectly seen the light reflecting off of objects, but the other sheer films of color, were the wrong color. Our “peripheral vision” was incorrect. Our take was wrong. Our view of the world was missing many layers of color, and had many colors that were not the true color of the painting. Of course, we took certain actions, that had certain effects, but again, our “seeing,” our perception, the peripheral layers added to what we see; was not really what was going on. Our memory cannot be accurate.

It is a part of our consciousness, this peripheral addition to everything we see.  Our whole lives, what we have focused on, wasn’t really there the way we saw it. Our memory cannot actually be what it was because we were clueless in so many ways. This is that spiritual talk about how we choose our experience in effect.  

In ten years, what will you say about the person you are right now?

This scares most people. To maintain their sense of self, that is, their identity with being the thinker, they must know what they are doing. It’s like talking a guy out of his opinion that there is global warming when he owns the coal power plant. His source of monetary wealth depends on him being right. Or like talking a priest into being an atheist; his whole life revolves around his idea of god, he cannot possibly concede there is no god without a tremendous emotional process enveloping him.

This means one is nearly totally ignorant in the present moment. This means right now as we look around us, we have no idea what is really going on. Never not once in our whole lives have we seen the actual painting of any one moment. Our minds are logging away our experience of things, we are calling it memory, we act like it was real, that it really happened. At best, the only memory of ours that is correct is that of the most inanimate objects. So I’m not saying certain things did or didn’t happen. Those things are other sheer layers of film colored a specific way. I’m saying that our memory of it is like that vision of your hand out to the side of your face; totally created in your mind and nowhere else. A few films of color are correct, as in, our hand is actually there, out to the side of our face. I’m just saying the vision is not there, but self created.  

Because of these illusions our memory of how things were or were not, cannot actually be what it was. So there is no use for them except for one, and that is to heal whatever emotional baggage one is carrying around with them. Do you remember the insignificant moments at all? Of your memories which are the ones you’re packing around? That is, which ones are affecting you, both consciously and unconsciously? The hurtful? The energetically charged? These are most often the memories we weren’t honest with ourselves about. The reason these emotions haunt us, that they are locked in our bodies, is to get us to “correct” our memory, that is, to heal the emotion by seeing it for what it actually was, instead of how we thought it to be, or even worse, how we wish it to be.

The ultimate goal, the reason for so many volumes of spiritual jargon, is help people become emotionally intact and at the same time free of memory. In other words, to get people to grow up. This is as a Christian would say, a saintly place to be.