6. The Power of Memory

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Our reality, our perception of the world around us, is formed by energy from the environment stimulating our memory, re-activating our past experiences. In essence, energy from the environment stimulates our nervous system (eyes, ears, brain, emotions, etc... our neurocognitive system) which causes memories stored within us to become activated. Those activated memories are temporarily bound together into a wholly integrated picture that literally and seamlessly constructs the world we perceive around us. Indeed, Abelar wrote that, “The world is a huge screen of memories”. Butterworth described this process by telling us that, “You see things not as they are, but as you are. Your perception is shaped according to your previous experiences...”.  

 

The idea that consciousness, or awareness, is a process that literally constructs the world around us, is not without support in the scientific community. Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman (20 p. 217) succinctly captures the essential function of consciousness in his ground-breaking work on the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection.

 

[biologically based epistemology] then proposes that the efficacious role of consciousness is to construct an informative scene (“the remembered present”) that connects present reality to the past value-ridden history of each individual conscious animal.

 

In this excerpt, Edelman and Tononi point out three significant characteristics of consciousness; 1) it constructs an “informative scene”, 2) present reality - “the remembered present”- is a scene constructed from an individual’s personal experience/history and 3) the history of each individual is laden with value. These are extremely powerful and insightful ideas which not only garner support from modern neuroscience, but also strongly resonate with the philosophical rationale underlying the methods prescribed by Castaneda.

 

If you think memory (your past experience) does not play such a fundamental role in your perception, then you need to spend some time with an Alzheimer’s patient. According to the Alzheimer’s Association...

 

In the later stages, memory loss becomes far more severe. A person may not recognize family members, may forget relationships, call family members by other names, or become confused about the location of home or the passage of time. He or she may forget the purpose of common items, such as a pen or a fork. These changes are some of the most painful for caregivers and families.

 

Do you recognize your family, understand spoken words, know what a fork is, or know how to read and write? That’s because of your memory. If you lose part of your memory, or items from it, then you also lose those parts of the world around you. The seamlessly integrated reality that you perceive around you, is a construct of your memory (the remembered present).

 

Our memory encompasses not just things and facts, but entire episodes of our experiences, including context – place, time, and personal feelings.

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Imagine a driver who gets upset when another driver cuts in front of him. His memory includes the event as well as his feelings of anger about the event. Eventually he is forced to move on to other concerns and he “puts the memory away”, so to speak, and it becomes consolidated into long term memory. But the memory is consolidated with the context of the situation, including his feeling of anger. Days later another driver cuts in front of him and his previous memory of being cutoff is immediately activated. Again, he feels anger associated with this similar experience, but eventually he moves on to other concerns. As this type of event occurs again and again over a period of years, the driver associates numerous instances of anger to this type of event. In fact, each time we recall a memory, in sufficient detail, it becomes alterable (changeable, labile) for a short period of time, before it is reconsolidated (stored back into long term memory again). While the recalled memory is in its labile state, it can be altered by new information. In the case of our driver, each time his memory of being cut off is reactivated, he infuses it with more anger before it is reconsolidated. Over time that memory becomes associated with numerous layers of anger. Consequently, it would not be a surprise to find this driver in a fit of rage, or involved in a road rage incident the next time he is cut off by another driver.

 

However, the New Seers offer a method that can clear away those layers of anger and free the driver from potentially life altering actions resulting from his accumulated anger. Indeed, Recapitulation can clear away the trash we don’t need; it can cleanse heavy emotions, hopes and fears associated with a recollected memory, allowing greater freedom in action and perception.

 

 

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