Memory and Being

July 5

Yesterday, during a conversation, the question of memory, the past, and the purpose it serves came up. We take this function for granted; yet it lies at the heart of every action we engage in, because the form of our Being exists and is rooted in the collected impressions of our lifetime.

We remember our experiences individually, but they form a collective whole within us. One of the hopes and aims of memory is for us to come into a greater tactile relationship with that greater whole, so that we act from a larger, more measured and mature context than the less nuanced and intelligent emotional reactions that prompt us in individual situations. Emotion is there to react, but without a greater intelligence to guide it it acts mostly according to animal instinct and survival motives. 

Yet it’s the wholeness of our lives that we hope will come to bear on situations; this is part of what mindfulness is all about. If I just react from the animal parts, I'm partial. 

In the most basic way, memory serves the function of care. The repair molecules in our cells care about the way things are arranged; their molecular memories contain information about how DNA should be sequenced, the way molecules should be folded, and so on, and all of their actions—their expression of agency— emerge from comparing the molecules they encounter to this library of forms. 

We live on a much larger scale, but we're not different; our memory serves as the form of our Being, and we attempt to repair that which we find around us — to reorder it, to configure it so that it works properly both within and outside of us —so as to serve our library of form and understanding of order accordingly.

The difficulty, of course, is the difference between subjective and objective understanding. The cell’s molecules engage memory relative to objective forms: one molecule sweeps up and disposes of cellular trash, the other one doesn’t. Either molecule A, the sweeper molecule, can sweep or it can't. Perhaps it's weary... it's having trouble sweeping. It’s something of a black-and-white situation. 

In the case of human form, however, the inner library of memory, it’s much more complicated. Form has undergone a mutation that introduces a much wider range of subjectivities. On top of that, there's a conflict between the inner and the outer. Objectively, the outer has its own impetus and will do whatever it wants regardless. It's only the inner part of myself, the memory, that can be reconfigured. I cannot as a single human being impose my will on the exterior and assume it will conform.

I'm the one that needs to find a way to conform.

Examining memory through the taste of things past, the history of my life, reveals that it leaves more than one kind of pattern in me. It’s not just the words, the thought, the events that are recorded in me: every sensation and feeling is also there. So although it isn’t spoken of very much, I have a lifetime of history in sensation and a lifetime of history in feeling which form whole repositories of memory in their own right, repositories that in some ways have even more influence over me than the thoughts I have about those past events. 

All three of these different sets of memories — thinking, sensing, feeling — are consonant in me at any given moment. They sound their notes together. I only notice the thought, and perhaps the feeling, if it is strong. 

Yet the wholeness of my being emerges from the simultaneous memory of these three parts.

As I contemplate this (i.e., observe it from the sacred space of my inward temple) perhaps it occurs to me that many of my memories are “broken.” I learn, with experience, age, and maturity, that things I did in the past weren't well informed. I wasn’t present to them; I didn’t understand other people. I did things that were ill advised. 

I gradually come to see that the past lives within me as a template for present behavior; but it's a template with undesirable distortions. I somehow need to come to terms with that template and repair it so that it can serve better in relationship. After all, that's the primary purpose of memory; it is the template for relationship. 

If there are nonconformities and distortions, it turns out, they arise from the difference between objective experiences that are taking place now and my subjective template. 

What happens now is objectively true. 

As my teacher used to say to me, “what is the truth of this moment?”

I better serve relationship by discovering the incongruities between my past, my memories, and what is true now. In every case, I can’t rely on an outdated and poorly formed template. I need to be clever and nimble, to discover a way to act that includes the template but is in a large part free of it. 

The template isn’t as useful as I thought it was. It can’t be used in a rigid way where I try to force everything into it. I need to be present to it, to include it, but the template is what needs to be adjusted as I live and respond. It has a lot of good in it, but I need to be aware of where the mutilated spaces in it are, the places that are not well formed. Otherwise "molecules" of impression will arrive which do not well fit the available docking locations in my mangled template, and these "molecules", which have important foods for my Being in them, will be rejected.

Unfortunately, as we grow old, our template of inner memory tends to become more rigid, whereas the opposite ought to take place. The more we open our hearts to Being... the more we trust in life and invest in love... the less rigid these templates of memory appear to us. 

Perhaps it’s okay to let go of past angers and feelings of injustice. Perhaps I should just act from the love that is present now and not my misconfigured attachments to things that happened before. 

I can take each moment as an opportunity to live now and to discover a new way of living. I don’t have to let the past influence everything I do.

There are more complicated thoughts here about the relationship between memory and time, and our experience of it, but I won’t speak of them now. Instead I'm returning to that delicate and intimate place between the actual molecules of my body, where they form magnetic relationships with each other and with the world at large, of which they are a part.

These magnetic relationships are produced by positive and negative charges, which result in attractive and repulsive forces. My body operates in this way on a mechanical level; yet the mechanics of it are the least of the story. My entire being arises from a magnetic relationship that exists between the cells. My consciousness, my awareness and everything in it, including my memory, emerge from this vibration of attraction and repulsion. The two forces need one another in order to be in relationship; and their activity, the exchange between the two, reconciles their relationship and moves towards equilibrium.

This is a technical description of the situation, but the harmony of vibration within my cells is directly available to my awareness. The more sensitive I become to how I am, the more quietly I reside within the innermost core of my being, close to the soul, the more deeply I sense the nature of this vibration, of the way it arouses being itself from a passive slumber into an active state. 

I can explore the world from this state. I have that opportunity today. If I am invested in this magnetic sensation, this organic sensation of Being, I can live more directly. There is a certain level of objectivity to it; it doesn’t think or invent things with its imagination. It resides within the fundamental field of Being. I'm here with it. I just need to remember that through the simple act of sensation alone, not by thinking it up.

This subtle harmonic vibration that creates my Being emerges out of an active force of love. If I’m fortunate, if I deepen my sensation of myself enough by sitting quietly and experiencing being as it is — not as I wish it were through memory or intellect — then I participate in this love in a new way.

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.