thought and memory

There are a few ideas that I just accept as true. I realize that I have faith actually but to me it doesn't seem like faith, because it's built on personal experience. Of course this experience as an acquaintance loved to point out is almost completely internal. So it doesn't really qualify for scientific truth. I can't measure it. Yet, many of our memories of life are not verifiable. And no one would argue with me that I actually experienced mashing jelly fish with my best friend on the Severn river. People just accept those stories of life as real and true, so I'm saying you'll have to accept that I've experienced a lot in my personal quest (yes I have a rich inner life) for the divine and these experiences have lead me to several ideas. First, is the idea of multiple incarnations. Second, the idea that our brains can store information outside of the body. Third and I suppose the overreaching idea that there is a reality behind this reality. That we come from somewhere prior to being born in this life.

I suppose for some people these are all a bit hard to accept, but for me these are the items that come with my faith. It is belief in a unifying spirit or energy that leads me to accept these things and it's that belief and acceptance of these things that supports my conscious assimilation and explanation of the images I see while working with clients. And it's those images I've been wondering about lately. Why is it that spirits communicate in images? I don't know if I can come up with the answer to that, but I can certainly spend some time with the question.

In my twenties I was fascinated by the sheer amount of information that we are communicating to each other. I frequently found myself wondering WHAT it was that we were so busily trying to say to each other. I always thought it was something more than "Drink Coke-a-Cola" you know? We tell each other stories using images and we sell each other things using the same images. If you look around yourself, you can see all the mediums we use to communicate: Billboards, TV Film, plays, dance, internet, even the stories we read use language designed to stimulate your mind to create images. Descriptive language.

Memories are often recalled the same way. We have fleeting images that appear in our minds of points of our life, the birth of our children, that popsicle you had as a kid after school on a hot summer day, the sound of the ocean on the hawaiin beach where you spent your honeymoon, the day you met your beloved, the first kiss you shared. We think and see in images. (not totally I know, bear with me here. I'm not saying we ALL ONLY think in images, just that it's a ubiquitous method of storing information). And this perhaps is part of the reason we see and communiate in images.

Somehow we store these memories for later access. Cellular memory is the idea that we store memories in our body not just inside the brain. Not a scientifically proven idea, but a lot of anecdotal stories support this. There is also a new theory that we store information outside our body. There is an idea out there that we use the mind like a terminal that accesses data on a remote server. I'm not a scientist, so I'm probably doing that new age psedu-science here....so bear with me, but Jung names the collective unconscious as where we store information culturally. I have heard it called the Akashic records, as Ervin Lazlow discusses in his book, "Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos. The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality"

The Akashic Records is a term used to describe a theoretical non physical library of all consciousness in all realities. I myself do not find it theoretical, having accessed this place myself while in trance, and also having journeyed there with a shaman. I suppose when we talk about fate, this is what we are talking about. This hall of records where the details of your life are already stored. This idea that your life is scripted out for you, is born up by the Akashi Records idea, but it's my thought that you are the one who writes the script, so fate is actually set by you. The big points in your life, the big lessons you need to learn, these things are decided by you. So the whole resistance of fate becomes silly and moot, you'd just be resisting yourself.

Anyway. I'm trying to keep to one thought stream here, the Akashic Records is just another facet to the idea I"m working on.

So back to the memories. They are visual things, typically, and can include other information, such as sound and smell, but mostly it's an image. So the energetic body of a person stores these images. And you can store these images over multiple incarnations, accessing them through the Akashic Records AND/OR storing them in your energetic body. These can become part of your energetic make up so much so that your body in this lifetime can manifest lessons learned from previous times. Memories are like pearls in our energetic/physical space. An example that I was given by a landmark teacher was this, you're about two years old. You're coloring on your wall with crayon, having a great time. The way the color rubs off on the wall, the way it looks and feels, you're totally into it, loving it. Engaged on the second, fifth and six chakra perhaps, creativity, communication and imagination...

Then your mother comes in and yells "WHAT ARE YOU DOING??" You become confused. This was a pleasurable experience, a creative one, suddenly it feels wrong. You decide something in that moment, you create a belief system. Perhaps "I'll never be creative again, because when I am I get yelled at." Or perhaps you just store your mother's energy there, her need to have things clean and beautiful. You store this energy, perhaps in your second, fifth and six chakras. As you grow older, layers are deposited around this, other life experiences where you're punished for speaking out, memories to support this belief system that you've accumulated as you interact with other people in life. People are attracted to you because of it. As the layers grow you may move this memory into your unconciousness.

This becomes a touchstone for you in life, you find yourself unable to create, and when you do sit down to create something it feels defiant, like you're trying to prove something. Or maybe you don't create at all, you find yourself compulsively cleaning your home all the while thinking, why am I doing this?

Suddenly a life experience is trapped in your energetic field. Something big enough will be transported from lifetime to life time, these experiences make up the Self that has the ability of self conciousness over many lifetimes. These experience can become part of who you are, even if you don't have conciousness of multiple lives. The person who is afraid of boats, yet has never lived near the ocean. The child afraid of dogs, who has never in this life had a bad experience with one. The musical wonderchild.

Imagine many lifetimes of experiences and layers around a memory/image. These layers often protect you from a very troubling memory. Most spirits try to avoid pain, these layers create pearls of protection that then become "programs", ways of being, or belief systems that we think are just "how we are".

As a spirit begins to get curious about these areas, begins to focus attentionon a way of being, these layers can be shed, worked through etc. Perhaps you realize that your mother is always in your thoughts when you are cleaning. Or perhaps there is confusion, suddenly you can't remember why you were thinking about a particular. Suddenly you're sleepy a lot or absent minded when thinking about why nothing new seems to be coming to you. Awareness that is a way of being or a layer around an image as protection for your being is not neccessary at this point. It is only necessary to keep focused on what your experience is now. What is causing you to check out?

I find in thinking over these things I only have more questions. Why do we choose to carry things from lifetime to life time. Why do we incarnate if only to forget and then to remember again? And still, why are things accessable as images? Is it that how the concious mind can take transcental information and move it into this physical body? Vibrations translated into images translated into concious thinking and ways of being?

My little pandora's box just keeps spewing more to look at!



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Acid Opens the Door

I've said it many times by now, I know the exactly moment I woke up, became conscious. Although now I just view it as one of my many moments of waking. It seems these opportunities come and you get what people call a moment of clarity. But never the less, the biggest of these moments was February of 1992. I was twenty two years old and lived in the dorms at San Jose State. I know, I'd been on the planet for 22 years, and I say life started then? It was only looking back from 22 that I felt that way, I didn't walk through the previous years thinking, wow, why won't my life get going?

I was a resident adviser on the seventh floor of Joe West Hall. A combination of things had happened leading up to this point, my very restrictive boyfriend dumped me over the summer, and I was working with an amazing woman named Vengerfulatta. No really! Her full name was even more awesome than that! And she was (I suppose still is!) an incredible woman. She proved to be a great mentor and really helped me out of my shell. I considered myself painfully shy most of my life, until I met her. (She later claimed to have created a monster! Who me??) So there I was becoming more and more outgoing, and rebounding in a serious way, ready to explore and try new things. The catalyst was provided by my best friend who had been going to the Renaissance faire for a while now and was having some wild adventures. She had met this couple and one weekend she came back talking about acid.

I was curious. Her description of going to the grocery store and being so involved with the colors and textures of the dry and canned goods was too rich. Although up till that point I had only really smoked pot, intentionally at least. I rarely even drank. There were a few other chemicals I ingested, but only cause it was ON the pot and I had no idea what I was doing. (see above pronouncement where I said I had woke up? See what happens to you!) But this time I had questions; I wanted to check it out. So one weekend she got a couple of hits and we took it in my dorm room. I'll spare all the high guy details of the eight hours or more, but basically I took it and then went ignorantly to the dining commons. She waited in my room. This seemed reasonable to me, I thought I'd just go get something to eat, completely unaware of what was growing in my blood supply and mind; what was coming for me. Everyone at my table grew funnier and funnier as the time went by, and

golly

time stopped having any import at all. I completely forgot anyone was waiting for me in my room until one of my residents came to fetch me because my BF, in the grips of her peaking trip had grabbed him and said MY GOD MAN! YOU MUST RETRIEVE HER! SHE KNOWS NOT WHAT SHE IS DOING! and she was right, I had no idea....I was completely in the moment.

We spent the day laughing our asses off, and I found myself looking at life with joy and bliss in a completely different way. I experienced the moment between when I stepped into a puddle, and when the water finally soaked through and hit my skin. It was delicious standing there on San Salvador street in the sun feeling that and then, well I had a wet sock and wet foot and wet shoe, that wasn't so nice. But it was nice in some strange way. We walked to Seven Eleven. I couldn't make out how money worked at all, and held out a wad of cash for the guy behind the counter. My sweaty palm, the sweaty bills all crumpled up. That was hysterical to me, and the trust I felt and the lack of attachment to the money itself.

A delicious lack of attachment and attention to detail.

I remember looking out my window and seeing all the red in the scene, a red car, a red hydrant, red signs all tying things together in a pleasing way. I knew I could create photo's in a completely different way with this new insight. About six hours into it I looked at my BF and said, WAIT? This is going to END!! I didn't want it to end, and I wanted to know when we could do it again. I didn't trust my ability to take the experience from one acid trip and be able to keep it, to have it inform my art.

I tried to write something in my journal. I tried to write to my future self, the self that would read the writing and I got tripped up (ah HAHA, trip? get it? haha sorry) in the fascination with time, and the knowledge that who I was from minute to minute was different and changing. The past me would not be the same as the future me. I felt like sending a bottle off to a completely different person on a different continent. And in a sense I was.

Later after all the hilarity and the insights, the confusion and clarity I realized how asleep I'd been my whole life. How I ended up in a college with barely any thought about it at all. How I'd grasped at the one thing I loved, drawing, to get me here. How I did what other people told me and wanted me to do, almost without question. The next day I felt an surge of delight and apprehension. I wondered how I made it this far just blindly following along. Oh shit I thought, it's up to me. Now this is not an abnormal thought for a human to get. All of us I suspect, if given a life of sufficient safety where we can think about things other than pure survival, and even in those lifetimes when we can't, many of us get to a point where we realize we are the masters of our own destiny. I just felt I had reached it abnormally late.

And I wondered what I'd been doing that whole time anyway?
How was I getting through life if it was only now that I felt I was fully inhabiting my body?
Who had been making those choices for me?
What was my life like and why was I so absent from it?
And what the fuck was I going to do now????

That was the big question, now what?

What was more drugs and more experiences, what, for a while was trying to get a grip on this thing I had ended up in, that I considered reality.

But what about my childhood? Who was this previously quiet girl, and how did she get to the point where she'd ingest some LSD?


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