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!