My first reaction to the readings is to appreciate memory.
Does learning without memory be possible? To use a tool requires memory, requires, to tell/remember an adequate story. The very young child and old people with Alzheimer´s disease (they are loosing their memory) cannot survive without the help of other people.
When I think about “love”, I remember many stories and the word seems like a signpost. Much of my memory seems looking backward and looking forward.
Now it seems easier for me to ask, how my memories shape my identity. I want to look, how my memories limit who I am and how memories sharpen my awareness.
Peter.
Hi Peter,
I appreciate your reflections on Memory, looking forward and backward, feeling that memory limits but also enables our awareness. I experienced a sense of how time itself moves both forward and backward: When I read the title to chapter 15 I immeditately thought that the flow of Time is from the future, and was a bit surprised when the chapter only talked about time flowing from the past. From the future, my image was of standing in a stream while the flow brought things I wanted to grab (apples bobbing along) and things I wanted to avoid (“there’s a crocodile, I think I’ll move to the edge of the stream and hope it doesn’t see me!”); I find that the flow from the future is the one that feels most alive with possibilitities. At first when Rinpoche was talking about how the past flows compellingly into the present, I thought: “maybe that’s more space and the objects we project onto space that is forming the present”. Then I realized that it must be time that is forming the present, moment by moment, and that as a “compelling flow” it’s like lava welling up from the past and hardening in the present. Is that at all like your thought about memory looking forward and backward? When a memory in the present looks forward (to the future) isn’t that more alive with possibility than when we look backwards (to the past), perhaps to explore and maybe get stuck in that memory? — Michael