Where I´m looking, there I´m finding memories, very much memories, like a soup with many vegetables. My thinking is full of memories, the same with my body (going, swimming, cycling, eating…). Even my gene seem full of ancient memories. But my memories are creative, they change, they adapt to my moods and vantage points (near or with ditance, just or long ago), they come and dissolve –  very obvious in my dreams . In dreams it seems to me, there is something like a magnet, which attracts many pieces of special memories, which fit to the special magnet.
But what happens, when I try a to remember a holy symbol, or to visualize it (for me a very difficult exercise)? These difficults show to me the vagueness of my memory. When the vagueness decreases, space and time seem to change. It seems a little bit like the “dream-magnet”, full of energy and vividness.
But all over my life I had a very “poor” memory.
This was beautifully expressed Michael. I don’t know if Ludwigm identifies with the “warm light” feeling, but I experienced something very much like it after months of meditative inquiry into my own archeology of internal reactivity and development. This happened years ago, and as a result of the understanding of the way I was, gaining the sense of autonomy and support that ‘I thought’ was missing, finding it there all along, literally dawning in that “warm light” feeling.
Best wishes,
David
Your reflections on memory and the differences that flow in various states of mind–dreaming, in ordinary life, doing a visualization practice–are interesting. I particularily was struck by your final observation: “But all my life I have had a very “poor” memory.” I wonder if your “poor” memory is at all like my “poor” memory. When I studied “Knowledge of Freedom” in the context of a retreat at the Nyingma Institute, I experienced an unexpected shift in the way I remembered my own past. Seeing my past in terms of times of change, I discovered a new appreciation for the person who had survived and evolved beyond those various traumas and transformations. This in turn allowed me to feel stronger and more supported (by the person I had been) in the face of whatever the future might bring. It wasn’t that I recaptured lost memories, but more like a warm light had been turned on in a familiar room. Perhaps this is the kind of perspective Jack is expressing in his post–memory as a way of appreciating companionship with who we have been. — Michael
Thank you, Michael and David, for telling your experiences.
– poor memory: for me it was always difficult, to learn by heart: poems, names, words of a foreign language, to remember exactly a chapter of a book (TSK), and so on…
– the positive influence of past memories into the future: for exemple:after experiences with TSK the decision to work with TSK for a longer time.
– “appreciation for the person”: I´m grateful for the wealth of memories in my life, but I also regret many situations. Often I feel like a leaf in the wind “von guten Mächten treu und still umgeben” (a poem: I´m surrounded with many good powerful ghosts, trustfully and peaceful), when I look back.
Now, when I write this I ask: why I do cut off the surrounding (wind) from the leaf?
Peter.
Yup, that’ll do it. You have my appreicaoitn.