Memories are Made of . . . ?

It’s an interesting subject memory.

No-one can really define what it is.

Here’s Wikipedia (the fount of all knowledge – not)

“Memory is the faculty of the brain by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. Memory is vital to experiences, it is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action.”

Whish is a bit like saying sight is the function of the brain which enables you to see.

It doesn’t say what it is or how it works.

Quite a few scientists have investigated how memory works and observed patterns of electrical impulses in the brain but that’s about as far as it goes.

No-one, coming at it from a logical scientific point of view is really sure what’s going on.

But does it really matter?

After all, you and I don’t really need to know how a car ‘works’ in order to use it, in order to drive it.

And it’s the same with memory.

To an extent.

You see, memory has many different facets.

People talk about long term memory, short term memory and sensory memory, the latter being how we understand things like smell, taste, colour, feelings and so on.

Short term memory pertains usually to what you or I are doing ‘now’, in this particular slice of time – you could call it our operating system memory.

Most of the time it works fine, and it’s not only when you get ‘old’ that you forget why you chose to go into a particular room – kids do it as well.

Long term memory is more about our ‘hard drive’ historical memory – all the stuff we have stored away in our subconscious we don’t always have access to.

It’s just as well, because if we did remember everything all the time we’d be overwhelmed as the subconscious stores everything!

From time to time ‘something’ triggers off the brain to open a particular file, to release a ‘memory’, and we find ourselves re-living, or at least observing, something which happened in the past – often for no apparent reason.

Why does this happen?

Why do these memories just ‘crop up’ – out of the ‘blue’?

The answer is simple. Something just happened which called up the memory, like a cue in a play. A certain set of circumstances seemed familiar and because the mind always seeks the familiar, the memory is brought back.

This is also how regression works in hypnotherapy, but in this case the therapist deliberately provides the cue to the subconscious to recall a specific scene.

Just like selecting a specific file and helping the subject to open it in order to reveal the reason from the past why something might be happening in the present.

All this works because the brain stores everything you have ever experienced, consciously or unconsciously, as electrical patterns or more exactly energetic patterns in the brain, just like, but in a rather more sophisticated way, you and I store data as a series of electrical signals in our computers.

But there are other kinds of memory.

Sometimes when a subject is undergoing regression therapy, they come up with a memory which is clearly not from their current life.

Past life regression is real. Some of the things that come up are way beyond most peoples’ imaginative powers and have not been stimulated, as some people would have it, by a film or book.

We have access to memories from other times and places and another variant of this is what is sometimes referred to as ‘race memory’ passed down from our ancestors.

Some work has been done on RNA and there is some evidence that patterns in RNA and DNA can carry the same memory signatures as are held in the brain.

People can ‘conjure up’ visions and voices from the past, and, if you reject the theory of linear time, from the future as well.

Let’s look at it a different way.

What if ‘memories’ and ‘ideas’ were the same thing – the same type of energy – remembering everything in the Universe is simply energy in space. (Neither of which could exist without the other).

You and I often have ideas – things which occur to us to be, do or have.

Are not these just another form of ‘memory’ – maybe a future memory?

And we know very well how easy it is, if we don’t act on those ideas, for them to just fade away like our ‘past’ memories.

And don’t our ‘memories’ give us ‘ideas’ from time to time?

And there’s another thing, how many times have you or I not acted on a ‘great idea’ only to find that usually quite soon someone else implements the very same idea?

Memories and ideas are the same thing, energy patterns which come to us on specific occasions when something else, usually our intuition but maybe an external prompt, cues them to appear.

And then we have to act.

We must act on our memories or our ideas according to their nature.

Sometimes to avoid things, sometimes to make something happen.

And if we don’t act, the energy in the idea or memory will just dissipate back into space

So Wikipedia had it right – at least the last bit!

What memory or idea are you going to act on today?