Today's Considerations
Yesterday, the body-mind connection was discussed. Consider these
two pointers regarding that subject:
“Whatever increases, decreases, limits or extends the body’s
power of action, increases, decreases, limits or extends the mind’s power of
action. And whatever increases, decreases, limits or extends the mind’s power
of action, also increases, decreases, limits or extends the body’s power of
action.” —Spinoza, 1600’s A.D.
“Suppose I am not able to think, that my mind is not clear.
What does it mean? It means my food essence is rather dull today. It is not
getting into combustion in proper order; therefore, the thinking is also dull.
This mind pertains to the food essences.” —Maharaj, September 3, 1979
Maharaj said that science would advance someday to the point
that it would confirm all of the non-duality pointers that he offered. If you review
what was shared yesterday about the way science has shown that particular foods can determine one's feelings and emotions
and behaviors - that is, the way that the mind will malfunction if a body is not provided with the proper food
plan for its specific metabolic type rather than a food plan based in some
dreamed-up spiritual or mythical or mystical and totally baseless belief - then
you will see that science has indeed reached a point where it now confirms the
accuracy of what Maharaj shared on September 3, 1979.
[About one-third of the planet's population has a metabolic type which results in a body and brain functioning best on a vegetarian diet; one-third will function best on a meat / protein diet; and one third will function best on a combination food plan. So much for "all people should be vegetarians" or "eating pork is evil so it is outlawed by our religion."]
So how ignorant and insane can the content of the mind be? Most believe that
they are something or someone that they are not. Most also believe that they are
what others tell them that they are, whatever dreamed up identities those might be. That’s
both ignorant and insane, is it not?
Maharaj asked: "What is identity, after all? Continuity
in memory?"
He said: “Memory creates the illusion of
continuity"
and
"Memory, stored in the warehouse of all lies - the "mind"
- and misperceived as truth by the impure consciousness, cannot possibly be the
basis of any "true" identity. You are not what you think yourself to
be, I assure you. The image you have of yourself is made up from memories and
is purely accidental"
and
"When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons
everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and
habits. At the moment of realization the person ceases"
and
"As long as the mind is there, your body and your world are
there. Your world is mind-made, subjective, enclosed within the mind,
fragmentary, temporary, personal, hanging on the thread of memory"
and
"If you could only keep quiet, clear of memories and
expectations, you would be able to discern the beautiful pattern of events. It’s
your restlessness that causes chaos"
and
"Life is worthy of the name only when it reflects Reality in
action. No university will teach you how to live so that when the time of dying
comes, you can say: I lived well. I do not need to live again. Most of us die
wishing we could live again. So many mistakes committed, so much left undone.
Most of the people vegetate, but do not live. They merely gather experience and
enrich their memory. But experience is the denial of Reality, which is neither
sensory nor conceptual, neither of the body, nor of the mind, though it
includes and transcends both."
So what was Maharaj’s invitation regarding memories? "You have projected
onto yourself a world of your own imagination, based on memories, on desires
and fears, and you have imprisoned yourself in it. Break the spell and be free."
The following is from an article which was inspired by the content of Showtime’s “The
Affair” which explores the relationship between truth and memory. The content of the article was offered with
this invitation: For a deeper look into how our perception [misperception] of
the truth can lead to dangerous consequences, watch Showtime’s "The
Affair."
In that October 2, 2015 article which was shared on the Huffington Post entitled - “5
Reasons You Can't Even Trust Your Own Memories” - the unreliability of the mind
and the memories stored therein are identified and discussed:
1. Humans can’t judge the accuracy of their own memories
2. Humans miss things the first time
3. Memories are “slippery little suckers”
4. Humans “come up” with things, forgetting that they didn’t
actually come up with them
and
5. Humans are capable of “remembering” things that never
happened
Those are some of the key foundations of the fallacious
concepts of karma; birth; rebirth; multiple lives; millions of misunderstandings each day;
the making of bogus charges and false claims; the source of much of the conflict
which plagues relationships; delusions; distortions; magical thinking; the assignment
of supernatural causes to events which are actually rooted in natural causes; and the propensity
among humans to misunderstand themselves and others and truth and reality and
Reality.
This introduction to the subject was shared in the article:
We count on our memories as being central to what makes up
our selves. But human memory is not as reliable as we think it is. In turn,
we’re not as reliable, either. Without realizing it, we often can’t tell the
“whole” truth.
We alter details, omit facts, forget faces and block out
some events entirely. Worse yet, we also “remember” things that never truly
happened. As science writer and author David diSalvo wrote, “Our memories are
wrong at least as often as they are right.” This happens for a variety of
reasons that are largely beyond our control.
1. WE CAN’T JUDGE THE ACCURACY OF OUR OWN MEMORIES
Recall is a lot like a game of “Telephone” where we whisper
something from “our past to our present, reconstructing it on the fly each time,”
wrote psychology professors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in a popular
"New York Times" op-ed. “We only ‘hear’ the most recent version of the message,
and we may assume that what we believe now is what we always believed.” Until
someone or something challenges us, we have no reason to think a memory is
anything less than perfect. The problem, in critical situations like courtroom
testimony, is not that we forget details; it’s that we don’t realize we forgot
them.
2. WE MISS THINGS THE FIRST TIME
In his book “Why We Make Mistakes,” Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
Joseph T. Hallinan pointed out that the eye is not a camera: “It does not take
’pictures’ of events. And it does not see everything at once. The part of the
visual field that can be seen clearly at any given time is only a fraction of
the total.” To compensate, Hallinan explained, our eyes dart. And that’s not
all. We blink. We look away. We daydream. We check out details that interest us
and we ignore things that don’t. In short, we skim. “But the problem is, we
think we've noticed when we haven't,” wrote Hallinan. “We don't know when we're
skimming.” Of course, if we don’t see it correctly the first time, we are never
going to remember it - no matter how hard we try.
3. MEMORIES ARE “SLIPPERY LITTLE SUCKERS”
When she couldn’t get a grip on her escargot, Julia Roberts’
character in “Pretty Woman” called them “slippery little suckers.” The same can
be said for our memories. Neuroscientist Richard Mohs gave a glimpse into the
labyrinth of the human brain as it works to recall something. He said errors in
memory often get made because of “an inefficient component of one part of your
memory system.” This is either 'memory retrieval' (it’s not that we don’t know
something; it’s that we can’t access it properly from our multiple brain
regions) or 'improper encoding' (we didn’t “effectively save” a memory to begin
with).
4. WE “COME UP” WITH THINGS, FORGETTING THAT WE DIDN’T
ACTUALLY COME UP WITH THEM
If you read or hear something but, later, forgot that you
read it or heard it, and, down the road (months, years or decades later), you
unknowingly copy that thing you read or heard, that’s unconscious plagiarism or
“cryptomnesia.” Why does it happen? It comes from “a false feeling of novelty,”
Harvard University professor and author Daniel L. Schacter explained to the
"Boston Globe." And if we tap into memories without the realization that we are
tapping into them, then we are likewise unaware when we are stealing them. “If
you don’t know that you’re accessing memory, how can you avoid that error?”
psychology professor Richard Marsh asks in the same article.
5. WE ARE CAPABLE OF “REMEMBERING” THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPENED
If you’ve ever thought something happened to you when it
didn’t, it’s called a “false memory.” Anchor Brian Williams took fire,
literally, for saying he took fire when he did not. “It got mixed up - it got
turned around in my mind,” he told Matt Lauer. Others say he just lied.
Elizabeth Loftus, a professor at UC Irvine, gave him the benefit of the doubt
when she told "The New York Times": “You’ve got all these people saying the guy’s
a liar and convicting him of deliberate deception without considering an
alternative hypothesis - that he developed a false memory.”
Loftus knows the topic well. She is one of the most
well-known experts on memory in the world and set up a now-famous experiment in
which she asked participants about three actual childhood events and one false
one. Three out of the four respondents claimed to “remember” the memory that
never took place - being lost in a shopping mall. Loftus explained in "Nature" that
she conducted her experiment because she wanted to see if one could “implant a
rich memory of an entirely made-up event.” It turns out one can.
[Williams later admitted that it was his egotism which led him to try to build and enhance his image by distorting the truth, yet the existence of the ability to “implant a
rich memory of an entirely made-up event" has been proved nevertheless.]
Nine years ago on this site, on August 16, 2006 specifically,
these pointers were offered:
The illusion called “memory”—which gives persons a false
sense that “they” have experienced some continuity of body and “mind”—drives
the constant cycling and recycling of “thoughts” that are generated by the
“thinking mind”
and
"When you believe yourself to be a person, you see
persons everywhere. In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories
and habits. At the moment of Realisation, the person ceases."
More than eight years ago on this site, on April 23, 2007,
this was asked in a post dealing with “Samskaras, Archetypes, and The Loss Of
Freedom”:
Have you considered the things that are stored in memory or
in the unconscious or in a dualistic “mind’ that are all determining how you
feel, what you perceive about persons, how you feel about persons, and what you
think about persons? Have you seen, when false impressions and inaccurate
memories and images are driving the way that you think and emote and behave,
that you really have no “free will” and no "choice" in regards to
anything? And do you not see that, without free will and choice, you really
have no freedom at all?
The questions are also relevant right now.
More than seven years ago, this was offered on March 24, 2008:
Much of the suffering that “the non-Realized” speak of is
rooted in the memory of traumatic childhood trauma or in distorted memories
formed and recalled during adulthood and based (A) not in the way things really
were but in the delusional way that things were thought to be or (B) not in the
way things were but in the delusional way that abnormal things have been normalized,
relatively speaking, as the desirous “mind” rewrites history and ignores truth
or suppresses the recall of the reality surrounding certain happenings.
For millions of years, human or human-like beings had a
brain the size of a cup which had no ability to store memories at all. As a
result of evolutionary processes, the brain began to expand in size and to develop
abilities which had not been present before, including the storage and retrieval of information
which could be used to assist with the survival of the species.
Originally, only “truth” was stored and recalled, such as seeing that one’s
hunting mate fell from a cliff and was smashed and died and that one might want
to avoid the edge of cliffs in the future.
Now, the brain has been filled with nonsense, myth-and-superstition-based
distortions, lies told by leaders to manipulate and control the masses, with astonishing
levels of learned ignorance, and with personality identifications which set the
stage for the development of personality disorders (which, in turn, set the stage for eventual disintegration
in neuroses and psychoses).
The problem is not that “over the years, persons stopped being
as religious and as spiritual as they were and as they need to be.” The problem is
that over the years, with the ability to store and retrieve information and the
ability to form memories (combined with the input of nonsense and lies and ignorant
beliefs and manipulative teachings), humans – more than anything else – began storing
and retrieving nonsense and lies and ignorant beliefs and manipulative
teachings and “inaccurate memories” and “things misperceived at the moment of
storage” and “false memories of things that never really happened," such as the
supposed memory of “past lives”).
Freedom begins with freedom from believing all of that
(stated most simply as, “freedom from all beliefs”). The discarding of all beliefs
is the pathway to freedom from any and all mindedness, and freedom from any and
all mindedness is freedom itself.
To be continued.
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
[NOTE:
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