Memory as a reflection of reality

Sunday, June 12, 2022

5:50 a.m. Unless you prefer something else, I thought we could address the final item in our queue (though I think I may have lost track of one somewhere).

That would be fine. Set your switches, copy the question.

From Lori Miranda, edited a bit:

[I’ve been very intrigued by the turn to addressing memory as a topic. I have a question. It certainly involves memory, but also may involve something TGU declined to explore at the time the topic was broached – the choices we make and how this changes the timeline we are experiencing, and of how all of that is kept track.

[An example —

[My cousins and I were cleaning out a family home in preparation to put it on the market. There have been many generations of carpenters and the like, so there were a lot of tools. One in particular was a screwdriver with a wood handle. I was interested in it because it had initials deeply carved into it. I recognized the initials as those of my great grandfather’s brother. I brought it home with me, along with a few other tools, and put them in a box on a shelf. Several years later, I took the screwdriver out to show someone. The initials are gone. I am perplexed, as you might imagine. My memory is not just ‘I think there were initials’ but I KNOW there were initials. But I cannot explain this.

[There are other examples, not casual, vague memories to me, but very clear.

[I’ve brought this up in the intention group Dirk hosts on Wednesday evenings, and he has a number of astonishing examples as well. While it helps me feel better to know that I’m not the only one to experience this, I am extremely curious as to what the heck is going on. If the Guys have any clues, I would certainly love to hear them. I’ve only noticed this sort of thing in the last 10-15 years.]

The question interests me, too, of course. I get that the earlier explanation you gave us, or I came to (can’t remember which) was somewhat oversimplified.

The simplest, most comprehensive explanation is also the one hardest to accept until you are far enough along to understand that the 3D is only somewhat real. So long as you assume its substantiality, no explanation will make sense.

Which amounts to, “No explanation will jibe with our assumptions.”

It does. And one problem is that you all have many more assumptions about reality than you are aware of, necessarily. When you become aware of your assumption that gravity is a constant, you therefore become less bound by it.

Richard Bach’s novel Hypnotizing Maria.

Yes. You are all hypnotized, in a way, into believing the world is a certain way, with certain limits. Some are hypnotized into thinking that they can learn to overcome those limits; some, that the limits are absolute; some, that the limits do not exist except under certain circumstances.

I hear you saying that this is what real magicians – sorcerers, shamans, certain kinds of priests – attempt (successfully or not) to do: to in effect re-hypnotize themselves in a given direction.

And – to address the question directly – some people, sometimes, experience fluctuations in their surroundings without knowing that they are the common factor.

I don’t think I got that final phrase right. Did I?

You filled in a blank space, let’s put it that way, in order to complete the thought. The meaning behind “the common factor” can’t be set out in a few words.

To make sense of this, remember as much as you can of what we have set forth: You are each a community of threads and are each threads in a larger being. Every idea, every perception, every thing in your life is mind-stuff, not some independently existing marbles. The appearance of solidity comes from the existence of a shared subjectivity, else it would flicker at the speed of light, so to speak, as your mental world fluctuated. All these ideas, each of which was once new and strange to you, perhaps, go into the understanding of how things change.

We choose, and our choices change us, and change the world we live in. This is a commonplace when considering one’s own life; it takes a certain leap of understanding to see that it is equally true (though of course manifesting only variably) in terms of the inner and of the outer world you experience. (And I see I changed viewpoint within this graf, you sort of sliding in at “it takes” and I sliding in again at “And I see.” That’s happening more frequently, I notice, though not very frequently yet.) So what specifically happens when someone walks down the street and the buildings are not the same, or reads in the paper that somebody died, when they clearly remember that person having died long before?

Well, ask what happens when your car keys disappear and reappear where they can’t be, or when you re-read a well-loved passage in a book and find that the words are not entirely the same words? In other words, what happens when things you ascribe to imperfect memory are due not to imperfect recall, but recall of a version of the world that doesn’t match the one you are now living in?

You told us long ago that there are multiple versions of reality. I take it that was a sort of bridging concept.

It was a true description somewhat falsified by whatever unconscious assumptions you (anyone) brought to it. Those who think physical life is absolutely real would naturally have a hard time imagining all that rock being duplicated time after time. But those who understand the meaning of “life is but a dream” would have little problem with it, knowing how unsubstantial and infinitely variable and perpetually fluctuating dreams are.

You are saying we somehow move from one dream to another version of the dream without quite knowing how we are doing it.

We are saying you are creating different versions of the dream, not going between pre-existing versions. Now, you may be going between versions that you created, but still there is an important difference.

It is the difference between something happening because of us and something being done to us.

Yes. Overstated, but yes.

Care to understate?

The distinction between “because of you” and “happening to you” in’t that black and white. That distinction is, in fact, almost entirely meaningless. How could something “happen to you” that was not integrally connected to who and what you are? If chance were a real thing, then yes, sure. But since everything is connected –

So then, what’s a better way to put it?

What you experience is flavored by your assumptions. If you paint yourself as victim, you’ll find the incontrovertible evidence on all sides. If you paint yourself as magical being, that’s what you get, complete with magical powers.

Aha, and the problem is, there can be a stage where we are sorcerer’s apprentices, experiencing all manner of unexpected consequences of thing we knowingly or unknowingly set in motion.

Yes.

Then why couldn’t we take fluctuating buildings or disappearing carving as helpful signs, pointing us onward?

Why indeed? That’s what they are.

I can’t help seeing that sheepish look on Mickey Mouse’s face when the sorcerer comes home and sets things to rights again.

Didn’t matter. Mickey grew in wisdom just as the joke says, that good judgement develops from learning from previous bad judgment.

Our thanks for all this. Any advice, beyond “keep studying”?

We didn’t say that. Study or don’t, as you wish. But you asked what’s happening in such cases, and we did our best to tell you.

So, today’s theme?

“Memory as a reflection of reality,” perhaps.

My first reaction was to say, we can do better than that, but perhaps not. Okay, till next time.

 

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