On memory and loss, and retrieval, of memories

On memory and loss, and retrieval, of memories

Friday, March 2, 2018

2:55 a.m. Lying in bed, awake, I was trying to remember something. And I deliberately watched the how of remembering something that was remembered enough to nag at me, but not remembered enough to really pin down.

I started with an anguished feeling, a question, that some man was compassionately asking some woman. At least, I think I knew that much. Maybe I knew only a fragment of the question, “What happened to you, ___?”

Rather than be frustrated or worried that I couldn’t remember further – for this I knew was a memory of something I had seen, not something I had experienced – I decided to concentrate on how I went about the process of retrieving the context. Clearly, it isn’t a conscious process, yet, equally clearly, I knew something about how to go get it.

All I had was those few words, but equally, the feeling behind the words, the anguish, the concern. I repeated the words, as best I could, with the feeling, realizing that in practice the process of retrieval isn’t logical and associational so much as empathic and – what word can I use? – “emotionally associational?” It is a process involving getting close to the emotional feel of it, not the intellectual content, or the logical associations, though they come into play too, when they can.

So, again, “What happened to you, ___?” Jess? Some one-syllable name, I think; that’s what it felt like. I concentrated on the emotional feel of the person saying it. Couldn’t remember the man – though I got pretty sure it was a man – couldn’t remember the woman, pretty sure it was a woman. No idea what was going on beyond his anguished concern for her, his helplessness. I got that immediately after the question, he backed off, saying in effect, “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.” And I knew it was a film, and I knew that we never did learn (nor was it important) what had happened, only what shape it had left her in. And after a while I realized it was John Travolta, the movie about the guy who suddenly is a genius. George something. George Malley. Has the good-natured huge black guy [in it] who had a bit part [as a pool hustler named Amos] in “The Color of Money.” The movie had some name like “The Natural” in that it was only a word or two. But once I got this far, I didn’t need the movie title, though I could probably dredge it up if I needed it. I could concentrate on the feel of it, just as I did on the feel of those few remembered words. The associational-machinery, operating out of sight, would eventually bring it out, perhaps long after I no longer coconsciously was concerned with it. Possibly popping up out of the blue, like a dead letter suddenly getting freed from its post-office interment for some reason.

I only got up and described it to this length because I got the sense that you fine gentlemen were interested in giving us a word or two on the subject. True?

True. And you will notice that as you were writing that out, you remembered that yesterday morning you overheard a conversation about people’s failing memory, and were moved to mention what you had heard about memory being in effect reset by frameworks like doorways, so that in passing through a doorway you might forget something and need to return to where you were before you could remember what you were thinking.

Yes. And the tendency clearly advances with age; everybody hears of it, jokes about it, worries about it. But I was told long ago that there’s a difference in the problem in that we think of it one way but it’s really another. It isn’t that the memory itself is gone, but access to the memory. Memory, I was told, is laid down in the non-3D, out of reach of accident. What is in the reach of accident, or decay, is our access to the memories.

And like many new concepts, that was a bridging concept, not quite right as stated, but a way to bring you over. Just as the questions so often is “Which you?,” so in this case it is “Which memory,” or rather, I suppose, “Which you is holding which memory in which place?”

You might say there are two forms of memory, the Akashic-record kind of immutable imperishable memory, and the 3D everyday reality memory stored in the physical structure of the brain. So in one sense, the conventional view of memory is quite right, it is in the brain and may be damaged. However, in a larger sense, that is only partly true, or let us say only partly relevant. For if the 3D storage is injured or destroyed, the non-3D storage remains, and so

And so it’s a question of access, just as you (or someone) said, but not in the way Rita and I heard it.

That’s right. You were thinking about retrieving a specific bit of information (conceptually, I mean, not that you were actively pursuing some specific at that moment), so you weren’t thinking in more general terms of your 3D / non-3D relationship. Nor did you have those concepts at that time.

So it’s about more than memories.

Oh yes. Easy access to the rest of you is your Aladdin’s Lamp, to the degree that you want it.

I get that that’s what you wanted to bring forth, because suddenly I’m too tired to continue.

But you brought forward something that you wouldn’t have wanted forgotten.

True. thanks. And I’ll make a small bet that the name of that movie – The Occurrence, or The Event, or something – arrives in its own due time. If not, I can find it via Netflix, but I don’t think it matters. I think the point was that –. Hmm, I guess the point may be a little more multiple than I thought. We’ll see if it’s more than access to abilities and information via our non-3D components and their associates.

7:45 a.m. It may have been called Awakening, or something like that.

After making my entry in the middle of the night, I thought, That’s the connection between guidance and healing, for one thing. No wonder Monroe includes healing in Guidelines!

Netflix reminds me [via a search for John Travolta movies], it was “Phenomenon.”