The Olympics are barely over, and already the vivid events are almost wiped from our minds. Small super-fragments may remain bright for a while longer, but too soon they will fade away to nothing.
Humans pride themselves on their ability to remember, and are often scornful of other species who don’t have that capacity, but the fact is we have little to be proud about.
If we really had large and accurate memories, then it would not be necessary for us to keep the reams of paper, and now digital, data that we do. We would be able to access and trust information, one person or group to another. But it doesn’t seem to work that way; there never has been a direct and trustworthy system, for once the moment of contact passes, everything that happens from then on is third hand at best, a matter of retrieval in one way or another.
Blame Time; it doesn’t stand still, and most unwillingly we have to go along with that fact.
Most of us are happy to let things be that way, sensible of the danger of overloading our brains with everything that ever came to our attention. The day to day brain doesn’t absorb much and doesn’t learn too much either. It was built to experience and react, not to become an enormous information repository.
The experiencing of pain is worth noting, in that once the painful incident has passed, the brain has no record of the particular discomfort. What is good for pain relief, however, is bad for improvements in how humans lead their lives, for it appears that what has been achieved in that area, is not retained either. Not directly, which is the point here; to re-inform ourselves, we have to go to the saved record.
We all know how much pain and anguish memories that have somehow created continuous, almost unbreakable loops can cause us. They are out-of-present-time events, acquired responses to usually traumatic situations, for which there don’t appear to be acceptable reasons or mitigating circumstances, and as they have become deeply imprinted, they are most seriously resistant to removal.
Living in the moment was all life was supposed to be, but that isn’t possible if there are memories. Living without attachment is the highest aim of those on the spiritual path, but the human brain has found a way to double-check even that aspiration. It is not easy, we are told, to prepare to walk the long road to enlightenment.
Clocks mark the seconds and move on, the breath comes in and goes out, every single moment is new and unrepeatable; there should be joy in being so unencumbered.
Happiness is not a memory; it is the reaction to the moment, each moment. Fear is a product of memory, and sadly, returning to a fearing point does not offer information as to how things can be made better.
It seems we must work against memory, not live with it. Non-attachment, so often despised as laziness and/or stupidity, would appear to be what we should attain to.
There is a future in not knowing. Nothing in this world is ours to keep, including the planet.
Time Zero
I haven’t got round to posting my posts in the last few days, events took me for a whirl and I ended up being short-changed in the time department. I mean where did it go? It’s supposed to roll out evenly, but frankly I don’t think that can be true.
We measure time with clocks of all sorts, instruments that know how to keep the beat, but I am far from convinced that counting even ticks is that effective, it simply doesn’t tell the whole story.
I would say that time is perfectly arbitrary, that all we do with clocks is control ourselves. Time is, I believe, quite different for each person and every other sentient thing on this planet, and probably to infinity through the universes.
Time seems mashable, malleable, stretchable, able to be tightly compressed, round, smooth, rough and bumpy, and sometimes inclined to become crystalline, with facets that reflect in many different ways. Time operates on the horizontal, the vertical and round blind corners, while still remaining valid to the person who is experiencing it.
There can only be one moment when time is wholly synchronous, and that is the time of our birth into the Light of Consciousness, the instant we become alive to a new life.
This is Time Zero, the only measurable point that is the same for all of us.
tetralogia 