Menoculayshunal; Memories Are But Thoughts

At any given point in the writing of any type of a memoir, the essential thought-form is 'memory'. One of the things we learn in Advaita Vedanta (AV), fairly early on, is exactly how our mental selves are operating.  While wary of placing the teaching here, it is interesting and useful as an illustration of the sort of learning that is undertaken, because much of this particular memoir is dependent on the very information that was absorbed. Essentially what is happening here is the equivalent of, say, a physics or maths professor needing to convey to a bunch of tourists with no background in their subject what a specific formula means to them and how it affects those tourists... context is a difficulty. 

The antaHkarana (अन्तःकरण ) is the 'internal activity' and it consists of four elements.

In AV, "I" is The One Soul. Ahamkara is the ego-self. Most people identifying as "I" are referring to their ego/personality. Such identification separates us from Unity. Such identification and the extent to which we use it demonstrates how attached we are to the world of perception - our physicality.

Part of the physicality is the river of thoughts called the mind - manas. The purely functional aspect of the brain which hosts it - that which shows up in our synapses and which our current scientific level of understanding permits us to comprehend. What that science does is show that action is taking place, but the actual makeup of thoughts remains... unfathomed. What we do know (in our material science world) is that thought actions take place in pulses. In meditation, with practice and care, we can actually see each thought, as if separating out each drop of water in a river... and then we can see the space that separates them. 

Thoughts are available to all species which have a brain structure. Thoughts are required for basic survival and forming of communication. What starts to happen in more advanced creatures is decision-making. Decisions are also thoughts but are based upon complicating factors such as previous experience (suggesting learning ability), desire (how much is that wanted right now?), risk (is there danger involved in reaching out for the desired) and so on. In the human species, this aspect of analytical thinking has been honed to cover abstract aspects and creative thinking as well as highly extrapolative contemplation... this is the buddhi, the intellect. Thoughts happen by the very nature of physical existence and in and of themselves have a constant quality as carriers of information. The buddhi, though, has varying degrees of quality and is something which can be enhanced through careful application.

One of the great sadnesses for Mankind is that so many high intellects of the past fell pray to egoism, and continue to do so. If "I"ness and "My"ness are the dominant personality traits, then even the most advanced levels of intelligence and intellect remain selfishness alone. Indeed, this is where we find sociopathy, autocracy, megalomania and other such twists of nature arising.

The remaining quadrant is chitta. This is commonly translated as the 'soul connection', but that is an oversimplification. It is that part of the mental structure that we know exists but few have access to - or are not inclined to explore. Please note, this is not in reference to brain capacity!  Our brains are merely the hardware upon which our software operates - the hard disk to the operating system, as it were.

Bear with me a little longer. Chitta is that part of the antaHkarana which holds all the records of where we have been (as the universal aspect of ourselves, so 'other lives' stuff implied here) and saves all relevant data from our current existence. It also informs, to a fair degree, how we operate in the now. It has the data which informs the intellect how to command and the level at which it must direct the thoughts; it has the memories that can spring up in our thoughts and we wonder where the idea came from; it has the imprints (vaasanas) that manifest as our ego/personality. The chitta can be considered, in the computing analogy, as the 'missing bytes' on a hard drive. Not missing at all, but simply serving via a different measure.

Well done for reading this far! Getting back to my opening point, that which we refer to as memory (as opposed to chitta) when relaying our personal histories, purely falls into the manas category. Then we have to rely upon our buddhi to assess how important, how accurate, and how pertinent any given memory may be. 

The reason this was being pondered here today is that there was a recent (family) challenge to a certain memory. One in which all four siblings were involved some fifty years back. It was fascinating (*read frustrating*) to observe the different views - almost to the point in one case of wondering if, in fact, they had been there at all. It demonstrated firstly what all policemen will tell you - that eye-witnesses are unreliable and thus as many as possible are required in order to get a common factor; secondly that some folk are highly sensitive (*ego-based*) and inclined to think everything is about them; thirdly, that all witnesses will experience the same event according to their particular view of the world and age at the time of the event. We all view the world through the prism of our antaHkarana and it is incumbent on the intellect to help the ahamkara withdraw, then pick salient facts from the torrent of manas and to measure that against the 'wisdom' of chitta.

This applies as much when we are reading another's memories of which we have had no previous knowledge. The degree to which we have empathy or trust in what is being read will be governed to a large extent by our own relative experience in life.

As the narrator, the responsibility is borne and you are to be reassured that part of the effect of studying the material such as presented in brief here today is to find oneself dealing with facts and realities and withdrawing from attachments to events,  not succumbing to 'massaging' of myth or falling prey to 'decorated' memory. Having always been inclined to seeing through "BS" and getting into hot water for seeking to have folk face facts, the logic of Vedanta sang to me. It helped me to sift through and clarify certain events and ascertain their validity. This is important because 'processing' and 'releasing' is part of the growth that we ought never to stop doing.  If we sit with the idea that we are this or that way (intro or extrovert are commonly given as examples) and are not prepared to put in the work to understand ourselves and place our histories into context, then we do ourselves and all who know us a disservice. 

The first and foremost question put to students arriving at gurukula is "who are you?". Everything else from then on is deconstruction and reconstruction. 

Only by becoming nothing can one become anything. 

The main obstacle to attaining nothingness, it turns out, is the ahamkara and how much attached it is to the mind/memory, body and objects.

^^NB this was prepared and scheduled before the news broke of another memoir causing a disturbance! Worth noting that the bone of contention in the Mac Clan was dealt with by agreeing to disagree and moving on to the next topic of conversation... but no doubt there is one who is still stewing over it. Not the YAMster for, you see, there was no memory of the event at all here - that's how much of an impact it had!!!