P B R . . . . . . . . . . . . Before you begin this exercise

 

 

10 Minute Therapy . . . Memory & Perspective

 

Remember that the open-ended nature of events is seldom a true version of a past event for even in one life a given memory. The original happening is experienced from a different perspective on the part of each person involved, so that the event's implications and basic meanings differ according to the focus of each participant.

 

In your terms the event is happening for the first time. It begins to work upon the participants. Each participant brings to the event his or her own background, temperament, and literally a thousand different colorations - so that the event, while shared by others, is still primarily original to each person.

 

The moment the event occurs, it begins to change as it is filtered through all of those other ingredients, and it is minutely altered furthermore by each succeeding event. The memory of an event, then, is shaped as much by the present as it is by the past. Association triggers memories, of course,and organizes memory events. It also helps color and form such events.

 

You are used to a time structure, so that you remember something that happened at a particular time in the past. Usually you can place events in that fashion. There are neurological pockets, so to speak, so that biologically the body can place events as it perceives activity. Those neurological pulses are geared to the biological world you know.

 

In those terms, past or future-life memories usually remain like ghost images by contrast. Overall, this is necessary so that immediate body response can be focused in the time period you recognize. Other life memories are carried along beneath those other pulses -- never coming to rest so that they can be examined, but forming the undercurrents upon which the memories of your current life ride.

 

When such other-life memories do come to the surface, they are of course colored by it, and their rhythm is not synchronized. They are not tied into your nervous system as precisely as your regular memories. Your present gains its feeling of depth because of your past as you understand it. In certain terms, however, the future represents, say, another kind of depth that belongs to events. A root goes out in all directions. Events do also. But the roots of events go through your past, present, and future.

 

Often by purposefully trying to slow down your thought processes, or playfully trying to speed them up, you can become aware of memories from other lives - past or future.

 

To some extent you allow other neurological impulses to make themselves known. There may often be a feeling of vagueness, because you have no ready-made scheme of time or place with which to structure such memories. Such exercises also involve you with the facts of the events of your own life, for you automatically are following probabilities from the point of your own focus.

 

It would be most difficult to operate within your sphere of reality without the pretension of concrete, finished events. You form your past lives now in this life as surely as you form your future ones now also.

 

Simultaneously, each of your past and future selves dwell in their own way now, and for them the last sentence also applies. It is theoretically possible to understand much of this through an examination-in-depth of the events of your own life.

 

Exercise:
Throw away many of your taken-for-granted concepts.
Relax and take a few breaths.
Now, pick a memory.
Breathe deeply and focus on this memory
Try not to structure it . . . allow it to take its own form.

 

This memory, left alone, not structured, will shimmer, shake, take other forms, and transform itself before your mental eyes. Its shape will seem like a psychological kaleidoscope through whose focus the other events of your life will also shimmer and change.

 

Such a memory exercise can also serve to bring in other-life memories. Edges, corners, and reflections will appear, however, perhaps superimposed upon memories that you recognize as belonging to this life.