if it were all to have meaning
and purpose and cause leading to effect
does it matter?
two people connect as if time never existed
(and it don’t, it don’t, it don’t….)
if
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
things as they are
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Life as dropped some surprises on me the past few days. Combined with the usual busyness, I’ve had some interesting contacts with my long lost past.
Some threads in the web of life are never broken — they just trail away, only to reconnect at a later juncture.
If nothing else, the patterns have been interesting these past few weeks.
The more I pay attention, the more things as they are have a wondrous pattern of emergence and reemergence; even if, at times, the patterns are surprising or disconcerting — the patterns are glorious all the same.
an argument against memory
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Memories are untrustworthy creatures.
There is no proof that the events that memories consist of ever actually happened. Poll three people about an event or a series of events and, while you may get some collaboration about the event, perhaps even strong correlations of memories, there will still be three different recollections about the event as it unfolded. Those recollections, the drawing on memory to relate a history, will all vary based on the key things that each of the three brains decided to retain as important to the event. What was important is coloured by what was emotionally significant at the time.
As the memories are filled with other memories, the brain tends to sort out and filter out some of the details and after a stage, only fragments remain – usually those perspectives most shadowed by emotion.
As I write this, I am fully aware that the memories my mind is turning over and that are keeping me from sleep are primarily illusion, but I am still struck with insomnia as I try to find some collaboration between the different memories I have of several periods of my life.
I wonder at the value of retaining those memories. If I cannot rely on the memories, are they little better than debris from a past that may be sheer fantasy? Should it not be better that everything seems so vague and doubtful? If things in the past are no longer in existence, then am I not clinging to shades and shadows that would be better cast aside and truly forgotten? If so, why does my mind still find value in those thoughts?
Might it not be best if we forgot the things that make memories as soon after the event as possible? After all, if there is a question as to the veracity of the thought – perhaps it should be cast away like anything else we fail to find trust in.
There are some who claim to have perfect memories, but my own experience with those people has been that their confidence in their own memories is rarely founded in repeatability – the memories are perfect each time, but chimerically change with each recollection. From where I stand, claims of perfect memory a more functions of a attempt at securing the ego than a function of true perfect memory.