BEYOND-MEMORY: The Missing Part of Human Consciousness

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"44 Minutes to Change the World"

BEYOND-MEMORY

The Missing Part of Human Consciousness

“Memory never captures the essence, the present intensity, 
 the concrete reality of an experience. It is, as it were, the 
 corpse of an experience, from which the life has vanished.” 

-- Alan Watts
                                   The Wisdom of Insecurity

“Memory has a place at a certain level. In everyday life we could not function without it. But there is a state of mind where it has very little place. A mind which is not crippled by memory has real freedom.”

-- J. Krishnamurti
                                 Freedom from the Known

TRANSCRIPT with Links:

For over 2500 years, we have sought the part of the world that can't be talked about. The world “Outside of Talking.” On the assumption and the hope that this is the place where our human completeness resides.

From the Taoist Lao-Tzu to Plato and the Neoplatonists, from the Medieval Christian Mystics to the Islamic Sufi poets, on down to 20th century Western philosophy, “Be-Here-Now,” and Mindfulness.

But we still haven't found ourselves as humans. We haven’t yet found our completeness. The Wholeness of Our Human Consciousness. 

 

So in the late 20th Century, we began a new quest to find ourself in the World Outside of Memory.

To find the part of ourself that can’t be remembered. 

 

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In 1980, Jiddu Krishnamurti said the following: 

 The whole of my existence, the whole content of me, is put together by Memory. I am a structure made by Memory. Do you know what this means? It means one has to reject psychologically everything that Memory has put together.

https://youtu.be/FWuD1Sh1GYY?si=1BmBn4LcIznQXy-C, around minute 3.   

 Mr. Krishnamurti considered this discussion “much too radical,” and refused to talk about it.  

 

It’s now time to talk about it. 

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The Thumbnail drawing attached to this presentation tells the tale. 

The drawing shows how Talking is a subset of Memory, and Memory is a subset of Human Consciousness. 

It also illustrates a part of the world that is Outside of Talking, and how this part of the world is still within Memory.

 

But, perhaps surprisingly, it predicts that there is also a part of Human Consciousness that can’t be remembered. It can’t be remembered, because it is Outside of Memory. 

It seems we have ignored this part of Human Experience since, well, forever.  

 

All of these together create the wholeness of Human Consciousness, 
 if we will have it. 

 

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Memory seems to make up a massive portion of our human life. It makes so many things possible, that we can't even conceive how we would do without them. Things like talking to each other and thinking and writing and planning and agreeing on things and making rules and enforcing those rules, to name  just a very few. 

These are all things that are dependent on Memory. They are 100% “products of Memory,” and these are all things that make civilized human life possible.