It was in the middle of the Foxhunter’s Reel, for some strange reason, in the middle of the usual stress-filled ear-splitting smokefest, that I suddenly saw in my mind’s eye a vision of my childhood home as seen out of my childhood eyes, and the thought occurred to me that it did not feel like a “real” memory, but rather sort of like a “past-life” experience or memory. And then I started to think: wait – what’s the difference?
I mean, honestly, what IS the difference? My childhood is every bit as gone as the body that was inhabited by this particular “mental continuum” in any other time-space-dimension. And yet, “last week” is also gone forever; and yet it somehow seems more present, more real. Why does one seem more distant?
The most obvious answer is the amount of elapsed time, but time is a concept that we humans invented in order to explain things like aging, and the fact that the moon does funny stuff. If something is past, it’s past. The stuff that happened yesterday is just as “gone” as the stuff that happened twenty years ago, and yet we do not perceive it that way. This must have something to do with the way we perceive ourselves, whatever we are defining as “I.” For example, I am laboring under the false impression that I am still the “I” who was “I” last week, whereas I have no illusions about being the “I” I was when I was 5. And who are all these “I” characters anyhow? Who is this “I” that is seeing my parent’s front yard?
Memory seems to be connected equally to the body and the emotions and the mind – to all the “heaps” that constitute this mythical thing we call “I.” If that’s true, then if we dump the body at death, how can we explain all these freaky stories of people “remembering” other lives? I think there’s something about memory that we just don’t understand. I think memory goes beyond brain-waves, sensory input and emotions. One of my music teachers, Barbara Thornton (who had an amazing memory), used to tell me “Memory is a function of the soul, not the mind.” That advice was meant to help me memorize 12 verses of medieval lyrics, but it ended up being, for me, a giant Zen koan. The “Soul,” for me, is not an unchanging entity that flies in and out of various bodies or will levitate up to join Jesus in the Pleiades when the Rapture comes. For me – and this is part of what drew me to Buddhism in the first place – it is very much like what the Tibetan Buddhists call the “mental continuum,” something that is always in flux and changing, but retains some sort of individuality while simultaneously being part of a vast totality; as the Buddhist saying goes, like water being poured into water, or like a wave that is separate from the sea and yet inextricably part of the sea. In that case, if memory is a function of the soul, then memory – true memory – comes from something that leaves an imprint on that continuum. I think that the body and the mind and the emotions are vehicles through which imprints are left on that continuum, at the same time that the body, mind and emotions are the product of that continuum.
In this same sense, never and forever exist at the same time, simultaneously. For example: in the background of my mental picture of my childhood home was the thought “I can never go back there again.” This isn’t strictly true; it hasn’t been blown to smithereens, and I could technically stand there again, even if someone else lives there now; but in every kind of emotional sense, it is absolutely true: I can never go back there. This thought comes from attachment – attachment to emotional connections, junk I can’t let go of, grief over a dead parent, and all kinds of things that leave an imprint on the continuum. At the same time, I can clearly go back there anytime I want -- I will never be a child looking at my “own” yard again, and yet here I am sitting in a smoky bar playing the chords to the Foxhunter’s Reel and I am, in fact, age 51.9, seeing my childhood home in my mind’s eye – seeing what my Tibetan teachers call the “generic image” of my front yard, a phenomenon that is peculiar to my own “mental continuum.” My sister’s “generic image” of my front yard is not the same, for example, as mine; and yet it is equally real.
This is not exactly the same as a kinesthetic memory, and yet it is related. My fingers remember the first piece in Bartok’s second volume of the Mikrokosmos, and they remember how to play the opening lick of Day Tripper on the guitar. In both cases, those pieces triggered some kind of emotion – in the former, a hard-to-explain fascination with the mode, which seemed vaguely evocative and familiar; in the latter, an almost devotional obsession with the Beatles. It’s not like remembering a phone number, or the name of one of my students, or which medieval polyphonic voice-crossing rule is introduced by Guido D’Arezzo; that is a completely different kind of thing (and tougher when the brain is experiencing middle-aged hormonal purgatory.) On the other hand, if it's your mother's phone number, or you've engaged with that student in some sort of discourse, or if the house across the street blows up at the same moment that someone explains Guido’s rules, that memory becomes something different all together. If the smell of a bottle of liquor at a restaurant in Rome triggers the memory of one’s dead grandfather with such force that tears erupt involuntarily, there is something happening here that is much more complex that simply cognizing a smell or a face. If this “mental continuum” ends up in another human body in some future life, will that same bottle of spirits trigger some positive or even slightly emotional feeling?
A common question asked about reincarnation is, “If we have other “lives,” wherever or whenever that might have been, then how come we don’t remember them?” Why, indeed? I know people who can’t even remember their own childhoods. They can barely remember anything about, say, being 10 years old, never mind being two years old. How are they possibly going to remember fighting at the Charge of the Light Brigade? Not likely. Some psychologists might say that this is a result of too much pain; I don’t know the answer. I asked my Tibetan teachers once why some people remember very little and others remember their very early childhoods and even hints of other lives. Their answer was “karma.” Another koan.
“Memory is a function of the soul.” Our bodies and brains and “souls” are not such compartmentalized units as we’d like to think. Parts drop away and parts continue; sometimes parts drop away and then return. Our current bodies and brains can also stop processing the memories that have still been imprinted on the continuum. Are they gone? I doubt it. And I think that’s true even if a brain tumor or Alzheimers dissolved the organic parts of our previous body-mind. Having given me the above “function of the soul” koan, Barbara herself took a serious memory hit when a brain tumor interfered. If memory is a function of the soul, are there “imprints” that will manifest if the mental continuum that was Barbara Thornton encounters a troubadour song in some other life / dimension? I think the answer is yes, but again, I don’t know the answer. If our “continuums” do continue, then we all will experience that feeling of recognition, of having known someone before, even if you know you’ve never crossed paths, or known how to walk straight from
