Memory Forms Our Soul’s Constitution and the Basis for Personal Experiences
Once we learn how our own mind works, and that the material aspect of our mind is our subconscious, we can form a deeper understanding of how our material reality is formed out of memory. The entire material world is formed and functions in a completely automated (natural) fashion out of a basic form of memory, called instinct. In terms of Nature and the material world of the Earth, everything, including humans, works out of a preexisting form of memory called instinct and natural laws. What sets humans apart from the rest of Nature is we have the ability to create personal memories, which form our life-theme, used as the means for consistently creating the same type of experiences throughout our lifetime. When we’re unaware of our ability to form personal memories that shape our life-theme, they function automatically at an unconscious level. We’re the only beings on the planet who are conscious in terms of thinking and being self-aware, while having the ability to create ourselves and our life experiences through our own form of instinct, called personal memories. Our personal memories function in a similar way to instinctual memory and are what form how we experience ourselves through our own self-made world.
The problem comes in the fact that the conscious aspect of our mind (we have a dual mind) originates as a seed planted within the womb of our subconscious, that develops gradually over time in 4 stages of 7 years each, becoming fully developed and actively dominant around 28 years of age. This can be recognized through traditional practices as “rites of passage” at 7, 14, and 21 years of age. Also, by realizing that you don’t have any memories of your life before the age of 6 or 7, and if you do, they usually result from what you heard being told by others, seeing pictures, or they seem vague and elusive, where you’re not quite sure if they’re true or not. This is because we’re born into our subconscious mind, which is our instinctual, animal mind, which is personality based, thoughtless, and uncreative, where experiences come in a completely natural and automatic fashion. From birth until around 6 or 7 years of age, we have no sense of being an individual that’s independent of our family unit or environment. We function as a part of our family unit and group mind (herd mentality), where we’re shaped exclusively by others and our environment.
As the conscious mind begins developing, we begin thinking about things, developing feelings out of our thoughts, problem solving and figuring things out for ourselves, and we begin making our experiences mean something. Whatever we make them mean, forms the basis for the story we start telling ourselves about life, and about ourselves in relation to our own story. This is the aspect of our mind that’s creative at the fundamental level of shaping reality through our perception, while forming the ability to think about the meaning of life. We start creating how we experience the world around us, without realizing that’s what we’re doing, because it comes in a gradual and completely natural manner. Still residing primarily in an unconscious state where we lack self-awareness, our own thoughts, which begin shaping our personal memories, act as a form of hypnotic suggestion. Up until this point in our development, we reside in a fundamentally hypnotic state, where we lack will and the ability to reason, discriminate, and think for ourselves.
We take in whatever we’re told and that’s being modeled by the people around us and in our environment without resisting or questioning it, and we begin imitating it through the role we play in the same dynamic. The role we take on emerges out of our personality, while also acting to develop it. We become the same as our family, tribe, and society. We take on a natural role in acting out a particular type of pattern as a behavioral dynamic, and we’re conditioned with that pattern as a form of mental imprint. We reside unconsciously in a herd, pack mentality and don’t have a sense of ourselves as being independent or an individual capable of thinking for ourselves and making our own decisions. This is the point in our development where we start shaping personal memories that stem from core beliefs and the values that have been ingrained in us, and we begin exercising our creative ability without realizing it or possessing any skill in doing it.
Allow yourself to notice that you don’t form memories of the events or happenings themselves, but of how you experienced them and the meaning you gave your experiences. As you began forming your own memories, you began telling yourself a story about life . . . about others, the way the world is in general, and about yourself in relation to it all. Out of your own, self-produced memories, you began forming your model of the world, your mental paradigm as a memory structure your conscious mind continued to develop and use as the basis for shaping yourself through your own self-produced experiences. As we began thinking about things, we started shaping ourselves as an individual through the reality of our own making, all in a completely natural way without realizing that’s what we were doing.
By the time we approach 13 or 14 years of age, we enter into a new stage of development where our mental model is already taking shape through our values and habitual behaviors formed through our family dynamic and instilled in our personality. Out of our initial mental model and the experiences we begin shaping through it, we form our core beliefs which serve as the foundation out of which the next stage of growth systematically emerges and begins taking shape. The next stage, which comes as a natural outgrowth of the preceding stage, comes at around 14 to 21 years of age, and is when we begin shaping our identity by separating ourselves from our family group and become more socially oriented. We begin thinking more independently and experimenting with new ideas and ways of being, trying them on, so to speak, to see how they feel. During our adolescence, our main focus becomes creating ourselves as a unique individual of our own making, and we begin exercising choice and will in a more pronounced and active manner.
By the time we reach around 21 years of age, we become a legal adult and are considered mature and secure enough in our identity to venture out into the world and set our life up. Naturally, how we form our life situation, independent of our family unit and initial environment, emerges as a natural correspondence to our identity as an individual, and the core beliefs we’ve formed about ourselves and our relationship with others and life in general. Once our memory-base as our mental model is firmly established, it forms the perceptual lens we look through to perceive the outer world, which is formed as an analogy. Our mental model blends with the neutral outer environment, and reshapes it to match our beliefs, values, expectations, and memories. This is difficult for most to realize because it comes in a completely natural manner, so we don’t even know to question it, and even when it becomes apparent that others don’t see the world the same way we do, we either try to correct them, convince or persuade them to see it the same way we do, or we argue against it and close down, feeling unheard or misunderstood. Even at this point, when it becomes somewhat apparent that we’re shaping our own reality, we still don’t fully realize that’s what we’re doing, or how it is we’re doing it.
By the time our life has taken on a distinct theme and identity, around 28 to 30 years of age, it begins crystallizing into a mental habit that we can’t seem to break, because it was formed by us through our initial conditioning. As we learn, grow, and develop our own ideas, the memories we form of the events of our life become a theme that shapes our perception and the story we’re always telling ourselves about life. If you notice, there’s always one part of you that seems to be talking to another part of you, explaining, describing, and telling a story about things that make them mean something. Because we begin forming our initial memories as a child when our ability to reason and think rationally hadn’t fully developed, we made everything that happened and that was going on around us, about us. The meaning we gave everything else meant something about us. When mommy was upset it was because we were bad and caused her to be upset, which meant she didn’t want or love us. When dad spanked us and told us we were bad or acting like an idiot, we believed it, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. We always become what we believe we are. Whatever was modeled, or we heard being said about us, we took in without discretion and personalized it, forming a belief about ourselves. Meaning shapes our experiences and forms the basis for the story we’re always telling ourselves about the way life is. Whatever we made emotionally intense experiences mean, formed what gradually became the theme of our life and shaped all our experiences to mean the same thing. This theme, which always involves and shapes our self-esteem, becomes the very foundation for all our life experiences, formed into memories that shape us an individual.
If we cultivate the deepened ability to self-reflect and become more aware of ourselves in terms of our own internal processes, we can form a much more profound awareness of why our life is the way it is. We can begin forming an awareness around how we form our own experiences based on an ongoing story-line we’re always playing out in our mind through a constant dialogue with ourselves. If you simply pay attention to your own thoughts, which run habitually on autopilot – you’re always thinking about stuff – you can notice they follow a distinct theme formed out of the same group of memories that leave you feeling the same way. You literally generate your own feelings and emotions through how you think about things. You think using patterns born out of memories that you picture in your mind, and you experience your own thoughts as emotion.
Allow yourself to notice that you replay a handful of memories over and over in your mind, each time a bit different based on the current situation you’re applying them to, forming a slightly different possibility for the same type of experience. This is how you’re constantly hypnotizing yourself with the same emotional suggestion and is what gives all your experiences consistency as being about the same idea. Your memory (model) forms all your thoughts, and your thoughts order and organize your outer world as a correspondence to your thoughts, forming the basis for experiencing yourself in a consistent manner. While many people say, or simply repeat, that if you change your thoughts, you change your life, this is an intrinsically false statement. Some will give visualization techniques, intensified with sensation and feeling, infused with desire as a means of “attracting” the physical circumstances of your desire or wish, which may work for some, especially if what they’re visualizing is congruent with their mental model, or they truly believe it will happen, but in the most basic sense, this is a false set of instructions based on a lack of true awareness.
How to Transform a Memory
Thought is a byproduct of memory, and memory is formed through an intrinsic trance state or subliminal hypnotic process, conducted by us through the dual aspects of our mind. The memory that forms our mental model is instilled and built into our nature. Memories are not independent or formed as a group of memories, some of which seem unrelated to each other. Our mental model, which is our essential nature and character, is a single, homogeneous memory, which forms the basis for what seems like individual memories. Our memory is a model that’s archetypal in nature, and functions simultaneously as our character and life theme. Our memory gives rise to all our thoughts through a process of adaptation and modification, forming what seems like individual experiences, which are then absorbed back into the memory that produced it, modifying it according to any new variations formed. We produce all our experiences out of preexisting memory which we then reabsorb and synthesis back into the memory base that produced it. Each time we adapt our memory to an existing situation, forming how we experience it by creating a new variation and possibility for the same idea, we evolve and upgrade our model through its own offspring formed as a new combination.
If you visualize reality as the type of experience you want to have that contradicts or can’t be produced naturally by your mental model, you’ll never be able to experience it. Experience isn’t based on a particular set of circumstances or the right conditions; it’s something you form mentally by connecting the inner world with the outer world, forming a single unit. You can be in any number of completely different situations or circumstances, and you’ll still have the same type of experience. You’ll use what seems like different circumstances or new elements to tell the same type of story, creating more of the same type of feeling. Experience is born out of a feeling and serves to give you more of the same type of feeling.
To change your reality, you must change the memory that’s producing it. Not as a particular memory that can be picked out of the rest, but as the experience and feeling the memory represents. You don’t change a memory by replacing it with a more desirable one intended to contradict the one you want to change, you transform the memory through a very basic hypnotic process. You focus on the feeling inherent in the memory, embodying it fully, and then follow the feeling back on an imaginary timeline to the first time you can remember feeling that way. You continue following it back until you reach the initial event that shaped and set the memory in motion. The key to a memory is the feeling the memory represents. All experience serves to give us more of a certain type of feeling. The feeling, which is the basis for thought and memory, is the key and nucleus out of which everything else takes shape. Not feeling formed through a sensationalized idea or visual thought, but the feeling that forms the meaning that shaped you as an individual. The one that gives you a distinct sense of yourself in relation to your own outward projection.
Transformation is the foundation of lasting change. You don’t work to change the outer world as a visualization that imitates an actual memory, you work to transform the inner world as a feeling that forms how you sense yourself in relation with your existing outer world. You can change your outer environment hundreds of times, and you’ll still end up feeling the same way based on how you form your experiences. Experience isn’t based on a particular type of reality, it’s what shapes your reality. It’s your mind that forms your experiences by harmoniously blending 2 aspects and 2 worlds together to form a 3rd as a single element formed as a memory. Experience and memory are outgrowths of each other formed as an archetypal theme.
If you embody a feeling that you have consistently, amplifying it by turning inward and concentrating on it, a certain memory correlated with the feeling will come to mind automatically. Don’t resist or try to avoid the memory, allow it to rise in your mind and form in a natural way. Then ask yourself, is this the first time you can remember feeling this way, and if not, follow it back as a feeling to a previous memory of a similar nature, then again, ask yourself if there’s an even earlier memory when you felt the same way, and keep following it back in time until you feel you’ve reached the initial event that formed the basis for all the other ones. Sit in the experience and let it play out as you originally experienced it . . . then, allow yourself to recognize what resource those who played a major role were lacking in that situation . . . strength, patience, honesty, courage, understanding, compassion, etc., and once you’ve recognized it, give that person the resource they needed. Then play it out as you imagine it would have transpired with that quality and characteristic instilled. Once you’ve played it out in a new way based on the missing resource, causing you to feel different, replay it repeatedly until it forms naturally in place of the old memory and gives you the feeling you want have. If you replay in a new way consistently, you’ll literally transform the memory along with the feeling that serves as the triggering mechanism.
It won’t change how you interpret the same behavior in your current situation, it’ll change how you respond to the same behavior. You’ll no longer be triggered into the same reaction, setting a whole thought process and emotional pattern in motion, causing you to go unconscious, and instead, you’ll naturally embody the same resource and quality that served to transform the memory. Memories aren’t formed out of one role in a pattern; it’s formed out of the whole pattern. Instead of personalizing other people’s behavior towards you, which is what you did as a kid, you’ll be able to keep yourself separate and instead exercise patience, understanding, and self-awareness. It’ll change how you feel in your own life, change how you perceive others and the world around you, and transform you as an individual of your own making.
Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher
