The Persistence of Memory

Reflecting on the Yoga Sutras, 1.5 -- 1.11

Looking back over a typical day, I'd have to say most of my mental activity is directed toward understanding, although whether the effort is successful isn't for me to say.

It's more successful than it used to be, that I'm sure of. In my youth and middle age, I spent a lot of time rationalizing the facts of my various addictions. I knew my behavior was unhealthy, but imagined it didn't and wouldn't have any serious consequences. I thought that addictive behavior was normal, that it's what regular people (like myself) did, so I was stuck in a combination of imagination (aphorism 1.9) and error (1.8). Today I spend quite a bit of time trying to reach an accurate understanding of how I got to be where I am.

I also spend part of each day reading, mostly on the net, pondering politics and history. This has been a habit of mine from a very young age (though not pursued on the internet until recently). I take in a lot of information, and try to discriminate between reliable and unreliable testimony so as to be able to draw clear and accurate conclusions. I'm not sure what good it does.

I don't think I'm a leaky vessel, or tipped, or upside-down. I'm a dirty vessel trying to get clean. And I remember everything. "Memory," as Patanjali tells us, "retains living experience" (1.11), but memories have to be processed for their meaning to become clear, and there again, the memories, like sensory perception of events in the present, can be either perceived accurately or erroneously.

There is one type of memory I want to investigate further, but I haven't found any guidance in Patanjali's Sutras (so far) for doing so. The sage speaks of mental activity, but doesn't discriminate between mental activity which occurs in the conscious mind and that which occurs in the subconscious. I'm speaking here of memories which well up spontaneously out of the subconscious when I'm practicing pranayama and/or meditation. These take a form very much like that of a still photograph, because, as C.G. Jung explains it, subconscious thought, "when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expresses the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture." (Jung, "The Undiscovered Self, p. 38.)

For example, nearly every day at the very beginning of pranayama, an image of an intersection in Desert Hot Springs, where I turned one way to go to one yoga class and the opposite way to travel to another, fixes itself briefly in the mind's eye, as if it's linked inextricably with the action of sitting down and drawing attention to the breath.

I've also confronted another type of recollection, the conscious but suppressed kind, as the mind has become less turbulent during pranayama or meditation. Ordinarily my mind is full of thought waves, like a wind-blown body of water, but as it becomes more settled during contemplation, like still water, memories of either things I've done which I regret, or things done to me which were unpleasant, sometimes well up from the bottom of the conscious mind. I think they were tamped down to the bottom of the can, so to speak, by the ego, which doesn't want to admit the full truth regarding my true identity.

I think any approach to the Ananda Maya, or even becoming aware that there is such a thing, will involve assimilating hard truths about oneself not formerly acknowledged. I wouldn't want to leave the house without my ego intact, but the truth is that's not me. That's just who I would like to think I am. As Andy Warhol once said, "It's not who you are that's important, it's who people think you are." But deep inside, I'd rather know the whole truth.

The painting "Persistence of Memory" is by Salvador Dali.