Our emotions are not only affected through our memories, but they are themselves memories. We have an emotional memory. How are our emotions formed? When you have an emotional experience, it occurs first in your short-term memory that holds emotional information very briefly, for a few seconds. Then that emotional experience is being manipulated and processed in the working memory that lasts also very short, up to 30 seconds, but most often much shorter. It is in fact the extension of the short-term memory, but they are not the same. For instance, through a short-term memory you become aware of a phone, and through the working memory you remember and dial the number. The working memory that connects to emotions is called affective working memory. When you are having an intense experience, first the short-term memory holds brief recognition of it, and then the working memory must process it in the mind. However, if the emotion is very negative, it disrupts the ability of the working memory to cope with it and reduces its capacity.
After you relate to your emotional experience through the mind, through the process called consolidation, it becomes encoded semantically in the long-term memory. The long-term memory is of two kinds, explicit and implicit. The way they are called is questionable, but we can use these terms for now. Explicit memory involves conscious or subconscious recall of past facts and events. The implicit memory is the unconscious memory in which we lack the ability to retrieve the past memories, but it is still influencing your behaviors, emotions, and allows you to perform many actions automatically, such as walking or talking.
Understanding how our memory works is very helpful in gaining more clarity on the subject of healing, and also on various processes in our spiritual evolution. Trying to heal emotionally we have to face the long-term memory. The feeling of emotion is triggered mostly in the amygdala, but the processing of it occurs in the working memory. When someone challenges you emotionally, most critical is what happens in the next 30 seconds, give or take. If you freeze, feel shocked, or get emotionally overwhelmed in your body and mind, your working memory will be under too much pressure to respond properly. As a result the negative emotions become intensified, all of this creates more negative long-term memory. As it happens countless many times in your life, then you need emotional healing as a result, as it is all accumulative. And what you actually want to heal is what happened in those recurring 30 seconds of the working memory.
The reason we carry so many emotional wounds from childhood is that a child is more vulnerable due to inability to process the painful experiences in such a short time. When a child is hurt, there is hardly any processing of the emotion, as the emotion is experienced almost exclusively in the amygdala. The amygdala has a crucial role to play here as the main emotional center and it has its own emotional memory, even though the emotional memory is also part of the long-term memory. So a child would absorb a painful emotion like a sponge, without giving it hardly any feedback.
Is the working memory the same as the mind? Let me quote here. “In psychology, the working memory is differentiated from the mind, because it is a cognitive function related to holding and manipulating information in the short-term. It is a temporary workspace for active thinking, while the mind encompasses a much broader range of cognitive processes, including long term-memory, reasoning, and decision making.”
It is not entirely correct. It is true that the term the mind is not limited to the working memory, but it includes it; working memory is the essential part of the mind that is capable of conscious processing of thoughts. Reasoning, decision making and problem solving is in fact done within the working memory. Where else? The working memory is called memory because the conscious mind needs to remember what it is thinking about. There are only two levels of mind in us: conscious and subconscious, and all the shades in-between. Subconscious mind is the activity of the explicit long-term memory, and the conscious mind is the activity of the working memory. This is in terms of thinking intelligence. The subconscious mind can be also seen in a broader way as the sum total of all the memories.
How does an emotion begin? The amygdala first activates an emotional reaction, and which is transferred immediately into the long-term memory in your body. Then the working memory kicks in trying to process it. If you are emotionally triggered in a strong way, it is crucial that the working memory does not become emotional, but facilitates the surrender of the emotion into the body. Your power to respond to emotions constructively is only in the working memory, because it is only part of you that can become rational.
However, when you recall a painful experience in your mind, it starts first with the explicit long-term memory, then the amygdala reacts, and then that reaction is sent back into the body and the autonomic nervous system. When you remember a past emotional experience, such as getting hurt, by the very remembering of it, you are hurting yourself again. For instance, when you try to heal your childhood traumas by remembering them, in the hope that there is a theoretical value to it, you are hurting yourself in the present memory. You are hurting yourself by trying to relive the past pain which is but an artificial simulation in your imperfect memory of what you experienced before.
One of the reasons that people are not in touch with emotions in the body is because they are experienced within the implicit long-term memory which functions as an autonomic system and beyond our conscious control. For them it is easier to feel emotions in the mind through their explicit long-term memory, which is the subconscious mind, because they live in the subconscious mind. If they feel emotions in the body, it is in a very fragmented way. To truly feel emotions in the body is to make the implicit long-term memory conscious, which requires bridging consciousness into the emotional body.
As you work actively with your emotions, by surrendering to them in the body, what actually happens? You are feeling your emotions in the implicit long-term memory while relating to them from your working memory. However, if you are not aware of them, they are felt only subconsciously in the implicit long-term memory alone. The working memory is trying to find the best way to relate negative emotions, but what can it do? For once, it can direct your attention to the emotions in your body and activate the intention to surrender; the working memory not only directs attention but also creates and maintains intention which is crucial for in our spiritual work. Still for that surrender to be possible you need to activate the emanating intelligence and consciousness.
The working memory plays a crucial role in actively relating to our emotions. As an example, when you are surrendering to your body, it tells you what to do exactly; to surrender deeper, to merge with emotions, to let go with exhalation, and so on. But the timespan of that memory is very short because it is energy consuming and becomes quickly tired. It is not by chance that it is called ‘working’ memory. This is why the initial practice of self-remembrance for students can be quite exhausting.
The first goal of self-remembrance is simply to remember the pure me, but maintaining constant attention takes a lot of energy. And if we include the additional components of the practice like the embodiment of pure me, meeting oneself deeper, being gentle, loving oneself and horizontal surrender, the working memory becomes very busy. But gradually through repetition of remembrance done from the working memory, the long-term memory can take over, making the practice easy and natural. In the past I spoke about the spiritual memory that we develop as we grow into pure subjectivity. The spiritual memory is actually the long-term memory which carries and maintains the spiritual knowledge. I am glad that it is now explained better.
The emotional suffering is experienced in the body through your implicit long-term memory, but the moment you try to do anything about it, you activate the working memory. However, when suffering is in the mind, it is experienced through the explicit long-term memory, such as recalling painful emotions and reliving them. This can be experienced only in the subconscious mind, or together with the working memory which is either trying to find a constructive solution (such as surrender to the body), or is making things worse by digging in the long-term memory for even more painful memories. Oh, yes, the working memory can easily make things worse, and has to grow in wisdom. Emotional suffering in the head (not in the mind) can also be experienced through the implicit long-term memory (when not triggered by our thoughts) in the amygdala in the form of various emotional states, such as sadness or depression. This too can happen with or without the interference from the working memory that could come to rescue by activating more positive thoughts, paying attention to one’s light, or above all guiding one into surrender to Me.
Explicit long-term memory exists only in the mind and most often it operates without any conscious feedback. When people are lost in the mind, in their subconscious, in their endless thoughts, this is an example of the explicit long-term memory being active alone. The subconscious mind is basically the explicit long-term memory talking to itself; this actually explains so much the meaning of being unconscious. When the working memory gives feedback to the subconscious mind, we become more conscious in the mind.
It requires attention to focus our thoughts, but what is really the source of attention? It is the person of course, and as we know very few people are conscious of the person, which means that the working memory of human beings is far from conscious. Their working memory is so close to the subconscious mind of the explicit long-term memory that it is difficult to tell them apart. Conscious thinking is almost unheard of on this planet. You remember how in the past you were asked to think consciously and you couldn’t do it? Why? Because the moment you were conscious, the subconscious mind stopped and you just had no idea how to think.
What is Thinking
Thinking can be both the activity of the explicit long-term memory or the working memory. Thinking from long-term memory alone is subconscious, it is thinking by itself. Here, you do not reflect upon what you think, and do not give feedback to your thoughts. But what happens when the working memory communicates with the long-term memory in the mind? The working memory takes over as the thinker, but is receiving information, inspiration and insights from the long-term memory. The activity of the long-term memory is not put on hold when the working memory is thinking, as it thinks too underneath the working memory, doing its own parallel mental processing. This is what is usually referred to as accessing intuition, finding unexpected answers or revelations. The working mind alone is not very intuitive, and to gain various insights requires connection to explicit and implicit long-term memory, and even to the collective and universal memory. People who do not understand how the mind works sometimes imagine that somebody else talks to them. They may even imagine that God talks to them, and become mad. From this comes the concept of a bicameral mind, two separate minds in one mind where one is talking and the other listening.
A few more words about thinking. Our thoughts, to work properly, need to remember each other. The present thought needs to remember the previous one, and so on, to produce coherent communication in the mind. Two thoughts cannot happen in one moment. And the working memory has to also listen to the voice of the long-term memory. Very complex, indeed. As the proper thinking is happening in the working memory, it goes in very short intervals. I tested myself with a watch, and it was less than 10 seconds. There are gaps in the thinking process that we usually do not notice, because conscious and subjection thinking can interchange. You might assume that your thoughts are happening in the present, but they are not. Your attention is close to the present, but your thoughts are in delay. Most people do not have any gaps in thoughts. Do you know why? Because it is not the working memory that is thinking for the most part, but the explicit long-term memory. The subconscious mind is tireless, it can think forever and forever without any break.
The explicit long-term memory is not perfect and the information stored that you wish to retrieve is often corrupted and decayed. Our memories are flawed, blurry and distorted. Therefore, ideally, you should not base your healing on recollecting past events. However, it is inevitable that you think now and then about more recent situations in your life that left a stronger emotional impact. Here, you should try to maintain objectivity in relation to the situation, acknowledge your emotions for what they are, refrain from processing them in the mind, and surrender to them in the body. Even though at times it is beneficial, it is better not to go into the past. It is kind of a waste of your precious time. Why is it so? Because you already remember everything in your implicit long-time memory. If you surrender to your body, all the emotions are already there, no need to look for them in the past.
The remembering of past emotions happens in the explicit long-term memory, but you process them in the working memory. And how you process them, will be coded back into the long-term memory. You are not only healing your past emotions in the body, but also working with not creating new negative emotions through your mind. Of course, the tendency to create them comes also from your long-term memory, and has emotional roots too.
Imagine that you remember a deeply unsettling conflict with another person. This remembering can come spontaneously from the explicit long-term memory, or in combination with the working memory. At times it is not even clear which one is the culprit, because when the working memory is more subconscious it borders the activity of the long-term memory.
To say it again, the emotional experience starts in the amygdala. The amygdala can react to anything that it perceives outside as a threat, or it can be triggered by the mind. Then the working memory takes over to process that emotion, and it can become easily overwhelmed, becoming emotional and unable to think straight; it itself becomes irrational. This is why you need to be very mindful, fully alert and very fast, faster than the conditioned or mechanical reactions to your emotions.
How are you going to respond? You have 30 seconds max not to create a negative emotion in the working memory. What are you going to do with these precious 30 seconds? The more you transform your emotions in 30 seconds, the more free you will be in the next 30 seconds after that, because you managed to unburden your long-term memory. If you have already created a negative emotion, you still have time to surrender it to the body. After the 30 seconds are up, it is too late. Because for the next 30 seconds that follow, you have to deal with emotions that have already infiltrated your mind.
Your working memory has to be on guard, very attentive to what is happening emotionally. There is not much difference between healing an emotion and healing a tendency to create it, but there is some. In the body, they are more or less the same. But in the mind they are different. The negative emotions do not really exist in the mind, but it is the mind that has a tendency to create negative emotions. So the tendency is first and the emotion is second. Renouncing to process emotions in the mind is the most gentle way to dissolve the tendency to produce them. Another, complementary way, is to discipline the mind, through the working memory, to stop doing it.
The Future Memory
Continuing the subject of memory, the prospective memory (opposite to the retrospective one) is also very interesting. As you think about the future or plan your future, you are anticipating a certain reality of the future memory based on the knowledge drawn from your long term-memory while formulating it in your working memory. Yes, there is such a thing as future memory that hasn’t happened yet and it just might never happen; incidentally, some things from your past memory also did not happen, because you created a false memory of them, and some did happen but differently from how you remember them.
Prospective memory is also connected to the concept of manifesting a good future in your life, so-called ‘manifestation’. However, it is not a type of magical thinking, but a form of creativity of the mind that is able to anticipate, plan and dream the future. Incidentally, creativity and imagination are also a function of the working memory. Our intentions do matter, and we do influence our future through the power of the mind and our desires, and of course putting energy into it, and often hard work. You are using the prospective memory all the time, even when planning your dinner or attending the next retreat. You can manifest such a future very easily as it is in your control, but some things are not in your control because there are just too many variables independent from you. But what is the future really? It is the past not yet experienced.
What is time? It is a continuously receding memory, like when you look through a window of the last wagon of a fast moving train at the rails falling away from you. Future is just a space of nothing allowing this to happen. Time is not really moving towards the future – because there is no such a thing as future – but rather away from us into what we perceive as the past. The arrow of time is neither to the future, as it is assumed, nor into the past. Time is actually not moving at all. Time does exist, it is just not moving, because the present is not moving. Time has nowhere to go. The concept of time does not make any sense. It is just a name indicating this dynamic quality of memory. It is the past that is moving away from us.
Let me ask you what is living? You are only truly alive when you are conscious, which happens within short and working memory. What working memory signifies is not limited to processing information through conscious thinking, but our conscious participation in life and the awareness of it and yourself. But each time you experience it only for less than 30 seconds. That’s why life feels like a dream, because it is just so short, just 30 seconds, if you are lucky. But within that dream there is something real, and it is Me. Me is the presence of the presence in the present, the very center of this dream. And all of it, the totality of memory exists for Me. Even though beyond this dream, beyond memory, Me is remembering this fabulous play of creation. It is true that in the event of awakening, Me must remember itself, but when fully realized it no longer needs to rely on memory, because it is. That which is, does not need to remember itself. Apart from Me, nothing else is. Everything else is a memory.
The Power of Forgetting
Looking even deeper, if anything, the future is the forgetting of the past. Even though everything is memory, we should not undervalue the importance of forgetting. Memory is evolving, and for this to be possible, it has to keep forgetting all that which is redundant to free space for higher memories. This is what evolution really is. This forgetting is happening on multiple levels, even on the level of the cosmic memory. But for us personally, forgetting is essential or else we will stop evolving. Look at our teaching. It has changed so many times. To follow it now, you need to forget my previous teaching. Do you still remember the word ‘state of presence’? Some students get upset that ‘oh, the teaching has changed again!’. They don’t want to forget, because they found comfort and intellectual security in the previous understanding. But guess what? If they refuse to forget it, they will stop evolving, they will live in the past. The past does not exist – it existed. The past is just a memory. Memory itself is not in the past – it is of the past.
Many traditions of enlightenment and religions refuse to change, which is why they resist forgetting, and often lack intelligence to change. This is the definition of dogmatism, which is naught but clinging to petrified memories, and mummified concepts. Most people are like this, stuck in their past, without any imagination, living through repetition of the past. This is the death of the creative process of life. If you are not shedding off the past, it becomes our prison.
The process of forgetting allows the reconstruction and transformation of the long-term memory. The process of healing is also about forgetting redundant emotions and mental patterns, so that we can move emotionally forward. Forgetting emotions is most difficult, because they are really unconscious, irrational, and we strongly identify with them.
You may wonder how forgetting is possible if the long-term memory remembers everything? It remembers everything that is part of our reality, everything that constitutes who we are, but that everything’s meant to keep changing so that we can evolve. Conscious forgetting is done from our working memory, which gives feedback to the long-term memory initiating that change.
When you dissolve an old unwanted emotion in your body, which your long-term memory holds, your body forgets it, and more space opens in you for a higher emotional experience. Forgetting does not mean deleting our memories, but rather letting them go as no longer relevant to what we have become. In this sense, forgetting mostly relates to explicit long-term memory, the one through which we remember the past events. We just become disinterested with remembering the past, and deconditioned from the compulsive need to go there. Because emotions are deeper than semantic memory, the majority of forgetting them happens in the implicit long-term memory and it involves deeper processes, as we follow in the healing path of nonresistance.
What is the Present Moment?
What is the meaning of living and what is our empirical experience of the present? Let me ask you, how do you recognize the world? The moment you recognize, it is already the past. The two types of memories that come the closest to direct experience are the sensory memory, and the short-term memory. And even they exist in what I used to call ‘immediate past’. Sensory memory is usually very brief and almost immediately forgotten. Short-term memory holds a very limited amount of information for a very few seconds at the most, and then is forgotten too. No wonder, that we simply cannot remember that so-called present moment. Check it for yourself.
So what is this present moment if you cannot even remember it? Oh, look, you have already forgotten it! You remember only the memories that you stored, coded in your long-term memory and even they are pretty short. You might not remember your last week, or many details of what you have done yesterday, and probably even forget most of the things you have done today. When you contemplate the fact that you cannot even remember the present moment, you get the sense of what it means that memory is moving away from you, like a river flowing away, vanishing and leaving you behind. For most human beings, memory leaves them behind. But from the perspective of Me, it is the memory that is left behind.
We are the totality of memory, and this includes not just the accumulation of our personal memory, but also the collective memory, the memory of our planet, our universe and the whole of creation. If so, is life only a memory? Yes, because recognition of the fact that we are alive and everything else happens with delay, and the present moment is in the immediate past. We are not experiencing anything in the absolute present, we are only remembering it. Life is the evolution of memory towards Me. Is love a memory too? Me is love and Me is prior to memory. But feeling love in the heart is the conscious long-term memory that is meant to become the constant present memory of love.
The present moment could be seen as attention, prior to recognizing anything. But since the source of attention is the person, attention is not really in the present moment, but also in the immediate past. Could it be that the person is our present moment? But the source of the person is Me, so the person is also in the immediate past. Only Me can truly experience the empirical reality for what it is. The only way to experience this reality fully and directly is by realizing it as Me. And this is the total perception. There are still different types and levels of memories at play, and memory is still moving away (or else all would freeze and there would be no life), but all that was, all that is, and all that is yet to come is experienced as the absolute now of Me.