December 10, 2022
Alina (0:00:38):
Namaste. We welcome you all to continue our series Evenings with Sraddhalu.
Namaste Sraddhalu.
Sraddhalu (0:00:46):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.
Alina (0:00:48):
We are happy to continue today this series and we will take some questions on developing our capacity for learning and expression. During the session, you may freely ask questions in the chat box.
It's a very interesting subject, even for myself, sometimes I find it very difficult to express and maybe we didn't learn in school how we should express our emotions and maybe it's a mix of some difficulties which express themselves later on in our adult life.
I will start with one question from Suraj:
During my college days, it was difficult to understand or absorb the lectures in my class most of the time. Professor teaching used to go beyond my head and suddenly at the end of the lecture, the professor used to make any random students to stand up and asked to be repeated the topic, and I was unable to repeat, and while some students were able to repeat the topic very well, and from that I have used to fear to sit in the classroom. So how do I retain or absorb the entire lecture or how do I develop the better listening, retaining, articulating and delivering abilities?
It's a very good question and I think most of the students would like to get some suggestions.
Sraddhalu (0:02:34):
Yes.
So as usual I will take the question and broaden the scope and try to go as deep as possible into all that could be drawn from the question potential itself. And broadly I would summarise it as being a discussion on developing the capacity to learn and the capacity to express. These are two things which unfortunately our existing system of education completely ignores or whatever is developed is incidental because as Suraj describes, so, commonly experienced by all of us, the teacher is used to talking one way, students are passive listeners and then suddenly they are asked to get up at random and speak out or repeat as if the goal of education was to turn you into a tape recorder.
Interesting.
You push a button as a teacher starts speaking, when he finishes now you speak, you push another button, play back, and you're supposed to regurgitate.
And that is a good student by the way.
That's your definition of a good student which is kind of weird when you think about it, because then you can replace the student by your tape recorder.
And naturally with this, as Suraj describes, you end up with fear. The fear then pops up each time you are required to go into that state, stand up and speak.
Now in real life you may be required to just speak your mind, speak your experience, describe something you experienced an hour ago, ten years ago. But the fact that you have to speak in front of people and you have to be standing that whole mood of the fear habit pops up, blocks you.
Many children even develop sicknesses of various kinds including stuttering, hesitating, mind blanking etc. under that moment of the all demand of the stress.
All are the very opposite of what should have been done to develop the capacity to express.
I've actually had students very capable having much to say if it comes to that and then going now into adulthood who still find it difficult, they find themselves frozen at the age of 30, 40, they're frozen when they have to express themselves and so they started avoiding and therefore that capacity remains undeveloped.
(0:05:19)
And then one question I asked:
But haven't you ever experienced what it's like to be on stage and prepared for a stage theatre show?
No, it was never done in the classroom.
Interesting. How poor, shallow, insufficient our education system is.
But all this can be compensated for, corrected for, irrespective of your age.
Doesn't matter if you're 8 or 80 or anything in between.
And so I would like to cover broadly a kind of a theoretical basis as well as point to applications and forms of practice that you could direct your development towards.
And looking at it from a purely spiritual point of view, the experience of learning is essentially an experience of discovering.
Remember.
Somewhere deep within you all the knowledge is already held, in some deeper layer, inner, higher, whatever it may be. The knowledge is already held and the the layers in between are covering.
Discovering is when you become aware of what is inside you and now it is yours, it can never be taken away.
Contrast this with learning by rote where the teacher is speaking, you are trying to memorise, and it's like paint stuck on you. The first chance, it peels off and it's gone at least in a few weeks or months sometimes in a few years at worst it's gone, because it was never yours.
What is discovered is yours, it can be covered again or partially covered, it's never fully, and it can still be drawn out again, but it was never lost, it can never be taken away from you, it can be hidden within you, but it can be always re-found.
So this fundamental difference of approach in education needs to be tapped when we are learning.
And the second aspect which is of the capacity to express, the power to express, is essentially a creative power of the Divine. The entire universe is the expressive power of the Sachchidananda, the creative divine consciousness, including us. Since we are a part of it, we too have this capacity to, well, create, manifest. Isn't it?
So think of the creative power as essentially a power of the divine creativity that we are being, we are replicating or participating in. Put another way, each time you create, each time you become creative, each time you express, it is the divine potential for expression that is working itself out through you. The more transparent you can be, the more pure, direct and complete that creative potential will flow through you. In a sense, you become focal points, we become focal points for the divine creative ability to be able to act now within multiple focal points, within the totality of its own movement.
Potentially, each one of us therefore has the full creative potential of the origin, but now expressed through a unique standpoint, poise, circumstance in which we are currently operating, experiencing.
So I'm putting these two, both learning and expressing, into a spiritual context and you realise it's not about academic education, it's not about being a student in a school or just learning for the sake of learning, it's about developing the divine potential itself.
But I won't ignore the school context also.
So I'll begin with the school context and develop to this more spiritual full potential.
First of all going back to Suraj's example, the requirement was rote memory:
You were a good student because you could replicate what the teacher just repeated. And some students did that. Not all of them were successful in life because that's not a faculty that's very useful in life, to be able to repeat what someone else has said. What is useful in life is to be able to express what you perceive or even develop your capacity to perceive, and then you have something new to contribute to any activity or discussion.
(0:10:17)
But there are students who have both. They have this capacity to articulate, express whatever they have heard but also to articulate what they want to say. And it would be the direction you would want to go towards, because you want to be able to replicate somebody else's thought also, although that is not essential. But to be able to do that, ho-yes, it is useful, why not?
And it is one of the faculties, memory is one of the faculties you want to develop.
So I am going to consider that part of the discussion also for our development.
First thing we recognise, and then just to put in context, the big picture we will look at will be this ability of course to express what you have just heard, but also in the question he says:
How do I retain or absorb the entire lecture?
How do I develop better listening, retaining, articulating and delivering abilities?
So that will be the full scope of what we will cover.
First recognise that for this memory:
there are many kinds of memory,
many layers of memory, and
memory itself is one aspect or one kind of learning.
So, we look at all that.
There is a visual memory. You draw a picture or the teacher writes on the blackboard. You see the text, you see the words and you look down at your notebook and you copy. Or you don't have a notebook, you see that the picture is erased. In your mind you retain the picture and the teacher says, now write it out on the blackboard. You can go and pretty much recreate. Pretty much. This is a visual memory.
Another will be an auditory memory. I can't retain the picture you've drawn but I can recall the words you spoke.
Interesting. Each one of us has one of these predominant.
And there's a third type which would be a kinesthetic memory. That is the memory of the touch. Until I have done it with my own hands, and it could include writing, so now that I have written it out in my notebook or on the blackboard, the act of writing is what imprints into my memory. Seeing is not enough, listening is not enough, writing out is my way, let's say.
Now remember, all three are memory or rather channels of memory. In principle you should develop all three. As it is nature within you has one of these more developed than others already. Now the error of modern education is to lock us into that which is still, which is already there within you as the thing that nature has awakened. Some of it has to do with your type, swabhava, temperament, biology, the gunas and some of it to do with heredity. So, it's a mix of various causes, why it is one of these dominates.
Ideally in a good education all three would be developed, all three kinds of memory, visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Very likely the difficulty that Suraj faced as many students do is that their natural trend would be of an auditory memory or a kinesthetic memory. And what the teacher spoke or drew on the blackboard [then] (0:13:51) is difficult to replicate because it was not a visual recall. Or it might be a kinesthetic memory, you heard the teacher, there was no picture and so you could not recall. Or it's a visual type, teacher didn't draw, they just spoke and you can't recall.
What you can do, let's say you are an auditory type, teacher is speaking, of course you are able to recall. But you are a visual type, and teacher is speaking, you need to create pictures in your mind, you might be writing on your notebook, that's one way to do. The act of writing fixes in your kinesthetic memory. Visual memory, if you look at what you are writing and draw a picture.
So in some of the more current educational approaches, they have you draw what they call ‘mind maps’, where you assign little circles to different ideas and make links between them. That's helpful, but it's in some way still reductionist, but at least it is a start.
So remember in all these, you are still focusing on a sensory memory. Later we will look at other kinds of memory. But this is still a basic development of the sensory memory, which should be done from childhood on.
(0:15:05)
So if you are a parent, consider how you can have children play with games in which the three kinds of memory are replicated, and by using they develop.
Simple example for visual memory, you have cards which are often in pairs, you lay them out, you open one card, close, someone else opens one card, closes, someone else opens one card closes. The first person to recall, ha, this opened card now matches with another which we saw five minutes ago or five cards ago, they open both and get it. If they are right, then they get those cards. If they are wrong, then whatever the game. Now in this, automatically the visual memory is developing in a way that is fun. Especially recognise that children naturally have an unfolding sequence of skill interests. I hope we will have occasion to discuss this in greater detail, but you will see nature has a natural sequence of unfolding the layers of faculties, and each time that a faculty is being focused upon by nature developing it in you, the mind automatically or the person automatically finds that activity interesting which feeds that faculty.
So especially in the early years of child growth, I would even say, from the age of three, four, five onwards, games of this kind, which are sensory stimulating, sensory memory would be a part of that, would be extremely interesting for the child.
For the parent, instinctively, there's a joy in doing what the child appreciates or is drawn to do at that moment, and that's part of their biology, instinctive programming, that nature has put in the parent to care for the children. But play those visual games.
Equivalent auditory games, let's say, you take a drum, you strike ‘tut-tut-tut’, the child repeats ‘tut-tut-tut’. Now I go ‘tut-tut-tudut’, child repeats. Now I go ‘tut-tut-tudut-tut-tudut’, child repeats. So you're making your length of the pattern each time adding one piece, one piece, one piece longer, all the rest is a repeat of the previous, and so in the child's consciousness the auditory memory is being built and then you will notice, initially the children get up to let's say the first 3, 4, 5, 6 strokes and then at some point they start lapsing. So, you pause there and keep varying patterns around that length. So, suppose a child has already reached a point where they are able to catch the first 4 or 5 steps. So you will no more go 2, 3, 4 steps, you will go 3, 4, 5 steps and gently, very gently nudge the complexity of the interaction and then have the children do that with each other, and you will find it so much fun because those faculties are actually awakening. And among children you don't even need to be present, you can have them build more and more complex things. And this is just one form. Here it's only this rhythmic structure. You can have sounds, words and then complex mixes, arrangements of those sounds and words, instruments, different kinds, etc. All these would help towards auditory memory, which when sufficiently developed, I should be able to hear an entire song sequence and replicate broadly, at least humming the tune or catching most of the words, as the child grows older, maybe more.
Similar training would be done with kinesthetic memory, where you touch, you repeat by doing, holding objects, moving with sensations. A lot of this could be done with clay for example or plasticine, soft putty stuff, where you shape something and the child watches you shape and makes his own shape, replicates the shape, he feels the movement, and in feeling with his hands, he feels the relation between the shape and the pressure given. Seeing the shape you have created, they recreate, and so on.
There is another variation to this, as the children grow older, you have construction kits, one of these which I used to find very helpful for developing sense mind as well as reasoning mind as embedded in the senses is the kit called ‘Meccano’ which is a mechanical construction kit. And for quite a while in the Ashram School I was playing with students at the age of 10, 11 which is just around the age when sense mind is turning to rational mind, and so linking these two becomes very effective at that age.
(0:20:03)
And you can see within this span, and I would had one period, that's 40 minutes per week, and initially you could see a certain resistance, oh this is so new, very quickly within the first two, three or four sessions some of them have got the hang of it and are enjoying it enormously, others find it still a point of hesitation and resistance. But you can see as a result of that use, you look at a picture which is a two-dimensional image, in your mind you have to translate into three dimension and then take these pieces and assemble them and join them to build what you saw as a picture. So, there is a visual translation from 2D to 3D. At the same time there is a kinesthetic ability. And then you see for example two objects are aligned and a third needs to align and you don't know how to sequence it and so there's a reasoning aspect of the sense mind which is also kicking in, and very quickly, by the time they've completed one year which is all they had with me, the power of the intelligence has been enormously activated.
Now in the way we did it, because the nature of the kit, most of the drawings which were given used to be pictures of cars and vehicles and things which naturally are more attractive to the objectivised sense mind, so, boys typically find that easy to connect with, girls had resistance.
Now, this is something we will discuss on another occasion in greater detail. There is a difference in the structure of the brain and therefore aligned with it certain faculties of the mind in the boys and girls as they unfold in age. And we have to take that into account and compensate for it. So one of the things I found was the girls had trouble identifying with a car, it seemed too dry, objective. And what I did, I broke away from the book at that point and I said: Can you draw a face? Can you build a flower with the same Meccano kit? And I would make one and show them and then get them to replicate and then have them follow with variations. Having drawn a face, can you make the lips move? Can you make the eyes move? So, it's a moving kit. And because it had an emotional connect, the girls could catch that quickly and compensate for what was otherwise a barrier. Those who did and put attention, you could see their intelligence actually growing.
And you see what happens in the early years of age, if you can activate some of the faculties at the right time and amplify them to the maximum, they continue to grow into later part of the teenage life as well as adult life. If at that moment they have been dulled and not developed, you cross the threshold of that stage of development of faculty, you move to other faculties now, the mind cannot come back and redevelop these or they are developed indirectly while trying to develop something else, your memory is somehow dragged along, but it's always resisting and you never could give it the necessary free attention to develop that faculty and so it remains as if half developed or a gap much later in life often for the rest of your life unless you have to, you force yourself to go back to that level which most people cannot do.
So all this is just to give you a backdrop of the importance of catching the right age when certain faculties are being developed and so you see we have looked at the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory memories. Work on these at an early age and automatically in the classroom in the situation that Suraj describes you would have the visual auditory and kinesthetic memories active because they have been sufficiently stimulated and awakened. Now the teacher draws a picture on the blackboard or speaks something out, in your mind you can arrange those ideas, structure them, turn words into pictures, pictures into words or even kinesthetic experiences even without having to write it because that faculty is integrated.
Now ideally we would push for all three to be fully developed and allow them to integrate.
You see the fact of writing and looking at what you write is automatically connecting visual and kinesthetic.
Listening and then drawing would be connecting the auditory and the kinesthetic as well as visual.
So, there are activities of this kind. Listen to music, feel the flow of the music and draw to express the flow with colours, with movements, whatever form it takes, and you are making a bridge. All this is great fun at that age when those faculties are kicking in. Once developed, they are there with you for life.
So to Suraj, I would actually say, do these experiments, play these games. I don't know what your age is now but whatever your age, if you find it fun, take up some of these games and activities and push the boundaries of these three kinds of memory and then the translation between one another. But this is still to tell you we are operating at the level of sensory memory.
(0:25:18)
The next grade on top of this will be the emotional memory. Can you recall an emotion? Can you recall an emotional experience and articulate it? And this is very distinct from the sensory memory you see. It's a different part of your consciousness. Can you recall an idea? Can you recall the conceptual content of the discussion or the memory?
So I would, I often had this problem because of a certain, let's say extreme focus on the content of discussions. And even now I have this sometimes. I might meet somebody, have a detailed discussion with him going for an hour, two hours. Afterwards, I can recall with great precision all the things we discussed, all the key-ideas which were covered, the sequence and structure. [This] (0:26:09) I even describe what the person's overall tendency of thought or limitation or interest was. But if you ask me, What kind of clothes was the person wearing? I'm sorry, I didn't notice. What shoe’s colour? I didn’t notice. What was the face? I have to struggle, because the entire attention shifted or shifts to the conceptual content and the sensory content is almost ignored. Now at some point it becomes a habit.
But if you compensate for that by actively putting attention, let me first notice what is the appearance. Okay, now that I have noticed I can move to what is the feel. Now that I've noticed I can go to what is the idea, and then you integrate.
And then after you've done this a few times automatically the thing tends to happen. You don't need to force it. So ideally you would do this from childhood and therefore you won't have this problem later in life.
There's a phrase, there's a word which is used very often today and popping up in all kinds of children today as a problem and they call it ‘dyslexia’. One of the forms in which this appears, and there are many different symptoms associated, one of the forms is that the person mixes up words, mixes up sequences or has gaps in their understanding, jumps in the logic and at its most material level it is confusing B and D, the mirror image, P and Q.
Think about what that means. As a child, I am sure all of you would remember, at some point in kindergarten typically you had a confusion between B and D or P and Q and that phase lasts in my case, I would recall, [as this is] (0:28:11) just by a broad sense of memory, a few weeks perhaps, and then somehow the brain develops the faculty and after that you never have a problem again.
And I recall how it was done, the way the, instinctively the mind did it, it picked two sides of my body and identified one which I liked and then associated that with the shape facing that side, ha, so it is B in this way, D is the other way. And each time I looked at the text, it would go through indirectly through this alignment.
Uh, as children we were forced to do march-past in the kindergarten, and during that activity ‘you have to turn left, turn right’ orders being given, and often you, at that age you confuse, later you don't, in that transition where that faculty is being developed.
So again the hand would take on the right side, bend the finger, hold it tight, and this is right, and anything which is not this is left. So you find your own way of compensating. All children do that automatically, instinctively. What mechanism you use is irrelevant.
But once you cross that, now the ‘B’-‘D’ organisation has taken place in the brain and you move on to the next level of more complex observation or learning.
So it's as if brain is layering various kinds of faculties in the senses and then later in emotions and then later in concepts. And as it is layering these, if you skip one layer of training and push to the next, you have dyslexia. In fact, this can be seen inside the brain through MRI scan using fMRI, which is functional magnetic resonance imaging, you can actually see how the, let's say information or processing flows in the brain space by the increase of blood flow and so on. So you can see how a step skipped represents a gap in transfer of knowledge in the processing, that's your dyslexia.
(0:30:16)
And at a sensory level it would be mixing words, getting spellings wrong and although repeatedly you've done it somehow that layer of faculty has now been moved away from and you don't know how to access it to develop it. Similar thing would happen in emotions or in concepts also. That's your dyslexia.
It just means you skip the stage. Why?
And the reason for it actually goes to the current approach to education where you are trying to cram advanced faculty developments at an early age before the mind, before the body, brain is ready for it.
As a quick example, when you start writing for example, your motor skills are not yet developed at the age of let's say three or four when you're in kindergarten, you can do a large circle quite badly, draw a line reasonably aligned, you can do your large B and D. Try to turn that into joint handwriting where you write, you cannot. You don't have the fine motor skills yet.
So if you start forcing the children to start writing at that age in kindergarten, the brain is not ready, the biology is not ready, the muscle-nerve coordination is not ready, you suffer- suffer-suffer, failure-failure-failure, till the age of about six. Between the age of six and seven is when the brain kicks in for the faculty of writing and soon after you're ready for cursive writing, but at that point you're still doing individual separate letters. But at that age if you take a child who's untrained and just have him draw and write, he can pick it up within six months.
So from age three to six, three years you suffered and reinforced in the mind and the body the inability and the sense of failure because it was wrongly approached for something which is impossible to do. And at the age of six when the faculty kicks in, puff, without effort you just get it.
So as we do it for example in the Ashram School where this awareness does exist as well as in other systems such as Montessori education, you work on the broad motor skills, you draw the letters large, and you draw one letter of, the first letter of the word and then you speak the word. And then at the age of six or seven when that faculty is beginning to kick in, within a few months you've got the writing skill, all joyously.
But if you are forced to do it at the age of three and four, the brain is trying to compensate for new learning, skipping the steps in between, that's when you get your dyslexia, the mirror image of B and D and so on. And the same exists for other emotional layers as well as intellectual layers.
You will see one of the big problems children who are unusually capable or intelligent at a young age is they have huge emotional incompetencies. That would be a kind way of describing it. Sometimes they are completely blocked. They are extremely sensitive but completely blocked in either sensing or expressing in inter, interchange. Maybe they connect with nature easily, they connect with animals but between human beings they have enormous blocks, and often it takes a couple of decades to overcome them if they don't do it with a conscious intention.
Why? Again that's a dyslexia in an emotional layer which was skipped by the rapid development of the intellect. Now I'm not saying that this is bad. If the child is ready and if the higher faculties are kicking in, no problem but go through the sequence in between also faster if possible.
Nature right now is pushing this in many individuals. She is pushing for the higher faculty development of the intuitions particularly. And so in certain children the push is strong, as a result you do get certain aberrations of this kind. Once we understand the rationale we can compensate for it.
And so coming back to the emotional, yes, you can have an emotional memory. You can have a conceptual memory of ideas. Look back at the discussion that the teacher presented or you had a conversation with somebody, can you recall how the ideas went one step to another? Make an exercise of it.
So you have a conversation, you watch a movie, you listen to a talk online. As the thoughts are unfolding, observe, note how this thought led to that, this idea led to the next. Simply observe at first. And afterwards when the whole thing is complete, try to recall the chain. Maybe you'll have gaps in between initially. If you're serious about it, write down the key-ideas, then visually look at the chain, then set the paper aside and then see if in your mind you're able to recall the chain without looking at your paper. Once the chain has made sense to you, if there was a logical structure, you would be able to do it.
(0:35:33)
But taking small steps in between, you're not skipping jumping layers, it happens very quickly. You might need to write only two or three times for a half an hour lecture. After that your faculty of recalling the chain-sequence would be so sufficiently developed that you won't need that paper anymore, unless it's an unusually dense presentation with many key-ideas.
So put this into practice.
Again I give an example of how I went through one of the forms of this training. It was, must have been perhaps 12, 14 years old and on the television in India they began to show Star Trek, which science fiction that I was really fascinated with and there was only a television in Vasanthi-ji's house, so I asked to go there and watch every time that there was that broadcast.
So my teacher said, yes, surely go ahead and afterwards, please tell me the story. Not that he was interested, not that he needed to hear it, but it was his way of helping me to, to learn. So I saw the movie as we all watch movies, oh, it was so nice. You come away from the movie with what? A general emotional impression, oh, that was such a good movie.
What was good about it? Ha, it was so exciting, oh it was so moving. What was moving? You are not even conscious at that point of the different kinds or nuances of emotions, events, structure, presentation, sequencing of ideas, events. You're not even conscious. It's all somewhere a huge mix in a subliminal or subconscious layer. You come away with an emotional impression of it and that's all.
This is unfortunately the truth for the bulk of humanity, and this makes us enormously vulnerable to any kind of emotional manipulation. You see, you read a news item. Most people don't bother to read the whole thing because it's boring, it's repetitive, it's pointless, uninteresting, that's bad news reporting. What do you end up with because it's bad news reporting? You just the impression of the headline. And the headline therefore shapes your first impression even before you've read the text. And if the text is biassed as is most of the news today, they may occasionally give you contrary information to what they were presenting, the contrary data, at the end which you never reach. As a result you're always left with an emotional impression, you're always vulnerable to impressionism of the media or of books or of other people's opinions.
Somebody tells you, oh that fellow mmhhghmm, and you've cut that already as a first impression, next time you read that fellow or interact with that fellow, you have this already as a base which is shaping you.
And I'm pointing to this because all of this comes from our lack of development of clarity of content and the chain of ideas, emotions, events within the content which would allow us and give us the capacity to form our own opinion.
Well, we don't have that. We just have the whole thing crushed into one broad lump, oh it was so good, and that's it. What was?
So I came away from my first having watched that episode and he said: Okay, so what was the story? What happened? And I suddenly realised that I didn't have the full chain. So my mind jumps to whatever I can recall and jumps back and forth and ‘oh I missed that by the way this also happened before that’ because now as the story unfolds I recall there was a key-bit that I have missed, so I was going back and forth. The first time I was embarrassed.
So the next time what I did was, as I'm watching the episode, in my mind I'm preparing myself to narrate the sequence, so I'm observing, ha this happened, I must remember this, then that, then that, and there's a chain and the mind began to organise the events.
One of the side effects, of course, now that most of us are adults, one of the side effects is that you actually develop this awareness of the structure in which the movie is presented. And you'll notice, there are almost certain, I will say, schemas, universal schemas. And if you study theatre or cinema, they will teach you these schemas that initially, of course, you have an introduction to the players and then around 60 to 70%, that's, let’s say, a two-third of the movie, you must have the huge crisis. And the last one, third, is about the denouement, the unfolding of how that crisis is resolved. If you don't have that, the movie is boring.
(0:40:32)
What's a movie without a crisis that was overcome? How do people change? How do they grow? And unless the characters grow, the movie leaves you as you are. It's not interesting. Interesting is when you grow in consciousness, in the experience, in identification of the parts.
So, there's a whole schema and there are various ways, variations on schema. There's the flashback schema. There are two lines of narration and you alternate between the two lines to keep the variety and then at some point the two lines converge and that again is at the two-third point typically.
You begin to notice all this. What was being done to you as if to manipulate your emotions and thoughts and your emotional states which is what the movie is actually doing except you want it done to you. You now begin to observe, objectivise, and a part of your mind begins to stand back and look at the structure and with it comes the conceptual memory as well as the emotional memory being developed, just like that.
So watching movies is a very powerful tool for training your mind if used in this way except mostly we don't. We wallow in emotions. We allow ourselves to be led in the emotional experience, we come out of it washed out by the movie effect, which is also useful, but you have not grown.
And I said, I have said this before in, I think, the previous session, any experience of life can be turned to development and growth of your faculties and made a part of your spiritual development.
So we'll see how all this converges into the spiritual development also.
But each of these faculties is going to be important because first of all as you observe your power to acquire knowledge is growing and then later will be your power of expression as a consequence.
But again it will be structured. If your capacity to observe the structure as you watch the movie or listen to a narration or listen to a classroom lecture, as you are able to develop that, you will be able to present it back with the same structure and sequence without difficulty without hesitation without fear.
So that's why I'm giving somehow more importance to this initial aspect but the rest will follow and you will see how they connect. So now this happened to me a third time and a fourth time and I found within four sessions, that's all it needed, the capacity to narrate the full story of a half an hour episode, I don't know, 40 minutes maybe, had reasonably developed that I could make a correct sequential narration.
And then came the content. I realised that I was so excited about it and somehow in the way I narrated it, although I got the sequence right, I was not conveying the enthusiasm. It was not evoking the same enthusiasm in the listeners. And so automatically the mind went to what is it that made it interesting and amplifying those elements and then making the narration more interesting. And with it, as you grow older, will come the precision of the words to articulate precision of ideas or emotions and so on.
So you know, now you notice, we are looking at a very different grade of memory, emotional memory, idea memory, conceptual memory, and all this would actually lead towards something still more profound which is as if the sum total of all these and yet something fundamentally different, the intuitive memory.
And here comes a spiritual potential that kicks in. In the intuitive memory, you will find that the kinesthetic component is there, you're as if touching because you know, you feel, you are what you know, and this is in a sensory layer, in an emotional layer, in an ideative layer, you have a contact, the kinesthetic touch, even in ideas, but you are what you know so you become and express what you are and therefore a power to exercise and to express. So, the learning and the expression are both merged; visual, auditory, kinesthetic are merged; sensory, emotional, ideative, conceptual, are merged but in something which is fundamentally different which is in its essence a unifying foundation. You no more have visual, auditory, as separate, they are merged in; you no more have sensory, emotional and idea as separate, they are merged in; you no more have listening, learning and expressing as separate, they are merged in.
(0:45:09)
So the intuitive consciousness, the intuitive memory would be, so to say, one aspect of it, is the base into which all these merge or the base from which all these flow. Now your normal thought would say, ha yes the intuition will come later in life. No-no-no. Actually the intuitive can be held as an underlying backdrop from an early age by reference to it, by making the child aware of it, so that even as they develop the sensory memories, the emotional ideative memories and so on, it is always linked to an intuitive base.
And the key to do that would be simply to say, each time you experience something and learn something become aware, where inside you did you already know this? Can you see each time you learn something, you say, wow that's so interesting, that the discovering something covered what you already knew, observe where you already knew, observe the quality of what you knew and the joy that comes with it. Every experience you link to something deeper where it is uncovered.
Now when you start doing this from childhood, it works in the senses, it works in the emotions, it works in ideas, but each time you're linking to this, at some point this becomes the constant, and at some point as you link to this in the contact with this there is a further emergence of knowledge.
So let's say in the classroom you're going through a study of something, you say, wow what a brilliant insight, idea, experience. You feel the resonance in the intuitive layer and immediately there's something more that kicks in like a flash, ah yes there's something more which now I catch which was not part of the initial knowledge, and now you automatically begin to either express or perceive from the intuitive influence.
And this can be started very early on even before the child can speak in a way but that's pushing it a little but from the point you are able to observe experiences and have experiences, refer to this layer. You may not speak of it, articulate with the word ‘intuition’, but as it grows, you know, notice that somewhere inside you, you knew it already, you tell the child. The child says, yes. Are you aware of there where you, that part where you knew? What else do you know there? Every time you learn something, notice that somewhere inside you, you knew it, observe that, bring that forward.
As they grow older you may give them a stronger, clearer vocabulary, be careful not to dilute the idea of intuition itself. Shouldn't be reduced to just a superficial experience.
So I won't use the ‘intuition’, I just say, notice that some part in you knows. And this would relate more closely to the vocabulary that Sri Aurobindo uses that our mind goes through three phases:
The first phase is “the mind of ignorance” where you don't know and therefore you need to reach outside yourself to draw knowledge from outside.
Which leads to the second phase of the mind's evolution and development which he calls “the mind of self-forgetful knowledge”. That means every time you learn you discover, ah yes I already knew but I had forgotten, and now you begin to turn in much more instead of reaching out from outside, the outside becomes a trigger for you to learn, to discover what was within you, and the trigger is all you need. Now what is discovered within is further discovered, further uncovered sometimes in chains.
Which prepares the way for the third stage of the mind's development which is “the mind of knowledge”. From “mind of ignorance” to “mind of knowledge” through the passage of “self-forgetful knowledge”.
So we have not used the word ‘intuition’ anywhere because we will reserve that word for something much more profound.
But still it's an intuitive influence operating in these surface layers and we have to activate these as early on as possible.
Now I have read many books, narrations in biographies of some of the scientists, geniuses, because, well, that interested me, the scientists.
One of the most interesting is Feynman. Richard Feynman is one of the brilliant minds of our age in physics and there's so many interesting stories about him. But one of the things he used to do and I immediately identified with it because I was doing the same, he would banter with students who were much older than him. So I think he was, let’s say, at a certain age in college, just entered and then the final year college students, they would be doing advanced mathematics, they would challenge him, and he would say, whatever you can tell me I already know of.
(0:50:21)
So they would bring up a certain theorem and he would say, explain it to me and I will tell you more about it. So they would explain it and then he would say, yes, correct or wrong. So he describes in the book how he did it. Each time they would describe something he would construct in his consciousness the model for it.
So there's one particular theorem where you take an orange, divide it into unnumbered pieces, take those pieces apart and then you can rejoin them to make a huge sphere, map it to the sun, one on one, part to part.
So first his response was wrong, it's not possible. And then someone said, no-no there's a theorem. So he looked at it deeply and said, ha you have to divide it into infinity of pieces. You didn't mention infinity of pieces. You see you get insights. When you map it infinitely, then of course you can map any size to any size. Interesting!
And so you can take any knowledge however advanced however abstract and build within you a model which comes from this intuitive backdrop which has been activated and it's the intuition feels and builds a model and you get insights even though you've never read or studied that thing before. So it's a way of preparing the intuitive consciousness and then activating it as you grow and unifying it with the surface layers of your faculties.
Now all of this I've digressed a bit but it sets the base for a more deeper understanding. All of these are still talking about memory but already we have seen how it's no more memory, it's much more than that. So the intuitive memory so to say is your underlying memory for all these memories, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and then layered from the senses to the emotions to the ideas in which in all of these you can get all three types of memories, all of these held together in a larger intuitive let's say substratum of consciousness which leads us to another insight and we're still talking about memory.
Another profound insight: In fact, memory exists in principle in all the parts of your nature. Not just mind memory. There's the biology memory and it's not kinesthetic memory that I'm talking about anymore. It's the body remembering a state of illness or a trauma of some hurt. Isn't it? That's also a memory.
Now we come to the great insight which Sri Aurobindo gives you at some point when you study him. I don't remember now where, maybe it was in The Synthesis of Yoga or perhaps again in The Life Divine. All consciousness essentially is a repository of memory. Wherever you have consciousness, you have memory. Or rather wherever you have memory it is only a quality or capacity of consciousness.
So memory is not a thing in itself, it's a faculty of consciousness inherent to consciousness itself. And according to which layer or part of consciousness you're dealing with is a memory faculty waiting to be awakened, developed, refined and so on. And equally we will say an expressive power corresponding to that grade of consciousness. Now you see how narrow modern education is when it develops only a very what they call ‘left brain’, analytic part of the memory of the most superficial sense mind.
In the emotional mind, in the rational mind, in the faculties of your reason, there's a memory of the buddhi, the discriminating intelligence, as distinct from the sense mind which turns to through the biology senses and looks at the world outside. That's also memory, isn't it? And as well there's an emotional memory and a physical biology memory, and that those memories can go into a subconscious layer in the working of your tissue and organs.
I'll just give an odd example but it illustrates this. I used to eat eggs for a while because of the boost of protein that I thought I needed. It was fine, I didn't like the smell, so I cover up the smell with pepper and somehow chew and swallow quickly the hard-boiled egg, get it out of the way. At some point, an egg came which was rotten, and although it had been hard-boiled, it had such a severe smell that momentary taste and the body rejecting it left an imprint that for the next month or so I could not touch an egg or even think of an egg because of the severe response in the body. That's memory in the body. It has nothing to do with your mind's memory. I've forgotten that incident but just looking at an egg evokes the nauseative response in the biology instinct. You see how deeply rooted it is. It is subconscious and yet it's memory.
(0:55:26)
And at that point you can make an effort, consciously seep your conscious mind into that layer where the response is felt, tap into that memory and then you can change it. If you can't tap into it, you can't change it, you're a victim. And this is what is often done in various kind of psychological interventions or other kinds of symbolic interventions, all done indirectly, which from a yogic point of view you could do directly go in and change. It's what hypnosis does, except somebody else is nudging or directing the awareness, penetrating with a suggestion into your subconscious layers or subliminal layers and changing or reprogramming so to say which you could do.
So here's a very interesting insight: Every part of your consciousness has its own independent memory; consciousness is a repository of memory; and potentially all consciousness can hold unendingly infinite memory. It is this which is the basis of what they call ‘Akashic records’.
So the big mistake people make in understanding what is meant by the Akashic records is to give it a picture, and sometimes this is symbolically seen, in fact it is seen symbolically when you go into those domains to try to tap knowledge from the past or the future.
Edgar Cayce describes, you've heard of Edgar Cayce I've mentioned him before many times, he describes how he would in a state of trance go into this what he called “hall of records”. And it's like little cubicles, for everything there's a cubicle, and in the cubicle is a scroll with the knowledge.
In fact when Sri Aurobindo writes in Savitri, he describes the hall of records, I think it is in Book of the Traveller World's Canto IV, “The Secret Knowledge”, he describes the hall of records, and Ashwapati is gaining access to it. And when Mother draws with Huta, the paintings associated with this, she actually draws this kind of cubical-like structure with scrolls inside. And when the scroll is opened, she has this hieroglyphic writing on it. The hieroglyphic writing is very suggestive because the writing on those scrolls, each writing is an idea-experience intuitively held, it's not words as physical letters combining to form words which then become sounds which become thoughts; each symbol is an experience. So it's the whole experience is symbolic. But when you've learnt to feel and know and receive and express in a more intuitive substratum, you can absorb knowledge in this way, much more directly.
And this should be part of our training programme by the way. But all this is to say that the Akashic records is retaining knowledge of everything that happened in the universe throughout time but also everything that tried to happen as an impulse that tried to happen. And when you tune into a certain space and time, you experience, you relive those things which happened, but also you relive what could have happened or tried to happen, and you can't always distinguish between the two.
This is the problem of tapping into the past. It needs a deeper intuitive discrimination and even a psychic discrimination to separate out what actually happened versus what tried to happen.
Or the same when you look at the future in this way. You project yourself into the future experience of what might potentially happen, well, it's one of many things which could potentially happen. Which of these is certain? Or what is the essential component that is certain? To distinguish between these Sri Aurobindo describes three things, in The Future Perception: What is the most essential which is inevitable, what is the thing which can happen with variations and what are the all kinds of variations that could happen. And distinguishing between these three is again a skill which develops and it is part of the supramental working of the mind which we may say overmental because it's the lower ranges of the supramental in which he describes this kind of a memory action.
And all of this is within our reach potentially, because it's all the same consciousness in different layers, parts, and so on.
So you see, I've taken the discussion of memory in classroom-training to memory to its spiritual potential, and you can see there's a seamless continuity. There's no part where you can say, ha classroom training ends here and the intuitive training starts there and the spiritual potential is there. No. It's a one seeming, seamless continuity. And our education should be formulated in this way.
(1:00:11)
Yes, while you're focusing on the external senses and their development you're building the underlying layers, and as you grow older those layers become more and more active until eventually there's a full integration from the deepest to the most superficial, from the lowest to the highest, and in all the parts of our being.
At least that would be our ideal attempt. Doesn't matter if you don't succeed. Just pushing in that direction would be your approach to integral education.
You see something like this we cannot put in a book. It would be too much for most people, for most teachers, who wanted reduced to just academic space. but for those of us who have a deeper spiritual purpose, goal, ideal in our life it makes so much sense. And you realise it doesn't matter what your age is, you can be working on this now.
So becoming conscious in every part of your being to some degree and the memory content of that part and then you notice something more fundamental: Depending on which part you identify is the kind of memory you have, but when you move from one identification to another part, you may lose the memory of one part while gaining memory in another part. And this is because there are layers and parts which are not yet fully integrated.
So let's say you are in a state of half sleep where you were reading something, ho it made so much sense, you decided, I'm going to remember this, then you go to sleep, then you wake up in the morning and you've forgotten completely. But that night when you again start going to sleep, as you drift inward, you reach that layer which is half-sleep state, pop, the memory is there, ah yes this I was supposed to remember I forgot. You didn't forget, you remembered it right now, but you remembered it in that layer which was in between your full waking and your sleep. And that layer is not integrated with your waking state.
So now this time you make an effort to remember, you put a strong will and still you might miss. Or you note down on a piece of paper, in the morning you wake up and look at the paper and you say, I don't recall writing this, or at that moment you recall vaguely and then you make an effort from outside-in to relink to that half-sleep state of memory but you recall only a fragment and you say, while I remembered it I remember it felt something so important but now I read it, it seems so trivial, because of the different grade of values of that layer and this waking layer.
So it's one of the big challenges of our evolution to integrate all these layers into a seamless continuity and so we have no gaps, no loss of these memories. And you can see how this is a spiritual goal because you want to become totally conscious in all your parts and layers but it also relates to your school education and very superficial sense memories.
For example, a child that reads his textbook and tries to remember while lying down will remember easily while lying down but will forget when sitting up. Now that we have this background it becomes obvious. But to the child it's not obvious because he thinks it's the same memory. Often you're lying down and you drift into half-sleep state while reading your book and it's at that layer that you have the memory. But when you go for an exam you're not in a half-sleep state, you're extremely woken up where you have total loss of that memory.
So the trick will be to insert the memory in the layer which you are going to need it in. So you need it in your exam-state, well, put yourself in exam-state while you're learning.
What is that? How are you sitting in your exam state?
Your body position is going to change your grade of consciousness by the way. So you're going to sit like this in your exam state, lean forward the way you do as if you're going to write your exam and then place the book before you and with the clarity of the surface mind, externalised sense mind since-mind, study, and from there of course you can't retain so easily, from there you drift inward and outward to bridge, and then what is learnt will be remembered at the time of exam. But that's not your normal state of working in life, so you need to integrate with those layers.
If that integration has been done by other means, then memory acquired in one layer would be available in another layer. If it's not done, that's when you have these problems which most students face, where they say, I studied for so long but I forgot everything at the time of the exam. What went wrong? This, the gap in the memory. You studied in one layer, and you're trying to remember in another layer. Either bridge those layers or train yourself to study in the layer in which you're going to express.
(1:05:11):
You see, very practical. It has nothing to do with the spiritual training, and yet it is intimately connected with the spiritual training of integration of all the layers of consciousness, you see. So when we are speaking of education, and even I have a book on this which eventually has to come out now with a revised edition, one can only turn to these deeper dimensions in a suggestive way because most students, parents, teachers are not interested in this deeper dimension.
So at least in these discussions here when we explore further aspects of education, I will try to always extend to these deeper ranges and make it accessible and important in our larger spiritual evolutionary side.
So integration of consciousness, integration of memory, both intimately connected, get the hang of it.
There's a story which I perhaps mentioned some time back here, which was told to me by my mother. Where as a child, she pointed this out, if you sleep while reading, then you will remember only while lying down, you won't remember sitting. And somewhere it touched the intuitive part. So it made sense and I was careful. But she gave the story. She said, there was a child who used to read his textbook while lying down. And in the teacher's class, the teacher said, okay, now stand up and tell me what you have studied and the child could remember nothing. The teacher got very angry and gave the child a whack. Okay, in those days that did happen. Today it's not acceptable. So he gives the child a whack. The child falls down on the ground and immediately remembers everything and starts repeating fluently. Of course the error would be to say, he got a whack, so he remembered. No. He laid down that's when he remembered. Interesting!
So be careful of your body posture, body position, state of mind and consciously modify these as needed.
Now there's a further dimension to it which I'm going to also touch upon because it has implications. I am going to speak of theatre subsequently as one of the means for developing power of expression.
And one of the problems we all have with theatre is stage fright. You go on stage or the equivalent is stage of life, you are sitting for an interview, you have to give a presentation, in a discussion you want to articulate your ideas and you have stage fright.
So one of the ways by which you will train yourself to not have stage fright is to actually do it in the spot where you are going to do it, where you will perform. With the same lighting, with the same audience present, that's how you'll overcome stage fright, isn't it? Except they're not there. So what do you do?
So I'll show it logically. First you go on the stage, visualise the audience sitting there, visualise the lights and then do your performance. So initially you really visualise, put yourself into it totally except now there's no one actually so you can overcome your stage fright. You'll still go through the struggle of overcoming it and the act of overcoming will create a bridge. Subsequently the visualisation of the audience would become less important at which point you can visualise the stage. Now you're at home, you visualise the stage and the audience and practice. And then later you only need to do it once on the stage for your dress rehearsal without the audience, with the lights and overcome that.
Push it a step further also. The direction in which you are makes a difference. So if you have practised with, let's say facing a certain direction and you have to perform in a different direction, you'll find the memory gets clouded. Because it's an experiential memory of the body and the body feels the direction very much. So actually in your mind's eye, you visualise the direction of the entire theatre where you'll perform, orient yourself in that direction, visualise the audience and then in your own room, you're practising, and it's as if you're infusing into all these layers of memory of the parts where you're going to have those fear reactions the habit of this.
Now extend the principle to whatever it is that you have, stage fright for including the interview that you're going to have, and you see how you can apply the principle.
So the state of consciousness of your overall being, not just body, all the layers and the way they are integrated, is so to say the base of a memory in which you will retain and recall and then you will integrate with other layers. At one stage eventually the integration will be good enough that you won't need to do all this.
But I think this would be sufficiently broad discussion on the memory training and development as only one aspect of learning.
(1:10:11)
There are other aspects of learning which I will quickly touch upon and then we will move to his other questions about listening, retaining, articulating, expressing and then we will touch on writing.
So you notice all this was one spark, aspect of learning which is the memory aspect, but there are other kinds of learning, other kinds of, I will even use the word, ‘genius potential’ that we have, and we could describe it as practical learning.
You go into a certain space with no prior experience, you watch people doing things, you absorb, you assimilate and then you are able to do the same things.
Let’s say, you go to a carpentry shop, metal workshop, artistic workshop, whatever it is, you watch, you observe, you absorb and then at some point you are able to replicate, and sometimes you're building a house. You have a complex mix of many of these skills and faculties weaving in together. And there are people with no effort can look at the situation and, ha yes I know what I have to do. It's a kind of a practical, in the body kind of intelligence applied in the physical senses.
Similarly there's an applied learning in life. You're facing a certain problem, there's a stress of ten different options, pressures, and it's as if you find your balance between all those and apply it there, and this could be taken to any kind of specialisation including materials, ideas, emotions, artistic spaces.
There are people who walk into a room, look at the arrangement of everything and they know exactly what they need to do to set it right to bring harmony and beauty into the space. And the others are totally lost, they get lost with pieces. They can't sense the whole and the balance of the whole. Again, these are faculties and kinds of learning which you can train and develop, need to be in our educational system.
There's also a kind, a different kind of learning which is interactive learning. You learn through participation, interaction, expression, going back and forth between each other. So all these are different kinds of learning of which memory is one kind of learning.
I am just giving you now the broad sense of learning itself. And in principle we would want to touch them all in our academic time. If not, as you grow older, you enter real life, well, tap into all these.
In Suraj's question, he then summarises his whole question to: How do I retain or absorb the entire lecture or how do I develop better listening, retaining, articulating, delivering abilities?
So, I am now going to look at each of these words and touch upon some of the principles there. We won’t have time to do the whole question today, but I will touch upon a few things and then maybe elaborate on it next time.
The capacity to listen, and maybe we can merge it with retaining.
The memory aspect we've already discussed.
But what is it that makes you effective in listening and retaining? What is the condition of consciousness in which you can listen and retain easily is when your consciousness is like a sponge. What makes it like a sponge automatically, spontaneously, effortlessly absorbing is a state of complete stillness but also entirely alert.
Now in the way we grow up, and to a large part I would blame again the educational system, you are made to be excitable when outwardly turned and conscious in the surface parts or when you turn inward you become sleepy. So it’s as if these are two extremes which are opposites.
It's very sad that the mass of humanity has been programmed into these two opposite conditions: if you go in, you go to sleep; if you come out, you're excitable.
Actually the key to everything, all learning, and the key to access of inner and higher ranges of consciousness and the spiritual potential is in the thing which unites these two: complete stillness with total awareness. That state has, as if been broken up and pushed into opposite contradictory states.
And so, training ourselves to enter this state from childhood would be one of the keys, as a result of which all of your attempts to grow, learn, express, change, evolve would become enormously easier.
(1:15:13)
As an adult, you are indirectly getting to this state in what we would call some kind of ‘meditation’. But in practice what people do is they catch the word called ‘meditation’.
What does it look like? Oh people close their eyes, I close my eyes, and then I slip into a daydream. Kind of half sleep, wandering state of mind. So you are somewhat still but then you are kind of dulled in your awareness, or you're stuck in a surface awareness even if you're stilling it, you can't go into a deeper layer, and so all these become the practical issues.
So coming back to the state, if you put yourself in the right state and listen in the right state, and I am going to generalise again from the question, watch in the right state, feel in the right state, and from there act, participate in that right state in a receptive state. You are spontaneously, effortlessly absorbing the entire experience, and whatever is absorbed stays with you. You may not yet have developed your ability to recall in structure of thought, that's something we've already discussed, but it doesn't mean you will have that automatically, but you will not lose.
When somebody says, oh did you notice this-this-this? You say, ha yes of course I noticed it. But now that you put it in these words it makes sense in the logical structure. But I was aware of it except I had not put it in that structure.
So the ability to put yourself in a receptive state correctly allows you to retain everything even if you have not developed the power to organise.
If you have developed the power to organise, you can later observe what you have retained and put in organisation or eventually you learn to be in this passive receptive state while still allowing the experience to organise itself spontaneously without getting active in the organisation. Now this is very important to understand.
So as, again go to a classroom setting, teacher is talking, I put myself in this receptive state, but my mind is active trying to now understand, put in shape, organise, etc., etc., which would be very useful in a classroom setting because unfortunately as is true for most teachers they do not talk with structured, they do not talk with clarity, they just present whatever comes in some kind of haphazard overall chain of thought often following what's in the textbook, missing key links.
So yes, you need to fill in with your active thought process. But if on the other hand somebody was sharing with you an experience which is conveyed to you with clarity and with power and an unfolding sequence which is smooth, clear, you would want to not to interfere with your mind and you would want to allow the absorption of the experience in a pure transmission.
Now this is one of the things which happens when you're reading Sri Aurobindo, and even at a point where your mind kicks in and says, ah yes but what about that, the very next sentence he says what about that and then he answers that. It's so well structured, and he's taken into account every variant of every situation.
When you're reading the Mother's experiences similarly, she, although the precision of wording is there, she may or may not follow always that kind of structure but it's all there implied. And she is more infusing at an emotional and intuitive layer. And so you read or you listen, and you want as if to identify with the experience, and you don't want the mind to be too interfering. It could be active, it could be observing and say, oh wow, interesting, but it doesn't have to be interfering:
Where will this experience lead? Is it this? Does it stop there? Is it that which I had read about? All those things would break the chain or reduce or distort the experience.
So you allow the experience to soak in, and once it's integrated, once you're identified, then you may review and then do an analysis, observation in preparation to an expression, or you could allow the experience to flow and express, following its own rhythm. So we'll discuss that later when we come to power of expression. But the state of listening and absorption is extremely important and with it an ability to retain.
What I found was when I could do this consciously or sometimes even unconsciously, automatically, because of a certain habit built up, sometimes going a few years later, somebody asks: Ha do you remember that? Of course I don't remember too well. Then they identify some important discriminating, distinguishing character, and I say, ha yes now I remember.
From the point I've caught it, and if it was absorbed in this way, I could so to say slip into that state almost like going into a trance, leaning back into that experience and recall the fullness of the experience, and then with it the memory of all kinds of tiny details would pop up. Because in your consciousness you've gone into that state in which you retained and the memory of that state is held, you have access to the whole experience as if you're reliving it now.
(1:20:47)
And so if in your listening state you attempt consciously to develop such a state and hold and retain in that state, you will actually have access to it all through your life practically. Not necessarily in that superficial part of the memory but in this deeper layer as if. And sometimes you need a link from the superficial to the leaper but then once having got that link you can get back and recall with extraordinary precision sometimes even precise words.
And these kinds of experiences completely blow away the biological theory that it is your brain that holds the memory. Your brain cannot hold that kind of detail. Even if you go into the memory of something, you can recall sometimes the smell of that state. Your brain cannot retain so much detail and keep it so clearly, fully organised. This is innate memory of pure consciousness. It could be in mind, it could be in emotions, it could be an intuitionistic mixed layer among them, doesn't matter.
But this is the pure memory of consciousness into which that state of listening would automatically absorb and therefore never lose again.
Now I don't have this kind of an ability to recall in this way, but I have read of one person who had this extraordinary memory, his name is Marc Auburn, and his book on outer body experiences, in French unfortunately, is highly recommended. One of the things he describes, he says: You know I've had all these experiences, I can't distinguish what makes me different from others except one thing, this is one thing very special I have, I can recall every single day of my life.
So he can recall for example when he was five years old, six years old, and he was walking on this particular day from school to home, he stopped here and met this, saw this, and then he had this extraordinary insight, and he says, that's when I understood this. There are experiences like that he describes.
But 50 years later the mind can pop in and pick out one particular day and those key events.
Of course the rest of the experiences may not be important, but you could in a similar way lean back into that and access it. Now what this shows in his case, and put it in yogic terms, is the subliminal barrier is completely transparent.
This by the way is one of the requirements Sri Aurobindo describes for the continuity of recall from one life to the next, and incidentally that is one of the things he has. He not only had out of body experiences but at some point the access to some of the past life recall of memories.
What did he do in this life for it? Nothing. Nothing consciously at least, he just had it. Why? Because it was done in a prior life. In this life he even claims he has no spiritual inclination of any particular kind. Of course he has a spiritual life, but he has no particular inclination. And this is just to show you that some of these things of integration of consciousness, if you work upon them now, today, irrespective of your age, will stay with you across lives.
Recall this discussion we had a few sessions ago about the integration of personality, unifying the personality, building this unit of the sense of I, and into that you bring in the discussion of today, integrating all the layers of consciousness with their associated, well, memory imprints of consciousness and intuitivising, infusing, and to the extent possible because the intuitive is currently subliminal to you or superluminal super, super-conscious to you, as you bridge into these and especially aligned to the soul aspiration, well, all these would be as if integrated in a way that the essence of it will stay with you across lives, not necessarily the memory content but the experiential absorption of the learning.
So in another life you face a similar situation and you have as if the instinctive response or knowledge of what you need to do to deal with that situation. It's already there what was built in the previous life.
(1:25:13)
Now I'm saying all this also to suggest to you that for all of us, and I dare say all of us because if you don't have that development you would not be interested in a discussion like this, for all of us we have similar imprints from past life experiences already present within us, covered up, lost to memory, lost to active access because covered up.
And so this bridging of the inner and the outer is your key to actually draw out on a huge body of experience going back hundreds of lives at least to the extent that they were integrated with the soul's aspiration and what is retained therefore. But it's a huge body of experience from which you could draw as needed or even from some which happens during times of crisis, the inner being pushes forward some body of knowledge experience intuitively held, pushes into the surface and makes you do certain things, but then it withdraws, and we don't even make the effort to catch that thread and amplify it. But it's there.
So many experiences that we crave for in our surface layers which are more instinctive. We've already been through many times. You don't need to relive them. If you can draw the content of that essential experience and infuse into the craving that exists in those layers, you can infuse in them and say, ha I have the satisfaction of it or the memory of the satisfaction of it already and that to a great extent counters the compulsion of the surface instinctive need.
So I have touched upon the aspect of listening and retaining, there's more to say about it, and then we will develop the aspect of articulating, expressing, delivering into which we will also look at the aspect of writing and expressing in body actions as well as the power to transmit an experience. All this would be part of our discussion next time.
So I have unfortunately not had the occasion to look at what is the questions in the chat boxes. We have two questions which, three questions, which I will cover next time when we continue this topic.
But also I would highly recommend for those of you who missed last time's session, because it was not webcast in the conventional way, it was pre-recorded, so it did not appear automatically in your information feed, do please look at that also, that's the evening series number 140, which from the number of views it seems like only half the people have seen, perhaps it did not pop up because it was not a live webcast. I do look at that also because that concludes our discussion on that theme of success in your career and what are the requirements for success in the career which were covered in two sessions one after the other.
And I think with this I will review what we have covered generally. Again summarising, remember it should not flatten out. Looking at Suraj's question:
We looked at learning itself in a broad sense of which memory is a small part.
We looked at the memories which are visual, kinesthetic and auditory in our senses. But also from the sensory memory, the emotional memory, conceptual memory and the intuitive memories into which all these unify, which should become increasingly a base for us.
And then we discovered that all consciousness has inherent memory and is infinitely able to hold a memory in each part. And so the integration of these parts and layers and levels of consciousness would be the full development of our memory.
We looked at other kinds of learning itself with practical body learning, applied learning, interactive learning.
And we touched upon the first base of what is required to put ourselves in the state for listening and retaining any experience, not just your classroom experience, any experience. You go into beautiful space in nature, you absorb all that nature is gifting to you now, but for that you have to put yourself in this state, entirely awake, aware but utterly still, but not make the mistake of being awake, aware only in your superficial parts, in all the layers that you can access, inward as well as upward, entirely expand your full scope of awareness as much as you can and bring it into utter stillness and receptivity and hold that poise and just soak in the full experience, and at that point it becomes almost like an intuitive absorption, but through all the senses which if they have developed, through all the parts, including sensory, emotional and conceptual, soaking in the totality of your consciousness and the totality of memory of consciousness.
Practise this. Do this consciously when you are either reading some text of Sri Aurobindo or sitting in nature or find the experiences where you really want to absorb fully and integrate.
You're sitting in a workshop where some new skill is being taught, put yourself in that state and you'll absorb rapidly. Reading a book with full insights that you want to fully absorb, play with this until the next week and see how the faculty grows and awakes rapidly and the benefits of it, and then we will continue this discussion into the next.
(1:30:54)
I think we can take a moment to recall, review, assimilate and turn ourselves to what it is we want to do in terms of either being or putting into practice certain aspects, insights for ourselves, for our children, for others in our lives.
We will take a moment to concentrate. I would highly recommend for you also to review, watch this session again because I've covered many profound things very rapidly. You might want to pause on some of those, think about those and then see how you would apply each of those.
So we'll take a moment now to take the whole imprint of the experience of what was covered and discussed and see and soak it in all the parts especially to that intuitive backdrop and substratum of being. Become conscious of that layer deep within you or those layers where you already knew all this because you are this, and the truth of it is yours, hold yourself in that.
Let it soak-in in a receptive silence and settle in a more intuitive layer within and then it becomes yours for good.
Namaste.
Alina (1:32:48):
Namaste.