A repeat question from before –  in pursuit of ascending to heaven after death, if one undertakes a ritualistic action or a good samaritan act, where’s that record held, at least until that person dies on earth?  Because heaven is after this life, right? And that deed has to be encoded with personally identifiable information somewhere, right?  If no one remembers that, or no personal information is included in that record, this good samaritan is not going to receive any reward for it, right?  Long story, and not to worry, the universe remembers it.  Every action, however subtle or small, is recorded in full detail by the universe.

Memories, as can be seen from our previous blurbs, is a critical topic for our understanding of everything around us.   Seers/Rishis spoke at length about these fundamental concepts.  We already talked about Universe remembering everything…. ontologically and epistemologically speaking.  Here are a couple of other interesting modern science perspectives.

How does mind/brain complex store, recollect and re-present memories?  How complete are the memories?  Can we trust them?  What’s their main purpose?  Scientists of the old and new have been pondering about such questions, due to their importance in our daily activities, including their role in eye-witness accounts in criminology.

Long story again, modern science is at the very beginning of this quest, and there are no definitive theories other than some rudimentary basis for types of memories like long-term, short-term and assorted types of memories in between.  We also know that emotions play a key role in all this.  Thinking about it, emotionally-disturbing memories don’t need any reinforcing, right?  That strength comes from the emotions it generated.  There are also some hypotheses that center around actually memories being recreated on the spot when we think of something, and this recreation process is neither complete nor fully accurate, which we already know (recollection is contextual as well).  As the old saying goes “the size of the fish you caught grows with time”.  

Let’s look at what the science of neurology and neurobiology say about memories first.

Memories – from a Neuroscientist’s perspective

Science seem to suggest that there are dedicated “Memory” cells in the brain called engram cells, which are groups of neurons that are involved in encoding and storing memories. When we form a new memory, a specific pattern of activity is created among these neurons, which serves as a record of that memory.

These memory cells are located in various regions of the brain, including the hippocampus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex. These regions work together to form and retrieve memories, with the hippocampus being particularly important for the formation of new memories.

Notice that these brain constituents, particularly amygdala and pre-frontal cortex are directly accessible to breath, and hence can be accessed through pranayama techniques.  Mid-brain plays a key role  in generating what we call emotions. Start with simple breathing techniques with a focus on following your breath, and processing the sensations from whatever the breath touched on its way from the nostrils, brow point, backside of the nose/throat into the lungs, and out.  Simple.  Observe the changes within you after a few days of this practice.

A read from “I of the Vortex”

To repeat, yogis’ hypothesis has been that memories fall into “not mine/universe” category, which is a little counterintuitive, given our daily experiences. Here’s a neuroscientist’s take that may put the yogis’ hypothesis in an interesting context for us (from “I of the Vortex” of Llinás). There are two things  that he points out: significance of the what we learn/memorize is only within the context of “memories” we inherit, and severe limitations on how much we can modify this inherited circuitry, limiting what and how we can memorize… [inherited being the key word here]

“…. We may feel a touch slighted by the fact that the “I” is fundamentally just a convenient construct on the part of the nervous system to centralize and thus coordinate its predictive properties We, our egos, also may feel a little deflated by the fact that learning, and subsequently what goes into memory, comes only from the honing of properties that are already present in our nervous systems at birth.

Furthermore, this honing operation, which we can measure as changes in the number of synaptic contacts within a given circuit, as well as the efficiency of the given synaptic contacts , is very, very small when we compare such measured events to what functionality comes from them. There are the languages we learn, the people and places we have committed to memory, and the specific education we attained long ago and continue to utilize every day. Yet although our neural machinery looks alike, for example, our visual memories are totally different. One would expect that in the face of all these sensorimotor images available to us, more serious physiological modifications would have occurred within the nervous system, but the actual synaptic modifications that produce these memories are very slight.

The range limits of learning, in the physiological sense, help define and dictate our commonality. If there were not preset physiological limits within which the speed of perceivable language production is constrained, the very threat of commonality providing human to human language development may never have been selected for. Phylogeny (“memories” inherited through evolution) determines that green is pretty much green to all our visual systems. These limitations to learning and memory are as valuable in our consensus dealings with the external world as is the ability to learn. … Although the details of the external world seem to be of the ontogenetic realm, the on-line, “what’s happening right now” realm, the significance of such detail may be given by the phylogenetically preset characteristics of the organism. …”

“Memories” – from a Physicist’s perspective

A read from “Science and the Akashic Field”

Continuing on with our contemplation on “memories”, let’s take a look at what modern physics teaches us on this topic.

Here are a few select paragraphs from the referred book:
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Let us take the example of the sea. When a ship travels on the sea surface waves spread in its wake. These affect the motion of all other ships in that part of the sea. Every ship – and every fish, whale, or object in that part of the sea is exposed to these ways and its path is in a sense “informed” by them. All vessels and objects make waves and their wave-fronts intersect and create interference patterns.

If many things move simultaneously in a waving medium, that medium becomes modulated: full of waves that intersect and interfere. This is what happens when several ships ply the sea’s surface. When we view the scene from a height, we can see the traces of all ships that passed over that stretch of water. We can also see how the traces intersect and create complex patterns. The modulation of the sea’s surface by the ships that ply it carries information on the ships themselves. It is possible to the deduce the location, speed and even the tonnage of the vessel by analyzing the interference patterns of the waves they have created. [Measurements at every single point actually contains all the object history information, but at a very limited resolution; the more the data we collect, the better the accuracy and resolution].

As fresh waves superimpose on those that are already present, the sea becomes more and more modulated; it carries more and more information. On calm days we can see that it remains modulated for hours and sometimes for days. These wave memory fronts of the sea would also carry the information about everything else that interacted with them, such as the wind, gravity etc.

Current modern physics theories give a scientific formulation of the process of wave-formation and wave-memory creation in a medium that’s not the ordinary sea, but the extraordinary quantum vacuum or the Akashic field. These vortices generated in the vacuum propagate as torsion wave fields. The wave-fields meet and create wave-interference patterns. These contain information on the state of the particles that created the vortices, and their joint interference pattern holds information on the ensemble of the particles whose torsion wave-fields have interfered. In this way the vacuum carries information on atoms, molecules macromolecules cells and even on organisms and populations and ecologies of organisms. There is no evident limit to the information that interfering wave-fields could conserve. In the final count they could carry information on the state of the whole universe. [we use such math routinely in our daily lives: in MRI/CT image generation, hologram creation, etc.]

We should note that the information carried in the vacuum is not localized, that is confined to a single location only. As in a hologram, the vacuum carries information in distributed form, present at all points where the wave-fields have propagated. The interfering wave-fields in the vacuum are natural holograms. The propagate quasi-instantly and nothing can attenuate or cancel them. Thus nature’s holograms are cosmic holograms; they link, “in-form” all things with all other things.

This holds true for our body and brain as well. All we experience in our lifetime- all our perceptions feelings and thought processes -have cerebral functions associated with them. These functions have wave-form equivalents, since our brain, like other things in space and time, creates information-carrying vortices- it “makes waves”. The waves propagate in the vacuum and interfere with the waves created by the bodies and brains of other people giving rise to complex holograms. Physicists discovered that all things in the universe are constantly oscillating at different frequencies. These oscillations generate wave fields that radiate from the objects that produce them.

In the last count, matter is but a waveform disturbance in the quasi-infinite energy- and in-formation sea that is connecting field, and the enduring memory, of the universe [our imprints last beyond our physical existence!].
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Folks, we are made of these waveform disturbances, which include traces of history of the entire universe! What happens when we add trillions of such waveform disturbances? A solid-looking individual (human) that is separate from that ocean? That is “Maya”!

The goal here is to reduce the concept of “we-are-all-connected” , and “there-is-more-to-it-than-meets-the-eye” to an intuitive and practical level. It is in pursuit of that that we are bringing in these different viewpoints…. Again, we are not here to prove anything, but to contemplate and reach that state of equanimity….

So to summarize:

1. Yogis theorized that every single thing, starting from major events to individual thoughts are recorded by a subtle universal medium called “Akasha”. Akasha is the subtlest of the five elements in that model.

2. In his book, the author, Ervin Laszlo equates this all-recording Akashic field of Yogis to an Universal field in terms of modern physics. This physics-based field is nothing but that which occupies the entire space, all interstellar to inter-atomic to intra-atomic …which is the physical real vacuum…

3. Records exist in this medium as everlasting “vortices”, just like how we see vortices when objects move through water, or planes/birds fly through air.

4. Everything that you and I had ever done and thought are recorded in this medium, and those records are out there, but fortunately encrypted. These fields are too subtle for our (five) coarse senses to perceive. But, beware of expert-hackers; they tend to be heavy meditators, typically…

5. Action (agitation, thoughts, basically rajasic activity) creates macro entities out of this akashic ocean. Essentially fundamental particles such as electrons, protons are waveform disturbances, and thus WE are also made of such waveform disturbances (vr̥tti pronounced vrutti). When that action (agitation) ceases, we experience and resonate with this subtle background akashic field.

But, there’s another deeper reason for yogis to propose this about memories, and already talked those perspectives while discussing “I” and Karma Yoga.  Good luck to all of us in understanding the yogic concept of memories and long term information storage…

May we all be blessed with a “vibrant and contemplative” mind _/\_/\_/\_
(Bhadram no api vAtaya manah)