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To you my dear friend, thanks for visiting me!
Šopyrighted by Crystal Pages (1997)
THE PERCEPTION OF TIME!
Time and again (OOPS!), the topic of 'time' or of its
nonexistence keeps coming up! We generally think of ourselves as
4-D creatures. We take up space (length. breadth and height) and
we exist as a continuum of experiential-slices that are of
different ages, existing in different points in time! When we do
manage to slow-down enough to hear ourselves think, we sometimes
can visualize ourselves as an
Think for a moment! If we were to lose all our memory traces (which are what really hold our past) at a given instant, all these time slices would vanish from our consciousness! We would lose all our past moments and truly we will become creatures that live in the moment and from one moment to another.
But, we would still retain our imagination. That faculty within us that enables us to project forward in time, and is in that sense akin to memory (though directionally reverse!). So while the knock in the head would wipe out our sense of where we came from, it might still not be able to touch significantly where we want to go, from the present point, that is!!
It is true that in our creative pursuits, we need both the memory and imagination, but perhaps they are not functionally linked beyond a certain point! Memory is a function that shows up in a rudimentary form even in single cells (and inanimate objects like the electronic astable or bistable and in our computers!), however imagination, true imagination is seen only in human beings! A given bird builds its nest in only one way, and not very many variations are seen in the dams built by a group of beavers!
contrary to popular belief, memory is something very sturdy and fail-proof and it had to be so because our survival depended on it through the entire evolution. One doesn't get a chance to mess around with a sharp-fanged tiger too many times and one tries not to eat again, the berry that made one sick like a dog!! Most mental faculties that have such a long across-species lineage tend to be well rooted, well-represented and placed in multiple copies in the brain. Even after loss of considerable brain tissue, much of the memory remains intact! And yet all it takes is a sharp tap on the head, to obliterate it, at least temporarily!
Imagination, on the other hand, is more specialized, delicate and localized (pre-frontal lobotomy being a case in point!). We also know that in most children, curiosity and imagination are particularly strongly seen, even though they have not yet amassed a lot of memory traces. And let us face the fact that only a few children have definite and clear past life recalls and so we cannot really consider 'that' memory which may be potentially available but not manifestly so in most. We also know that imagination can be curbed or suppressed in children. It is truly a much more fragile gift than memory.
As we create the future through our imagination, we borrow some of the guidelines and rules for creating from the past experiences that are stored in our memory! One might even visualize imagination as that part of our creative machine that randomizes or tends to randomize 'designs', and tries out variations and improvisations while we tend to weigh, truncate and shape those into what we consider feasible and pragmatic! By this token, one who has a very strong, clear and well-organized memory would perhaps be somewhat limited when designing the future, because the firmer and clearer rule-structure that is in place would tend to 'shape' the product significantly more than in another person who has less of such memory constraints! The other extreme might not work too well either as too many 'flashes' of inspiration could result in too many loose ends!
If, hypothetically, there is a time-continuum, at least in our perception, then while imagination is the front-end and memory is the rear-end, the driver (aka the nut behind the wheel, the most important part in a vehicle!) is sitting in the 'present'!
To recapitulate, we as flesh and blood human beings are equipped with distinct faculties that seem to control our future-seeking and past-recall and these can be shown to be variably located in our brain and amenable to being lost or affected in specifically different ways from each other (indicative of their separateness!). No wonder we perceive time as a sequential process! However, if we were able to transfer our consciousness to the level of awareness that the soul possesses, in that instance, perhaps time transforms into something quantal.
Sequences are like the individual gems and settings in a necklace, each individually beautiful and necessary for studying and in the formation and maintenance of the necklace, but the knowledge of which is hardly essential for visualizing and appreciating the beauty of it.
Perhaps within our SELVES are two levels of perceptions (there are!), one that is instantaneous and which we use when experiencing our emotions, and the other one that we use for understanding and describing our surroundings etc.; our heart and the brain as we often call these.
As we go through experiences in life, these two perceptive
mechanisms take in information and pass it along to
Ethics, responsibilities, love, compassion are all feelings-related experiences and certainly are feelings-driven with perhaps no 'temporality' attached to them, being timeless and beyond the constraints of time. Structure, forms, processes and perception thereof are what we handle at the cerebral level and this requires the consideration of a sequential time-frame.
We can therefore (and do) look at a given experience from both temporal as well as an atemporal (timeless) manner. For a given purpose, either of these elements might not be essential, but for the totality of perception, we need both viewpoints! Although individuals might vary in their ease with either form of perception, none is inherently more or less difficult than the other, and certainly they are equally important! If existence and the creation is about learning, then we have no choice and must learn to feel as well as think, perhaps simultaneously!
I had, some months ago in my first "Just a thought" thread, touched on the power of imagination that can turn on the magick in our life, and perhaps IS the driving force behind its manifestation! I would like to touch on another of its attributes here. While memory strikes me as a steady faculty that can be passively (objectively) affected (by the good old knock on the head!). I call it passive because it does not have the ability to change itself actively! Imagination, on the other hand, can not only change the shape of things to come (definitely on the mental plane and eventually other planes as well!), but it can also *go back* and change our current recollection of the form and details of past events! It is an extremely powerful tool that past-life therapy or other healing techniques, for instance, use to remove old mental blocks etc. Imagination, therefore, is the active magic wand that can reshape not just the future but also our past (as we remember it!). Let us face it! Our *personal* past is not necessarily an account of what had happened, but rather how we remember it as happening! Needless to mention, that imagination, being powerful as it decidedly is, can do more damage than good! Hand a tot a soldering iron and watch the circuit board smoke!
However, when controlled imagination is applied to our memories, things truly begin to happen, that not only help us learn our lessons efficiently, but view our experiences from a different perspective. If, what is known as "karma" is indeed a self-impose limitation, determined by our memory of an event or chain of events, then imagination can indeed help us overcome karma! As long as we are aware though, that karmic debts are based on the memory traces that are sent by our "feeling" part! The details are lost but the "emotional baggage" remains. Therefore, denying the existence of Karma at a verbal, cerebral and sequential level would not help! It would do nothing! In order to make _that_ magic work, we would need to change our "feelings" by using our imagination!
But first we must learn to hold and control the tools properly!
Šopyrighted by Crystal Pages (1997)
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