What do we know about the world around us?
The map of the world around us in our head and gets updated from time to time.
The map of the world is all we have of the world. You could say it is our world.
When you are at school or work and you think about your front door you have an image in your head of that front door. You could maybe tell from that picture what color the door has as well as some details of that door.
You can even see things that aren't there. Just like when a house number is cut out in wood, you recognize what is missing.
We rely on our memory all the time. When we automatically open a door we do so many little movements and trust that all doors that look the same work the same. Those generalisations save us time and energy. Our muscle memory is something so crucial to how we operate in our day to day life and job that when we would lose it we wouldn't be able to do the smallest thing.
Sometimes people lose one kind of memory but maintain another kind of memory.
So people can lose their short term memory but maintain their long-term memory or they can lose their long-term memory but maintain their muscle memory for actions they did over and over again over the years.
People with retrograde amnesia lose events and information that happened before an incident or disease (often temporal) and people with anterograde amnesia lose the ability to create new memories from the moment that the amnesia happened.
Short term memories are, what I like to call, liquid, the activation of neurons and neuro-networks by electrical and chemical communication in a particular direction.
Long term memory is structural, due to the constant activation of neurons and neuro-networks there is a structural change in the hippocampus. The network has changed.
I remember ..... being taught, due to the religion I was in then, that God remembers all of us to the smallest level of detail and that it is because of that, that He can resurrect people on judgment day.
Now my beliefs of what God is and what Judgement day is and the resurrection has changed drastically.
Studying Kabbalah, I learned about the "4 worlds":
Assiah, Yetzirah, Beri'ah and Atziluth. These can be translated to
Action, Formation, Creation and Emanation. Or in other words
A Archetypal world, a formative world, a creative world and a material world.
Now, instead of me trying to explain it somewhat decent let me show you how a master like Lon Milo Duquette explains it:
You see how things come from something big and general and go to the specific and material.
This idea together with the idea that we are God, we all are part of God, as God is the unified consciousness of all consciousnesses, this reminded me of my old belief in God's infallible memory.
It made me feel like this "me" I am experiencing now is just a projection of God's memory and we all live in God's Living Memory. It makes me feel like the real me is this archetypal idea that creates a sort of cookie cutter that pressed me in this illusion of separated conscious being.
But then again, consciousness can only be experienced separately. Borders need to be in place in order to experience anything! Experience can only be had when there is difference. Form leads to function. With no borders there can be no function. In order to maintain life the body needs to sense it borders so it can regulate and maintain in a tolerable range of homeostasis.
Seeing this world and ourselves as a projection seems what far-fetched, I admit but it makes me think again about quantum physics, the theory of the multiverse(s) and how everything is metaphor.
(For more information about how everything is metaphor you can take a look at my post about magick here. )
There is this quote from Aldous Huxley:
that makes you think of how relative our idea of where we are and what this world is.
Immagine holding this quote in the back of your head when you think about the 4 worlds , the spheres of the tree of life, the Qlipoth and any other map we have in our head.
In the end, don't forget to have some humor. we know little after all.
Laugh and Smile, maybe we are God's muscle's after all ;)
