Thinking Beyond Science

Everything that has ever come into contact with us through these five sense organs–whatever you saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched is there in our memory, influencing your personality. Every bit of memory that we have gathered in wakefulness and in sleep is in this bank.

Evolutionary memory hones our biology: It is this evolutionary software that makes us a human being, for instance, and not an animal. Even if we eat dog food, you remain a human being! This evolutionary code is imprinted deeply upon your DNA.

What is our body anyway? As we have seen, it is just an accumulation of food, water, and air we have absorbed from the planet. The substance you call earth and the substance we call body are not different. But a complex amalgam of memories transforms the substance beyond recognition. The same soil becomes food when we ingest it, nourishes us, and makes us a human being rather than a plant or a dog. The privilege of being a human being in this life is mainly due to evolutionary memory.

Personal Karmic memory: the blitzkrieg of impressions that have shaped us over time and turned us into distinctive human beings, each with our own quirks and idiosyncrasies, likes and dislikes, habits and preferences. Every human being carries a vast storehouse of personal karmic memory, which is why no two human beings, even twins, are ever completely alike.

Our daily negotiation with our immediate physical and cultural environment also has an impact upon our system, determining the way our bodies and minds respond to the world and creating sensory memory.

Inarticulate memory, the enormous reservoir of generic and specific information accumulated over eons, of which we are not aware. It is a base, akin to the foundation of a house, and silently influences how you gather articulate memory. your superstructure. Articulate memory is the impact of all the conscious information that every human being carries within.

When we live by the memory of a single book, we are religious. When we live by the memory of several books, you are intellectual. When we live by the memory of several generations of people, we become a truly compassionate human being. But when we live beyond the memory of generations of people, we become a mystic.

The one thing that human beings simultaneously suffer and cherish is memory. We try to acquire and freeze memory in order to acquire an identity; we are trying, therefore, to do in order to be. But neither our identity nor our memory is essentially about us. Think about it.

When we are sitting in a café, drinking our cappuccino, we can enjoy only our four dollars’ worth of coffee. Whether we have ten billion dollars in the bank is irrelevant. The money exist only in our memory. To carry money around in our memory means you are a creature of the past. If we base our future on our past, we are as good as dead!

When a certain stability in physical, genetic, emotional, and social relationships is attained, individual human life can grow to its peak. When there is instability, the physical memory grows confused and, over a period of time, can create serious psychological and physiological imbalances.

In the modern world, ruled by the intellect, the mind is far more dominant than ever before. The body is no longer the most powerful presence in our lives. In an age of virtual reality, where lives can be lived out almost entirely in cyberspace, people are sometimes barely aware that they own a body!

Because we acquired a body and mind, we imagine we are going all over the place. But at the end of our life; we realize that we have just been looking at our projection: the phone screen of our minds. It is like being rudely jolted into reality after a movie, when the lights come on. We haven’t moved an inch; we have just been going round and round in exactly the same spot!

We are sensory beings. Our entire experience of life is a certain sensation. If we don’t feel a certain sensation, we are not even aware that that part of our body exists. When our leg goes numb for a few moments, we are not even sure if it exists.

Most human beings do not realize the tremendous power of creativity they have been endowed with. This is because most of their creations are determined by their compulsiveness, not by their freedom. Anything created by limitation will be limited. But if you see your ability to respond as limitless, the power to create is super enhanced.

Life cannot be owned. The need to own life is responsible for much suffering on this planet. Let’s say we meet someone and say “I love you.” It feels really nice for three days. Then we think you must capture this love. Well, we ended up with a marriage! Nothing wrong with that. But the beauty of an experience cannot be captured, it cannot be institutionalized.

The human problem right now is freedom! That is the paradox. We are free now to make ourselves miserable; we are free to make yourself joyous. We are free to live like a god; we are free to live like a demon. Nature gave us freedom because we are now evolved enough to make a mature choice. In short, Nature trusted our intelligence. But unfortunately, human beings take their own time to make use of that intelligence.

Source : Karma: A Yogi’s Guide to Crafting Your Destiny by Sadhguru

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54895722-karma

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