Memories

Lots of memory

Memory is a pattern. It is a very special pattern. Without it there would be nothing but a chaos of random patterns everywhere and nowhere. There would be no universe, no stars, no worlds, no minds and no bodies. One can see that all experiences are nothing but a memory of one or the other kind. In this article I present this rather unconventional way of looking at an experience - it is a memory.




What is a memory?

For an average person, it is an ability to remember things, faces or names, for a neuroscientist it is a network of neurons, for an electronics engineer, it is a sophisticated piece of hardware, and for a spiritual seeker, it is the essence of all existence.

When a pattern leaves an imprint on another pattern, we call it a process of memorization. Just like your hand leaves an imprint on wet sand. The sand has now a memory of your hand. When many people imprint their hands on this sand, it is a database of hands now. It has experienced something, there is knowledge here. If this sand creature were given an ability to read those memories or imprints, and communicate them, it would tell us what happened. It could share its experiences. Without those imprints, it is nothing, just sand, just randomness. No amount of sophisticated abilities can convey anything, except more randomness. Now that there are these imprints, we can see that there is a structure, there is information here, and more accurately speaking - we have an reduction in Entropy of the system.

From the mentioned metaphor of sand and hands, we can already learn a lot about what a memory is. Firstly, it is a copy of another pattern. Secondly, it is a structure, has information, and thirdly, it has a lower Entropy compared to its immediate environment. And, last but not the least, a system can evolve around it that can communicate and pass on those imprints to other systems. Information sharing means even lower Entropy. Entropy decreases, randomness decreases, meaning arises, minds are formed, life arises, evolution towards complexity begins.

Metaphysical Memories

What causes a memory? An ability to change in accordance with another pattern. It need not be an exact copy, it needs to be simply consistent. There can be errors in copying, but as long as these errors stay in margins and the resulting pattern gives a positive match with similar patterns, the job of memorization is done well. It also, need not be the same substrate, it also need not correspond one to one with the original.

What happens when a copy is made? Entropy reduction happens. It need not be a specific pattern, it can be any random pattern, but now it has a copy or many copies and it has acquired a meaning, it can be recognized by some other process. When this pattern gets arranged in a regular, predictable manner, it forms a structure. The structure can repeat itself by imprinting on neighbouring patterns and the structure grows. Suddenly, we have a thing now, an entity or an object is born.

Why would it do that? Memory happens because it is a possibility. Patterns interact in many ways. They are change themselves, and hence pass on the change to other patterns, which in turn change the first one. It is an exchange. The exchange results in modification of one or both patterns. The patterns can merge, one can get destroyed or can change in a random fashion etc. If one of them is not changing much, or is almost "blank", the other can induce a change in it which corresponds to its own. And thus, an imprint is produced. It then reproduces. The patterns grow in population. More of them means that the probability of other patterns that interact with them taking on that particular imprint goes up. We see more and more of them. They compete, and various structures are formed. Patterns are pure change, and hence lose their imprint sooner or later, if not reinforced by repetitive imprinting by their own type. These patterns turn into randomness again. The structure is lost in the sea of chaos. Hence, only those structures survive which have evolved processes to keep them going. We can see the seed of life and matter itself here. It happens because it must happen, it is by necessity, when a memory happens structures are formed. Mutually or self reinforcing structures are the only ones that continue, rest dissolve back into randomness.

We haven't yet reached anything non-physical or physical here, we are still at the metaphysical level. These patterns are pure information, pure change on the screen of consciousness. They are a dance of emptiness. They are potentialities. They have no substance. Still, we can see a lot happening here, in this sea of almost nothingness, of infinite chaos and possibilities. The play of memories has just started.

Non-physical Memories

Once a memory is formed, a process of protecting it evolves around it. This is also by necessity, because a memory can form without such a process, but it will not last given the continuous change, nothing remains because all is change. So we are left with only those memories that have an adjoining process of protection. This is the seed of natural selection. Memories that copy themselves and keep the pattern intact are selected out of a pool of randomly changing patterns. We have a start of a rudimentary mind here.

How would the protection work? It needs at least two components - one that checks for any corruption in the original pattern, and another that restores it back, in case any major corruption is detected. People who are in IT can see what I mean. This is the foundation of any information system. You'd need a process that continuously monitors or scans the memory for changes. It does so by keeping its own copy, which takes on precedence in case of a dissimilarity and there is another process which overwrites the original memory, reinstating it back. What if the reference copy itself get corrupted? Nothing can be done, it is a case of mutation. The original gets overwritten and whatever happens, happens, it is no more the original memory. Note that the actual pattern in not important, anything that can survive the constant erosion of change will persist. However, too much mutation means a loss of valuable information, which has been accumulated in the core memory and took a very-very long time. Fortunately, there is a solution - error correcting codes (ECC). Sophisticated algorithmic processes evolve to check whether the reference has any corruption, and they correct that. One of the way would be - to have three copies, and when one of them gets corrupted or changed, and the other two still match, the non-matching one can be overwritten, since the probability of two copies getting corrupted in such a way that they match exactly is very low. ECC, as you can guess, relies on some or other kind of redundancy.

Luckily for memories, there is one more way to ensure purity, that is even more resilient. Make as many copies as you can, spread them far and wide. In this way even when the individual patterns get corrupted, there are enough of them to continue the structure building process. Individuals keep disappearing in the sea of chaos, but the overall structure is very resilient, it endures. A simple mind is born in this way. It has a process of central memory, protecting processes, correcting processes, copying processes and probably some more. The whole structure can be copied and reproduction begins. We get first non-physical structures - they are minds, mental entities, just memories.

What if the adjoining processes falter, break down? They do, as must happen if there is nothing but incessant change. The structure, which is now a simple mind, can do one thing, among many possible strategies, which is - to store a mechanism to reboot the failed processes. It recreates those processes. How? Obviously you will need a blue print of that process stored somewhere in the memory itself. So, a part of the memory also stores the information about the processes it needs, all the processes actually. A process is nothing but an algorithmically changing pattern, a process is just memory in motion - a pattern that proceeds in a certain way. When you have a copy of this process pattern, it can be regenerated and starts processing again, replacing the faulty process. Of course, you need a process to detect if one of the process has faltered. This introduces the need for more error detection and correction, and you can see how complex the system can become. In this way, a complex mind is born. It has a huge array of processes that monitor its health, and a huge amount of memory that stores not only the original impressions, but also the information blue print of the whole mind and all of its processes. It is amazing to see this structure in operation.


Note that not all memories take this route and become minds, some are happy with replication and formation of structures that change in simpler ways. These become non-physical worlds, terrains of memories or patterns that are rule bound. Lack of rules simply means dissolution back into randomness and increase in Entropy for that part of the sea of patterns. This sea is almost infinite, as it is zero dimensional and non-local. It is like a huge mind - the Universal Mind begins forming.

Physical Memories

You must have guessed by now, a complex mind would look like a non-physical creature, an entity that is purposeful and has a meaningful behaviour. We are still at a very primary level. Things get really interesting when this mind can not only scan itself, but can also scan its "surroundings" for various purposes and can exchange information patterns with other minds, perhaps of its own kind.

The sea of ever changing patterns means that the memory of a mind is still very vulnerable as the external patterns impinge upon it incessantly, so some sorts of barriers start forming around that mind to protect it better. The barriers are nothing but more patterns that take the hits from outside change and shield the inner memories. However, a barrier means that this mind now cannot interact with outside and cannot recruit new patterns into its structure. When left closed like this, eventually the internal memory errors take over and the whole structure falls turning into a wasteland of randomness. So a better solution evolves, which is - some openings are left in the barriers and changes from outside can now enter the mind. But, the mind makes it double sure that these changes do not affect it adversely. There are guardian processes that filter the incoming changes and allow only the useful ones to enter. These processes form substructures that we are very familiar with - senses.

Senses are memory structures with adjoining processes that allow change to enter the core memory of the mind. The restriction on what enters inside means that it will be distorted and reinterpreted in ways that serve the mind well. Senses do not provide the mind with exact information of what is outside its barriers, they simply provide a formatted information about what the mind needs in order to grow and replicate. In this way, the experience of a physical world is born. It is just change imprinting on the memory in the mind through a restricted and distorted portal of senses. The mind now "senses" a world out there.

Senses do not send data directly into the core memory, that'd be dangerous. So they have their own memory, a buffer. The information patterns of outside are copied into these memory banks. A whole array of new processes are developed to process them into their essential meaning, and the unneeded stuff is discarded. This is the whole process of perception. The core memory and its adjoining processes then decide what to do with this filtered information provided via perception.

The patterns arriving via senses are assigned very peculiar qualities that are essentially non-physical and irreducible to any other pattern. This whole experience gets labels of "outside" and physical world is born. It is a collection of all patterns, however filtered and distorted, that are not the original system of memory, or in other words, it is all that is not "me". Identity is born out of this division.

What does the mind do with sense data? It uses it to perpetuate its original agenda, which is by necessity - lowering of Entropy via replication and growth. Now that everything is so tightly structured, it becomes an involved process in itself, it is no longer a simple copy and paste of patterns. The mind has one more use of this data - manipulation of outside patterns. This is something big, something important that happened in the evolutionary journey of the mind. It developed structures to not only process the patterns that come in contact with it, it also developed structures to manipulate them, stop them from causing harmful changes or to integrate them into its own structure by suitably modifying them. These structures are nothing but a body. When seen via mental processes, a body is a collection of non-physical patterns and when seen via senses, it is an object, a collection of organs which is seen as one of the object "outside" the mind.

The senses provide the mind a narrow slice of an almost infinite variety of patterns that the mind considers as "not-me". This highly distorted narrow view is what is known as the physical world. It is a collection of objects, although it is just a thin slice of sea of patterns, the variety and range of those objects is overwhelming. Objects are patterns that are tightly structured and bound by processes that we call physical laws. They are just non-physical patterns which happen to be in the range of senses and are useful for some minds in some ways. Non-physical patterns are in turn a thin slice of metaphysical patterns, only a few of the latter are of concern for a mind. All non-physical patterns are essentially metaphysical - change in nothingness, just probabilities. So the reality is only of one kind, it appears in three kinds because of these three kinds of memories.

Senses are interesting structures. There are some, the exteroceptory ones,  that interface with external world and there are some that interface with the internals of the body itself and convey its status, its needs and health. We can call them interoceptory senses or sub-physical senses. There is yet another class of senses - the non-physical senses. I do not have a collective English name for them, they convey the happenings inside the mind itself. There are many - recall, imagination, emotion, desires, thoughts and so on. These are perceived as internal events in the mind.

A body is an interesting structure indeed. It is what gives a mind the ability to perform actions. It is a part of the mind that interacts with patterns and processes that the mind considers as external to its own. It is interesting because, bodies are memory structures themselves, just like senses, and have physical and sub-physical senses as their substructures. Bodies are within the sensory range of physical senses and appear as complex and ever changing objects. The mind connects to a body at the point of senses. It can disconnect from it as easily also. Bodies have their own core memory, its the DNA, where the whole pattern of a body and its processes is stored. It is also called the genetic memory, as it can generate the whole body. Like a true mind, DNA can replicate, make copies of itself, has error detection and protection/correction etc. RNA transcription is the process through which generation and growth happens. This process produces proteins which form cells and cells self-organize in many ways to form various creatures. So creatures are just structures formed around a complex of memories of various kinds. We humans are one of them, very unique but a minuscule part of whole.

A mind is a struggle against rising Entropy and parts of the mind routinely erode out and are replaced again using blueprints. Body is perhaps the part that erodes faster than any other. It can be due to its direct interface with the physical world, which is largely a domain of high Entropy. Body is also the most distant part of the mind, its not well protected from degradation. Body has a mind of its own in this complex of memories. It is the Ego. This part is non-physical but totally dedicated to the survival and procreation of bodies. While the mind goes through an experience of a body, the Ego remains its most active part. The core of the mind is largely hidden behind the noise of the Ego and activities of the body. The Ego is shed as soon as the body is shed. However, the mind can create more kinds of bodies and more senses on demand. It has these blueprints at its core. These are beyond my current knowledge and moreover cannot be shown easily while the experience of the physical body is in progress.

The Universal Memory

It turns out that in spite of barriers around a mind, it is not totally isolated from its environment, which is a sea of patterns and structures, and from other minds, similar in structure or utterly different from its own. Combined in such a way, these form a collection of minds, or a collection of memories of all minds and objects, which are nothing but memory patterns. All these, collectively, can be thought of as a gargantuan mind, which I am calling as the Universal Mind (UM) in these blog articles. It is nothing but a collection of all the memories that ever existed. It has all the minds, all the objects, all the universes, physical or non-physical. We cannot imagine how huge it can be, it is not in space, it is not in time, for it is the minds that create space and time out of memory. UM is essentially unknowable for an individual mind. We can know some things about it via inference. The most essential property of UM is that it is nothing but a memory. Individual universes or minds are virtually isolated regions of the UM memory having their own mental processes or physical processes, aka laws. Secondly, we can say that it is almost infinite, but not actually infinite. Thirdly, everything evolves out of the UM and dissolves back into it. UM is essentially eternal, but it may have a start and an end, as it can be experienced, however its start/end cannot be known and is necessarily unknowable. And finally, the agenda of UM is nothing special, it is the same as that of any self organizing information system - Entropy reduction, which is not a "chosen" agenda, it is what must happen, it is by necessity.


Experiencing

I introduced this seemingly innocent term in the past articles. It turns out that it is a very enigmatic process. It is not even a process, it is something that is the cause behind all processes and patterns. It can be best described, in my opinion, as a continuous shift of the consciousness through a field of possibilities. This field is nothing but Presence - All-that-is.

Experiencing can be roughly understood via the metaphor of a movie, the kind which is a series of images/frames printed on celluloid, not the digital ones. The frames of the movie are nothing but possibilities. The frames move in front of a light and a lens projects the images on a screen. The light and the screen can be compared to the consciousness, it gives rise to an experience. It seems that the screen is changing, displaying all sorts of patterns and images, but all that is happening is a movement of reel, which is a collection of all possibilities. When current frame is compared to the last one, it gives rise to an experience of memory and hence change can be experienced. When there is no memory, no change is experienced. No change means no experience too. All experience is just change, it is our direct observation. All we see is impermanence, nothing is absolutely static here, except the experiencer itself. So all experience is due to memory.

Experiencing, a metaphysical process, is seen as experience of memories. There is nothing more to know after this is known. The contents of the memories and the associated processes or laws are merely details. Everything is possible and hence all memories and patterns are possible, and hence knowledge is an endless process, it never ends, we are never finished. Knowledge itself is a pattern in a memory which resides in a mind.  Can something be known if there are all possibilities? It stops making any sense as soon as we know that all can be known or nothing can be known, they are one and the same thing. Knowledge makes sense only in a narrow range of limited knowledge which displaces a limited ignorance.

Experiencing, given all possibilities exist, is also never ending, but does not suffer with the difficulties knowledge suffers from. So, everything can be experienced and is actually being experienced right now right here, as there is only one experiencer and only one Presence.

Experience of a memory

Let us return to our own human experience of memories. Knowledge itself is nothing but well organized memories. These memories are acquired via experiences of various kinds. Knowledge gaining is an organizing and structuring process that operates in a mind. Obviously, it is operational in a human mind too. Knowledge lowers the Entropy of memories to a minimal value, and is therefore, a favoured process. It is a process of forming meaningful inter-relations among experiences. More organization and interrelations in memory mean less Entropy and more information.

We can have knowledge regarding memories themselves. We can study a narrow range of memories that yield to the knowledge. The way we can do it is to classify them, observe their nature, what they do and how they function, how are they interrelated etc. This will form the knowledge of the memories from a human mind's perspective.


Inert memories - Physical things are memories, patterns that change in the universal mind. Objects have a structure, we call it matter. Inert memories are not totally inert and inactive, they change. They change very predictably as they are rule bound via algorithmic processes. They have simple structures. Predictability means that these memories are most suitable for interpretation via senses. Senses filter out the noise of mostly random changes, and present us with inert memories that are more consistent. So the physical world is experienced in the form of objects that change slowly compared to the mind itself.

Bodies - As mentioned above, a body is a result of a complex memory and associated processes. When a mind connects to a body, it owns it, a person is born. Bodies change faster and in more complex ways compared to objects. But they change slower than the mind does. Bodies are disposable, they are just interfaces with inert memories.

Perceptive memories (PM) - These are fast changing memories that store ongoing perception. These are responsible for the experience of "now", the present moment. Recognition happens in these memories, which is its associated process. Without such memories, which are fleeting, nothing can be perceived or recognized.

Short term memories (STM) - They store recent events and experiences, and give rise to the sense of time. Time is the distance between two memories. The arrangement of memories determine the amount of time. This is done in short term memory, and hence it is a very important part of the mind. This part is also known as the working memory. Decision making, thinking, imagination, recall and many more processes are associated with this memory.

As the name suggests, this memory is temporary and is refreshed by other kinds of memories, as and when needed. It also stores our current mood, the state of emotions. Emotions colour and bias the processes in the STM and also in PM. Memories affect our mental states, but are also affected by them in turn. Mood can alter the sense of time or can affect decision making. Intense emotions, like fear etc, can distort the PM and can affect recognition.

Recall happens in STM. It is a process of copying from long term memories and reprocessing them to produce results. Recall projects the copied information back into PM. Thus, we find that recall of events appears as a faint perception of them. Anyhow, the mind can recognize the recalled objects just as well. Other processes are affected by recall, such as decision making or choosing. For these processes, there is no essential difference between PM, STM and recall. Hence, a recall of happy event makes us happy, and recall of fearful event makes us afraid, and even the body is affected as if the event is being really experienced. The face expresses the recalled memory as faithfully as it expresses the PM.

Imagination happens in STM. It is a process of mixing of various memories and experiences. We can imagine only that which we have experienced, the novelty is a result of mixing of memories, not a result of creation of them. The imagined result, however, can be committed back to memory, as a "creation". Hence a human mind cannot create, it can only mix and match from a huge range of memories. The imagination affects all processes as usual, so a pleasant imagination sends waves of pleasure in the body and a negative imagination can make us cringe.

For a mind, the contents of STM is its "reality", it does not matter how the contents got there. They can be from senses, can be from recall, or imagination or even from non-physical memories or the UM itself. We can say that the word reality is a meaningless word for the mind. That said, there is logical structure of memories and processes, which alerts the mind by detecting the source of memories in STM, that in turn helps the decision making processes to carry out an act. It is obviously a high level process, the result is sanity - we do not act on imagined or recalled events. For some humans, this process gets afflicted in many ways, resulting in odd behaviours ranging from insanity to destructive actions, to biases and to mild ignorance.

Actions arise out of STM. Our current actions are a result of contents of STM. There is a part of memory that holds the blueprint of this action, it is the intention. Details of this subject are fairly involved, so I will simply skip them for now.

Medium term memory (MTM) - This stores experiences and patterns that are of some importance for the mind, but it may not need them immediately. MTM gives rise to the experience of near past and near future. Examples can be your appointments, your plans to visit a store, buy something, your recent fight with someone or a romantic meeting that happened a few days ago. These are stored as not very immediate causes of action, but as causes that will result in action, if situations allow. We experience the first occurrences of desires. Desires arise out of MTM as motive forces that propel the mind into actions. Usually, the desires fade out with time, or get fulfilled or become irrelevant or are replaced by other desires.

A process keeps copying the contents of MTM into STM, in a sorted order based on their priority. Of course, the survival related issues take precedence over other. Next in the line are memories that resulted in pleasure and so on. Thus a mind is constantly bombarded with intentions and desires, and an untrained mind keeps acting on them without much discretion. The result is an nonoptimal state of affairs called suffering and pain. The cure is to train oneself to become aware of the contents of STM and MTM, and choose wisely, from knowledge, not from compulsions caused by automated processes.

Long term memory (LTM) - It is yet another kind of memory that is very important and spans a wide range of experiences, giving rise to the sense of past. It can be of many years, perhaps whole lifetimes. Significant events from the above mentioned memories get copied to LTM routinely. It is an archiving process. This memory stores the personality, the identity of a mind. Long term desires are stored here as wishes. This forms the story of an individual - a series of events that happened in his life, his past. All of the mind, and other memories are coloured by and are affected by LTM. This is what we call as conditioning.

The overall behaviour of a person is determined by the contents of the LTM. In other words, we can say that you are a sum total of your experiences. These contents are fetched into the STM whenever needed and various processes compare and evaluate the current situation in the light of LTM data. Our past affects our present in this way. Our conditioning largely determines our actions and preferences, not our perception or logical abilities.

All learnt skills are stored here. So LTM is important for survival too. All our relations with other people are stored here, and hence LTM is responsible for our social actions. A young person is seen as immature and "green" because of the low information content in LTM. Children are innocent, energetic, flexible and learn fast. Longer a person lives, greater is the weight of LTM, and hence a very old mind is heavily burdened by its own memories, its own conditioning. A time comes when this results in an increase of Entropy instead of a decrease of it, and very special processes in the mind kick in. Perhaps the body is also a pile of high Entropy patterns now, and the mind starts a process of discarding the entire LTM along with other memories. This is the experience of death. So we see that the death is an Entropy reduction process, or a creative process, not a destructive one.

Greater memory (GM) - These are just memories as usual but they store our non-physical experiences, when the mind happens to be in a different state. The states can be of meditation or Astral Projection - a disconnection from usual experience of a person/body and a physical world. One must wonder why is there a need for a completely separate memory in this case. Actually, a mind is always in non-physical environment, the physical environment is special and has dedicated memories. GM is the norm, other memories mentioned above are needed for survival and experience of a body/world.

We get to access GM when we are less involved in the worldly actions and thoughts. It is not very inaccessible. It is just another memory, we choose to forget as it is less important for survival. We are in a survival mode most of the time, unless you are a spiritual seeker. GM is a collection of our non-physical experiences that are happening here and now, and happen all the time. A non-seeker is simply unaware of them. GM stores communications and experiences with other minds - embodied or disembodied, present in this universe or any other. It also stores the adventures of the mind in non-physical worlds. One can say that our minds have a parallel life. Thus we encounter the greater mind for the first time here, in the form of GM. Thus we know we are more than mere humans.

It is not that the GM is completely isolated from usual memories such as PM or STM. Its contents do affect the latter ones more or less depending on the openness of the mind. A seeker, having gone through various non-physical experiences is more open for such influences from GM. These usually are experienced as intuition. However, intuition can also result from purely physical experiences. For a mind, there is no difference.

As can be guessed, GM can also generate desires and imaginations. These look like inspirations to an unawakened mind, when they trickle into usual memories. GM, like LTM stores knowledge and they look like insights that arise out of no cause, or exceptional talents, that defy all explanations. In the altered states of the mind, which means a disconnection from physical world and sensory perception, the GM comes into foreground. A different "story", personality and a totally different body with strange senses can be experienced. One can suspect that GM can be broken down in similar ways as described above. GM gives us a first glimpse of our ancient and greater mind, it shows what continues as we transmigrate from death to death.


Karmic memory (KM) - Also known as causal memory, is the core of the mind. Not surprisingly, it is ageless and stores experiences that span many thousand years, or perhaps millions of years. It stores the experience of all lives. We can see the KM as our tendencies. Of course the most powerful tendency is to be born in some or the other world. This is the essence of Entropy reduction agenda of the mind, that is a result of necessity.

Our entire life is determined by the KM, not only this one, all other lives as bodies or bodiless existences. An ordinary person is in firm grip of the conditioning and tendencies that exist in KM. These are as old as time. Only a seeker is free from KM, only to a certain extent. If you have a body and a mind now, you are in the grip of KM. I put it as if it is a bad thing. It is not. This is how a mind must be - memories that are well protected. What is bad is that sooner or later, such mind gets identified with the contents of the memory. The "I" gets too strong and becomes an affliction, as there is an imbalance now. This gives rise to a repetitive existence, a run of a mill like circular process that results in increased Entropy eventually. The good news is - this can be corrected. The answer is liberation. It is a state of the mind where it is dis-identified with all memories including the KM.

It sounds simple, but it takes aeons for a mind to come to a totally free state of existence. But the evolution ensures that it will happen, because that is by necessity. Those minds that cannot get to the liberation or resist liberation due to some or the other affliction in them, eventually de-evolve and degenerate into randomness and chaos from where they arose. Luckily, the actual situation is not so bad and this rarely happens. The minds that are already liberated are so capable and powerful that they lift their fellow minds up from the darkness into liberation and freedom. This is also by necessity, as it should be obvious, a group of mind in which such cooperation is not present would be reduced to randomness faster. We see that the love is a fundamental act of the minds. Love is nothing but a tendency of caring and unconditional favouring of other minds. Love is an action that is giving instead of wanting and is directed towards the benefit of others. Eventually the mind performing the loving acts is also benefited for obvious reasons. The good for whole always is good for an individual. Here we can grasp the importance of freedom, love and cooperation. It is not that the minds are eating each other on their way to the "top", it is more like a process of co-evolution, love and cooperation. We do see some competition and dog-eat-dog kind of behaviour initially, but that is a temporary lower phase in the evolution of the minds.

Having realized that the goal for any mind is nothing but Entropy reduction, a mind identifies with the consciousness instead of memories, which is the reality of all minds. It operates consciously with full awareness of its goal and is not affected by its primitive tendencies, conditioning and programs or processes. It takes its evolution in its own hands. This is a state of enlightenment.

Akashic memory (AM) - It is nothing but a combination of all memories. In other words, it is the memory of the UM. Actually, there are no separate entities called an UM and its AM, they are one and the same. UM=AM. It is not that the combined experiences of UM are being hauled away and are being stored in a separate place called AM, remember, the mind is nothing but memory itself and hence UM is nothing but AM. AM stores the eternity, experiences of all the minds with all of their lives, structures of all universes. It is all of the manifested Presence.

It is a memory, as it is just patterns, but not any patterns, nicely ordered patterns, low Entropy structures. So what is left when we subtract UM from the Presence? - a vast and unimaginable sea of non-existence, an ocean of potentialities that is beyond any knowledge. UM can be known, by only one thing - the UM itself. Any other mind, which is obviously is a small part of the UM in this scheme, will be incapable of knowing UM completely, although, it can get an abstract idea of what UM is. So I do not claim to know the UM, it exists as a tiny concept in my memory, which is, as you must have guessed, does not come even close to what UM is.

The part cannot grasp the whole, which is yet another law of the minds. We will never know what UM is unless we become UM. Having realized that a mind can go nowhere but in the direction of lower Entropy, which is where the UM is heading, the mind joins forces with the UM. In other words its destiny is to be aligned with the direction of the UM. There cannot be any other goal for any mind whatsoever. This is the state of dissolution or unification. I will not be able to comment further on this subject.

AM is the memory that has all the memories. It has all the past, present and future. Actually these terms are undefined for the AM, as it is beyond time. Time is a concept in an ignorant mind, which is born out of memory of external change. What is time for AM, when all change happens within it? It is all change, all experiences and all events. They are all eternally there in the AM. However, new experiences are continuously being generated out of random nothingness, and the creative/evolutionary processes keep creating structures, so the UM is expanding. It is almost infinite, but not actually infinite, as there is always a scope of accommodating new memories and structures. It never runs out of space, it is beyond space, it has exactly zero dimensions and is non-local. Now we can appreciate how our humans minds, and all minds for that matter, are a fractal copy of the UM. They are baby minds in UM, low resolution fractal clones of it.

It surely sounds like religious teachings, which is not a surprise. Humanity has uncovered this knowledge many times and at many places in the history of civilizations. As civilizations fall, the knowledge is destroyed, is corrupted and its reminiscence survive as teachings of one kind or the other. This knowledge of AM is as ancient as AM, obviously who knows it better than AM itself.

AM is a store of all events, down to the picosecond levels. You can scan through it in the format of time - as successive events in the past through future. It does have a lower limit on its resolution, as it cannot be infinite if it wants to manifest. Only consciousness can be infinite, as it is just emptiness, it is very pure, has no information or Entropy, and hence it is beyond infinity or finity. How is it even possible for AM to do that? Because it is all already there as potentialities, it does not need to do much except manifest one of them at a given moment. As we know from above discussion, it is being done through the process of Experiencing. So Experiencing is a process that is even beyond UM, it is a metaphysical process, just like patterns and other processes are. In fact, our minds are actually scanning through the AM right now. Any mind cannot do more than that. Experiencing presents a slice of Presence to the consciousness in the form of contents of the AM. This last sentence says everything that needs to be said about everything.

Footnotes:

A basic diagram of layers of memory. An updated diagram and description is available in this video series: Path of Knowledge Video Series

Latest description is available in the Path of Knowledge Program