Memory and Digestion
Robert Sardello

Howard McConeghey’s wonderful article on memoria in this issue of Sophia makes a strong connection between memory and beauty. Howard defines memoria as involuntary memory. He is not speaking of the kind of memory of facts or events that we deliberately try to bring to the surface when we try to remember something. Rather, he is speaking of the kind of memories that waft in, fill us with an indescribable sweet fullness and within which we feel the presence of sacred worlds, sacred beings, and sacred times. This kind of memory occurs when, having lived through events with full attention, we then let them continue on and do their work of transforming us: we are what we have lived.

We imagine that as we get older we will live in the beauty of memoria, that we will muse and be amused (Memory is the mother of the Muses), be able to bring our lives together as a whole and have some wisdom concerning why we are here. We know, of course, that does not always happen. We are more aware of the loss of logical and functional memory as we age rather than the gain in memoria. If we are not to come to our later years in disappointment and despair, we need to prepare for the beauty of memoria, for it cannot happen without a lifetime of preparation. Age is the time for the digestion of all our experiences, where they can be seen in the light of eternal intentions. If we have all along had trouble in digesting experiences, then we will not be able to do that at the crucial moment either.

Digestion refers to a process of taking in something from the world, where it undergoes complete transformation, and in this transformed activity, life is maintained. A similar process takes place with whatever we take in from the world. Digestion is not limited to food. We perceptually and cognitively take in events and they become experiences, and when they go deep enough they become soul experiences that nourish the life of imagination. A reflection on the life of memory shows the range of this process of psychic digestion very clearly, and where it can go wrong.

Obsessions, for example, are undigested memories. They keep coming back up in exactly the form in which the experience occurred. When we undergo events that are too strong, that overwhelm us, these experiences return as emotional, autonomous, automatic, fixed forms endlessly replayed, and we are haunted by what has happened. It is not so much undergoing trauma per se that makes for psychological difficulties, but the fact that such experiences often cannot be digested. In such instances it then becomes necessary to re-frame the experience in many different ways, usually with the help of a therapist, in order for the experience to dissolve. What happens in the therapeutic process is that the event gradually transforms into image. The event is told and re-told, in many different ways and forms. Gradually the event becomes story. The story deepens and opens to wider dimensions. Memory and imagination intertwine. The event, now imaged, has an inner light. The event is digested.

In the present world we are assailed with experiences that cannot be digested. There is too much and it is too fast and there is no context. If what we experience is far too abstract, it cannot be digested, for it is like taking in something that is dead and it just sits there. Mechanical explanations of essentially human activities, for example, are such abstractions. Or, when children are made to learn mechanically, without story or image, or rhythm, then that material taken in cannot be transformed into soul nourishment. Mechanical memory, memorizing that is all headwork, also cannot be turned into soul nourishment. Later in life, these undigested experiences will turn into bodily ailments. It is like having something foreign in the body, sitting there for years, rotting, putrefying. And, since this may take thirty or more years we do not connect our illness with undigested experiences.

And if undigested experiences do not turn into illnesses, later in life we are assailed by waves of memory from the past, waves of strange and peculiar images that are frightening and seem to have no known source. We see something in the world, maybe a child crying, and all of a sudden we feel immense waves of uncontrollable sorrow, but it is not sorrow for the child but sorrow for ourselves that won’t go away and leave us alone. This is associative memory, and we often see the elderly swept into this kind of difficult experience.

True memory is a very fluid and rhythmical process and is of a spiritual nature. Through active re-membering, we, from time to time, dip down into this flowing stream of memory and make part of that stream into a remembered event. It has all the liveliness of the original experience because it is the eternal essence of that experience, now experienced as a soul event. This kind of memory is so vivid because our spiritual being is at the center of the process. With this kind of remembering, we also feel the mysterious and unknown whole that is our life. The memory is not abstracted from the fullness of life. Active remembering is something more than a mental process. With logical memory we can fish up undigested pieces of the past and know them as facts. This kind of memory, while somewhat necessary, does not nourish the soul either. This kind of remembering yields half-digested memories, things remembered that might be functionally useful but do not connect with the living stream of our lives.

Memory, like healthy eating, relies on our giving complete and full attention to what we are doing. When we incompletely encounter someone or go through something with only half our attention, then the event remains with us as something like an independent inclusion within us. Habits are these kinds of memories resulting from absence of full attention – mental, spiritual, soul, and body attention.

The digestion of experiences into the living stream of memory requires, above all, the presence of the heart in the act of attention. The memory of the heart constitutes true soul memory. If you wish to develop this capacity of memory, it is only a matter of quite consciously shifting your attention, placing your attention in the interior of the heart and practicing experiencing others and the world from that place. The head, thinking, is still involved, but secondarily. Experiencing through the heart is not emotional experience, reacting to others and the world, but a creative feeling-presence, full and active. Then, whatever we experience has depth, rhythm, motion, and, most of all, love. What one loves, one does not forget because the event is taken in and fully transformed into the eternal stream of love, to be retrieved at any time, full of life and feeling.

The practice of memory digestion by engaging the heart prepares us for maturity. Maturity is a task. It is not the end of growing, but the full-grown way of growing. It is the path of beauty. We do not get to maturity. There is the path of maturity, not the path to it. This path concerns the harmonizing of psychic forces, primarily memory, and offering them to the spiritual world in an act of creative surrender. Doing as a letting happen. We do not stop doing when we age, but find the way to be receptive in whatever we do.

When we who are younger hear the elderly engage in memories, time and time again, the same memories repeated, then we know they have found the path of beauty. From our point of view, we tire of hearing the same story. But, if we stay, and listen creatively, we find that we have been taken into a different time, that the creative act of the older person is to create a different time than our usually functional time. They create friendly time, the events of life dipped in the stream of anti-Lethe, the stream of memoria. This path back across the river of forgetfulness is created through repetition, and through it, we remember our spiritual home. To petition is to ask something of the divine worlds. So re-petition is to ask again, and again, and again. To seek the presence of the gods again, offering them the substance of our lives as sacrifice. And each time there is such a petitioning, these acts of memoria, we touch a little into the spiritual world and we feel the presence of eternal Beauty.

The young child, fresh from the spiritual world, incarnates into the earthly world through acts of repetition. Each time the child wants to hear the “same” story again, for the tenth time tonight, each time the child builds a house of blocks and demolishes it, only to build it up again, the soul is getting accustomed to this world. In later life, excarnation happens as a reverse kind of repetition. Each time the same story is told the elder person is freed some from the fetters of the earthly life. And, all repetition of an imaginal nature is beautiful. Think of music. Of poetry. Of dance. Of all of the arts. Their essence is to be found in repetition. Repetition is the essence of beauty, and it is the beauty of aging.

 
Robert Sardello, Ph.D. is co-founder and co-director of the School of Spiritual Psychology. He is author of Facing the World with Soul ,Love and the World ,Freeing the Soul From Fear , and The Power of Soul: Living the Twelve Virtues.