Am I the Vessel of my Memories?

Q: I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong, but the more I investigate myself, the more I am convinced of my individuality. Me, the vessel of my memories, sensations, emotions, and the address of my experience. Charlie Hayes says “Look – who are you?” Well, I looked and the name matches the number. Anyway, I keep checking just to see if you enlightened ones are right; I'm always open to being wrong about the nature of reality. 

A: I’ll start with one loaded word and we’ll see where it goes. I’ll probably have to address the others some other time, if you still need me to. Memory is the one I’ll address now, because it’s really the seat of all the other things in your list.

Memory. What is it?

A memory is a mental representation of an event. The event is gone. The event can now be said to not exist, since there is only now – the present. Only a mental representation of the event remains, not the event itself. This is an important point.

All of “Tom” is contained in memory. Memory is a collection in the brain of mental representations. Therefore, all of “Tom” is contained in a collection in the brain of mental representations. Are you starting to get how non-substantial Tom is?

The collection of memories in the brain is very consistent. That’s how it evolved; that’s how it got designed. The whole point of this memory mechanism is to give a creature some way to feed itself and reproduce itself. So it has to be internally consistent, to the max, for life to happen on this planet. A creature has to know where it lives, who its friends are, where the food is, etc. The name has to match the number.

And in the case of humans, who have a more sophisticated brain than other creatures and can become curious about apparent inconsistencies, memory also has to be very seductive, to make sure you don’t “wake up” to the fact that it’s a fabrication, because that would threaten your survival. The whole thing is designed for you not to wake up.

But this creature-life system doesn’t care if you are happy or suffering. The whole memory trick – the system of creating mental representations of events that pass in the blink of an eye, and then making a life “movie” out of them – evolved for you to eat and reproduce, and that’s all.

This “waking up” business is about seeing that you are not a creature, sentenced to live in this mortal, meat-based way for your whole life. You, as consciousness, are free to see that the creature “dream” is not based on any reality, and the “ground” upon which the movie appears is the true reality. And this is what is noticed right now, as your ordinary consciousness, just this ordinary, obvious THIS that you are aware with; this is all that is real.

Memory is the ploy. Look into it. The present is all there is. For there to seem to be anything but the present, there have to be these mental representations, usually strung together in a logical sequence, which give the illusion of a life story of the creature in whose head that particular brain resides. That’s why you keep coming back to “you": these are this brain’s particular mental representations, not another brain’s.

So look at where this sense of “Tom” comes from, and how it is based on these images, stored in grey matter, of events that came and went, and were only “present” when they were present. Now, all that is present is the present! So where is this “Tom”?

If you are real, you have to be in the present. It’s all there is. Are you real? Is there something about you that you take to be real? So, find out what that is. Is it the part that takes place within the string of mental images and plays along with itself, or is it what actually exists in the present?

What exists in the present? Just this consciousness. Just the THIS that you are always taking for granted, always running in the background, taking it all in, needing nothing, judging nothing.

I think this is all for now. Let it sink in a little.