MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

Did you ever have glimpses of memories from the future?

Oh, well, you are right and in your place I would think exactly what you are thinking: "the poor bloke is out of his mind".

A few weeks ago I was digging a hole in my wonderfully rocky garden, a lot of soil needs to be changed, sifted and fertilized, as the more seeds for beautiful flowers I lay down the more are the weeds coming out. While digging, at a certain point I stuck my pick on something large and tough which turned out to be a very big root of a jacaranda tree so that I decided that I should cut it. I grabbed an old hand ax, passed its rusty blade on a grinder and then satisfied with its razor-sharp edge I began to cut the root, meanwhile thinking of the poor jacaranda undergoing the loss of such an important part for its own sustenance ... and at that moment I saw again, not in visual imagery but anyhow mentally vivid, the scene that I had clearly seen almost a quarter of a century before. Once more I saw Abbai with an hand ax beheading my younger daughter. What I further realized is that I was in the very place where Abbai, in the hallucination which I previously described, had been carrying out his brutish piece of work, so that immediately I established a link between the former hallucination and the task which I was at.

Be as it may, I still call that remote vision that which in reality it was, an hallucination, yet the link between the two experiences was too strong - the symbolism of cutting the head to a living being in the bloom of her years can very naturally be substituted with the cutting of a life giving root of a vigorous plant - the gardener changed too, not the hand ax nor the spot where the action took place and obviously there was an all important difference, the difference in time - almost a quarter of a century.

If I take for granted that the hallucination concerning Abbai reflected my situation at such a later time - although it all may very well have been a semi-perfect coincidence to which I adapted my symbolical imagery - I have to say that we do have, at times, the power to transcend time; you may call it prophetic experience, pre-vision, foresight, reading the future, premonitory vision or whatever you will, I just and simply call these kind of experiences memories of the future.

This now brings about a greatly debated argument for which there is no definite proof whether or not we believe in the Old Testament, or the prophecies of Nostradamus or whomsoever you will and this for a very plain reason, that the human mind is very good at adapting some situations to seemingly related events described by more or less ancient prophets, just one small eschatological example: "Black snow and red hail will come three times ..." ¹.

In a modern way of thinking, I can visualize the black snow and the red hail as something connected with modern warfare (just get a mental display of your television screen at the time of the war to Saddam Hussein! But, as I am reading this line, we are well into the Osama Bin Laden era!) and so it maybe that I am expecting a third world-war. Obviously this is a purely subjective interpretation which I do not believe at all but which I wrote down just to give a plain idea of how the intellect can construct situations agreeable to its own taste within the choosing-basket of its own symbols. Let me say that anyhow, differently, I cannot find any other meaning for such a prophecy and very simply because I live on the threshold of the year two thousand (and two!). What would have I thought if I had read anything like that, say, one hundred and seventeen years ago? Maybe I would have been expecting big clusters and showers of brilliant meteorites and huge clouds of dark volcanic dust crossing the skies and I would have had the proof of the fulfillment of the prophecy while being buried under Krakatoa’s ashes! What would I think if I were Methuselah-like and would meet this prophecy for the first time close to old age, that is, around the year 2793? Perhaps UFO's falling on Venus or fighting in Neptune's skies. So, in my point of view, that is the reality beyond our interpretation of prophecies; yet, at times things happen which cannot be utterly discarded. And having mentioned UFOs and as they are all seen only by visionaries throughout the globe, let me tell you another small story so that I may rightfully enter the restricted circle of the visionaries.

It is late July, 1981, around 19.00 hours and a heavy storm is approaching the northern Italian city of Vicenza. Far in the north across the fields the sky is pitch-black and a very impressive thunderstorm is making a magnificent lighting display seemingly just below the mountain chain’s ridge; I am in the warehouse's yard with my wife and we are intensely watching this truly impressive masterwork of nature when suddenly a large orange sphere lights up right in between the lighting, it lasts for about three seconds or possibly less, and as it goes gradually out another orange sphere seemingly of the same size lights up, this too in between the lighting, at roughly a mile away on the right of the former; this too lasts for about three seconds, or less, and as the second orange ball lights out, the former one lights up again and the whole cycle lasts for not less than five or six turns. While I can say that me and my wife suffered collective hallucination (I heard of no one else reporting the incident and was deeply disappointed not finding it on the local morrow's newspaper), yet I cannot explain the phenomenon; I went so far as to venture - not to say plainly that the two orange spheres were UFOs renewing their energy supply through the atmospheric electricity - that perhaps it was some sort of particular experiment carried out by the American Air Forces. I mention this incident only because somewhere I read something about a theory stating that UFOs are coming from the future; be as it may, they are not really in the context of this writing, what is of interest here is the memories from the future and if UFO's are, they are not memories, wherever their point of origin in time lies.

And now, after these stories, let us get to the point: how do we reconcile mind and time? Here we have no choice but to go back to the distinction between MIND and mind, or the domain and mind, and to give yet another definition of time irrespective of Plato and Maimonides, just describing time - which incidentally we label as the fourth dimension - in plainly physical terms, as: "motion which unties the time which measures itself in accordance with the physical system where it acts". We have little doubt that time is dependent on motion and a related system and as well that our physical frame - hence the related mind - is time-dependent.

So, to transcend time, that is, to have memories of the future, we obviously have to transcend motion - and our mind as well.

Here I can make two hypotheses: one related to MIND and mind, the other concerned with a bicameral mind seemingly like that of our schizoid ancestors.

MIND and mind: having already pointed out the distinction between MIND and mind, for what is concerning the future's memories I can venture to say that at times the mind can, in particular situations, disentangle itself from the physical world and get in touch with the MIND, where the storehouse of universal consciousness is somewhat available to peeping in and as MIND is not time-dependent the received messages, encrypted in symbolic garments by the mind, may reflect situations related to the physical world and life but lying in a different media and time sequence, beyond the limitations of time and space. This would call in an ancient unsolved argument, that of free will and predestination: if happenings yet to come are already recorded in some cosmic media not dependent on time two things are clear: either all the physical existence is already written down along a fixed directrix and inescapable - an undeviating computer program - in other words, there is no choice at all as to its outcome and maybe not even individually, but perhaps only between very narrow limits, insofar as the final outcome of the show is set, or the physical universe is undergoing a closed-circle cycle – in the same wise as a piece of music repeating itself over and over unendingly so as it often happens with an old-grooved record.

With the concept of "the Day and the Night of Brahma" the Hindus stated this thousands of years ago.

As for what concerns the bicameral mind, at times a part of one of the brain's hemispheres not particularly concerned with our physical fancies might be taking over and lead us through interesting mental displays (clearly dissociations of a schizoid character if we are not under the effect of our marijuana cigarette!) apparently unrelated with the normal everyday life. These shows come to us veiled in symbolic imagery and therefore appear as irrational and un-understandable, yet they reflect situations recorded in the cosmic media not dependent on time limitations - or they are outright fancies in accordance with which, at some point in time some individual may find some seemingly matching correspondence and await for the catastrophic end of the world, or an enlightened savior of all the peoples of the earth, or see in a certain fellow the reincarnation of so and so.

Reincarnation? that too is a very debated argument between pros and cons. My point of view is that, if there is any point to it, it is just some mind's excursion in time which then treats it according to its own tastes to the point of firmly believing that such a person from a remote yesterday is walking right now around the corner of a shrine in Calcutta or another one will come down from the clouds in a future not too remote. In their illusion, some percipients of unexplainable events, dress themselves with the garments of their illusion and boast that they are so-and-so who lived such a life in such a place and at such a time. While I say in their illusion, this does not explain some facts as to their experience – exact regognition or recollection of events or places which never entered their life experience and perfectly speaking a tongue or idiom theretofore completely unknown to them. My point of view? Well, not really knowing how to treat it, my mind constructed a theory - not to lay in the dark ignorance of the unknown - of this kind: every speck of existence - at an energy level - is recorded in the cosmic media and so it may happen that some event or existing being may at times appear to closely match or reflect with a good degree of similarity (aided by the percipient’s imagination) the qualities or appearance of something or someone gone by long before - just like hearing a piece of music which seems quite like that of your preferred composer but which in reality was composed by a different mind at a different time but, if you are not aware of it, you just think of it as only being the differently orchestrated piece of music of your preferred symphony and, whatever it is, you enjoy and love it for what you believe it to be. If the percipient states that he is the reincarnation of so-and-so … sorry, I just leave it to the exchange of messages in his bicameral mind - yet, as above stated, some events not within his experience remain puzzling. But our mind can explore realms of which we are completely unaware, beyond time and space, and it is easy to transpose these experiences, in the proper milieu, to one’s own self. Other cases are those of the sorcerer, or that of the enlightened being who, not having finished their task in this world or for any other reason of their choice, discard their old failing body and enter and revive a young corpse and so on indefinitely until they are done with their work. Shamanism, sorcery and yoga are replete of such stories but, as to my conscious knowledge I could never get even to the beginner’s experience of separating my etheric double (couldn’t simply find it! am I a normal being?) from my physical garment there is little I can say about these facts. They can be plainly accepted or rejected according to the individual tastes, that is all the proof we have for it to the present.

Having mentioned enjoyment and love, I will sojourn for a while also in these to realms and give you my personal impressions.

I simply define love as a point in a ladder, not equal for everyone, between utmost dislike (hate) and utmost liking (love), but that is a simplism, true love being something more difficult to give than to get; you cannot get it if you are unable to give it, that is, true love is utter self-effacement with no polarity on the hate-love ladder; diversely it is more akin to enjoyment - by definition something agreeable and liked - and the loss of enjoyment is more or less regretted so much so as enjoyment itself is more or less searched for and that, roughly, is the standard for human love, it comes through a polarity in the enjoyment scale.

True love is not only self-effacement but utter self-detachment as well and so goes beyond enjoyment or regretfulness, it is defined as Love with a capital "L" - but that is something beyond the power of normal human beings; and if you are not a normal human being (remembering that being normal depends on a large measure on the social frame to which you belong to and as such normality is a word which has not a delimited world-standard) you are refused from society and maybe you will be crucified or decapitated or poisoned or anyhow done away with, so beware, and know also why you cannot be e true Lover although endowed with the power to strive for it, the power to go up some more steps on the ladder. Be content to be a lover and enjoy it lest you be obliterated from the face of the world, no miracle would save a Lover from obliteration - what, by the way, is a miracle? Here I am completely at loss, be it a white miracle or a black miracle (white magic or black magic) but at times I like to think that the mind can display some powers unknown (we have to recall that we consciously use only a small part of the brain, about 10%) which can work wonders or that some beings can play wonderful undetectable tricks. What we do see is that the more science and knowledge advance the less mind-borne miracles are factual so that, as we advance in time, certain occurrences of the past become more uncommon and we retain only memories of unexplainable events which cannot be verified with the means at our actual disposal, all that we can do is to rely on old writings or hearsay and take them more or less for granted in accordance with our individual attitude.

Here I mentioned and defined some words, incarnation, love, enjoyment, miracle - in accordance with my own tastes so as Einstein defined relativity in terms of E=mc²; while my definitions can be plain fancies Einstein's was not, even if he stated that imagination is more important than knowledge, and he brought us into the future - was his formula of relativity a memory of the future? and to what extent? We now speak of terrific things in space where even Einstein's E=mc² falls to pieces, we believe that we have discovered black holes, cosmic bodies whose mass is so compressed (a match-box's contents would weight as much as the earth!) that even light cannot escape their gravitational field of attraction; and if you fall on their event horizon nothing will save your physical frame from spreading sidewise on it like a shadow due to the monstrous gravitational pull of the spot where you happen to land. Within my imagination I made some of these terrific cosmic bodies' mass still more compressed, to the point that their own gravitational fields as well at a certain point are turned back to their own core's center, that is funneled in and out in the wise of a spherical hyperboloid, so as to be expelled into another dimension undetectable to our physical means, beyond matter and anti-matter. Einstein-wise, you might even devise a formula to comprehend this terrific physical process remembering that the system lies in a four-dimensional cosmos and that " In any system governed by a potential, and in which the system's behavior is determined by no more than four different factors, only seven qualitatively different types of discontinuity are possible" ².

At times it is nice to travel in fanciful worlds, how many of these fancies - to mention just a couple of them - Verne's travels to the moon or under the seas, turned to be memories from the future? What really is in store for what we call science-fiction? How much of science fiction lies within the mind's power, aided as it is by the contemporary technological processes, to see beyond the present time-horizon, the mind's power to get memories from the future?

At this stage I will leave behind all my hallucinations, UFOs and fantasies about little understood cosmic monsters and all those things which I wrote afore; obviously, unless you are a sort of zombie belonging to my particular species, by now you will have clearly understood that I am not a specialist and as such not properly qualified to deal in depth with any of the topics I touched in this writing. Most of the topics I dealt with were pursued in my life in the hardest of man’s quest, the quest for self-knowledge and that is a chimerical goal for lowlings of my sort.

But now let us return for a moment, a feedback process, to basics: brain and mind. Brain and mind, we have little doubt, work in strict collaboration with each other and even if belonging to two apparently different planes - tangible and intangible - they appear as being a complete system unto itself, a psychosomatic system, so that now we can leave behind Cartesian dualism, and my three-ism as well, and just classify mind and brain as a-one-thing only, a system.

But we live in a physical cosmos which looks like an immense system made up of un-countable smaller systems; to scale it down a little, let us name some of this systems: galaxies, stars, planets and biological life which very grossly we can divide into at least two categories, flora and fauna.

Within this great set of systems, at a certain point in the descending ladder we find an evolved ape which went so far as to name its own species labeling himself Homo sapiens sapiens and who is trying, all the time, to get more and more sapiens and, little doubt about it, he has been quite successful in this endeavor; only a small hindrance on the way: this unidirectional trust to knowledge from paleo to present and to post, this great success in applying it to science and technology has brought our sapiens to the point where, apparently, he has lost contact with his own true self - the heart of the machine - and as such, as a system unto itself, it now appears to be faulty - and frail!

We must not loose sight that he, sapiens, is a complete system, a microcosm unto himself and as such part and parcel of a greater system within a still greater system and so on indefinitely. But just to keep our feet where we belong to, let us consider only the sapiens’s system within the earth’s system.

The earth, its biosphere, its biota - systems within systems, how could we apply system’s theory to this set and, without schizophrenic relapses or going down to Nostradamus’s prophecies, get some memories of the future?

System’s theory, very scantly defined outside the complex laws of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy, might be summarized as follows:

any system’s activity within a greater system will act on the whole system. What would happen if we take this theory for granted and apply it to contemporary man and his world?

By now we supposedly accepted that biologically sapiens is a very complex but complete dual system (brain and mind) unto himself, subject to greater systems and acting on them so that the latter will feel the impact, within their own time frame, of man’s activity. Hence, sapiens being a complete system unto himself and a component part of a much greater system, the disturbance - or unbalance - of the small, yet great, sapiens-system will of necessity reflect on the greater system and, if destabilizing conditions persist and spread in the smaller system, the greater system will in due time be compromised. We are already having the clear perception, and tangible proof, that this condition has been achieved on our planet and at different levels: sociological, economical, scientific and ecological which means that a global disturbance - or unbalance - of the system is now real and evident and presumably un-reversible. Yet at this stage it also appears that it is within the powers of sapiens, for what we believe him to be, not to halt, but, given enough good will and the abandonment of a good lot of selfish egotism, drives and unhealthy ideals, to alter the current trend so as to limit, modify or delay what might be an impending catastrophe - however it might come about.

Presently, the human nature is apparently working both against its own system and the whole system’s exact laws. Sapiens will have to find once more himself, to reverse the course of his pursuits, to get back to his childish - albeit as an evolute child - state, or to utterly face the consequences of his highly esteemed evolution and progress and chose one among some possible memories of the future which might come by as any one among different choices within the realms of our fantasies or among those within the more exact realms of scientific forecasts or predictions apart from natural events on a geological time scale. Even in scientific circles, the thought that the earth is a highly evolved intelligent system is starting to be considered and even accepted: will the earth itself revolt against us? Will our reptilian brain put us on a par with the dinosaurs? Will Gaia rid herself of her children and start all over again?

Notes to chapter 8

¹ "Neve nera e grandine rossa verranno tre volte ..." - Giuseppe Messina S. I. - Libro Apocalittico Persiano - Ayatkar I Zamaspik. p. 121. Roma. Pontificio Istituto Biblico. 1939.
² Alexander Woodcock and Monte Davis. Catastrophe Theory. p.42. Avon Books. New York. New York 10019. 1987.


Preface
Introductory
Chapter 1 The Mind
Chapter 2 The Image
Chapter 3 The Domain
Chapter 4 Rational and Irrational
Chapter 5 The Rational Being
Chapter 6 Symbols
Chapter 7 The Bi-dimensional Being
Chapter 8 Memories of the future
Who did it

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