I keep thinking back to the film “Lion” (2016)  and how clearly the man Saroo remembers his childhood in India where he lived until he was five….before he got lost; how he is able to walk, in his mind’s eye, the route back from the train station along a dusty track and through a maze of buildings to his home, can see every detail of the reservoir where they bathed, the outlines of trees particular to that location, the very texture and colour of the soil. In this film based on a true story, Saroo gets lost on a train and is subsequently adopted by a couple in Australia, spending the next 25 years piecing back together those memories to feed the ever growing urge to trace his real family. In fact, he becomes obsessed with it; those memories more vivid, sometimes, than his everyday life. A world apart from where he has been  raised in relative affluence in Tasmania, he can flip back to that other world in his head in a split second, using it (ultimately) to pinpoint “where he came from” using Google Earth to zoom in and recognise landmarks from above.

Astonishing, although I know I can sometimes flash back to an incredibly vivid experience (“like I am there”) of the subtlest sights and sounds of early childhood; able to ride a certain feeling, a frequency, to get me there. To a degree, we probably all have this connection to the place where we felt most cherished, safe or like we belong; are able to go back to some places much more vividly than we can recall others that we pass by every day of the week, even if we have not visited for a very long time. It’s as though we tune in to a certain frequency and we are taken there remotely, outside of space and time, to where we can walk through all the sensory details in real-time in our minds.

My grandmother and two of her three children (my mother, left) in India

My mother also lived in India for the first 7 years of her life from when she was just a handful of months old; it was all she knew until that ocean liner (which she seemed to remember most of all) brought her “home” to England in 1935. Yet, by contrast, she didn’t seem to want to remember those years, like she couldn’t bring them back into her mind; though I always sensed she recollected far more than she was letting on. It was like getting blood out of a stone to get her to talk about those days and all she would ever do was sort of shudder as she told me there was nothing much to tell me except there was dust, heat and squalor. She would always repeat her horror at seeing foot prepared on the side of the road but where was all the rest; the kind of things my uncle later told me? This selective amnesia made a chalkboard of the first seven years of her life, like she had simply scrubbed them away with one emphatic sweep of her hand. These were the same  formative years about which the Jesuits declared with such confidence “give me a child until they are seven and I will give you the man” yet she insisted they had made no impression on her at all. Is that possible?

So did they inform her in other ways, pushed down deep inside as an aversion that informed her experiences in other ways? Did they, perhaps, even come up in me? Is this how inherited fears become part of our biological make-up; a vibrational code that we hand down to future generations like a particular tune strummed on the harp-strings of our DNA? Did her strong feelings of alienation and dislike of heat and dust reemerge inside of me, manifested as the down-side of my bizarrely see-sawing impulses: do I want to see India or don’t I? One minute, it is on my bucket list, the next I find the idea completely abhorrent and have all of my excuses ready. Passionately yes and passionately no; its like I am being torn in two opposite directions. Is this how it is when we hand our fears on down the line, birthing generations who don’t truly know what is theirs anymore? This is something I came up against, a couple of years ago, when I was researching into my father’s side of the family, visiting places where they lived during the era when they transitioned from relative comfort and rural security to abject poverty in the workhouse and then exodus to an alien place where they got sucked into the industrial machine, working in steelworks and down coal mines. Standing at the workhouse gate where they lost all their dignity, back-tracing how those deeply bedded fears around money, loss and survival landed and manifested in my father’s DNA and became distinct character traits that I recognise in our gene pool long after they had relevance, was a cathartic thing for me. It helped me to understand some of the traits that my father and I share (especially those I once resented him for “giving me”) so much better than I had ever done in his lifetime.

Certainly, there are a couple of significant traumas from my earlier life that I have never discussed with my daughter but which, as themes, she has observable responses to. By this I mean that I observe in her very strong aversions or fierce opinions relating to things about which she should have next to no opinion or knowledge at her tender age and so there is no other logical explanation than that she learned these “safe-guarding” reactions from me, without word or demonstration. Is this how we pass on our cursory tales; via the womb and the fear coding written into our DNA? In my own life, I’ve done what I can to identify and sift out “the inherited” from the “authentically mine” in recent years and its been like shedding a huge bag of rocks from my cells.

It’s fair to say, in my own life, I have come to experience memory as something much more to do with vibration and resonance than anything local to my biology. When I read Dr Carl Johan Calleman’s book “The Global Mind and the Birth of Civilization”, a large piece of this innate though, as yet, undeveloped understanding fell into place as he described memory as, potentially, a non-local phenomenon stored in the crystalline structure of our planet. This made so much sense in light of everything I had come to intuit, especially via all the profound experiences I have had in places I had never previously been “in this life”, certain power-points where memory seemed to shoot up like molten lava from beneath my feet, and where I sometimes felt as though I was being flooded with familiar data, ghostly memories of…well, I don’t know what exactly (nor did I know if they were actually mine, or if they were projections of a collective mind, with which I was somehow “in tune”). At first it became hard not to identify with such experiences, like I was tripping out on a grand psychedelic tour of my own past lives; but then I began to regard it all as far less personal than all that, more like tuning in to a shared resonance to find I fit into all these places in a way that is interchangeable with countless other beings who could, just as easily, step into my shoes and tune in to those very same vibrations (hence the great draw of some of these places; “sacred” places where we find ourselves). Perhaps it was the place and not the person that held the memory, I began to wonder…and yes, what I read in this book made so much sense. After all, how could I carry so much memory around in my head and how come certain coordinates on a map seem more powerful than others; leylines and sacred spots, places where the earth seems to pucker and fold so much that its innards come close to the surface. What if the earth was a giant crystal holding all of it for all of us; Calleman’s book made considerable sense of what I had been playing with for some time.

In some places, I know, I have tuned in with far more resonance than in others; those places I particularly “liked”. Certainly there are places where we seem to willingly add to the stockpile of local “high-vibe” memories; places where we live with our families or, in broadest sense, “tribe” and spend most fulfilling times. These places can seem to glow with a certain energy long after the people have dispersed. Yet I already knew, somehow, that it was all about being the mobile radio receiver and finding, in these places, that there was music playing on my own favourite channel, which happened whenever the signal was most pristine so that I seemed to receive it with most clarity, colour and joy. And if I didn’t like the “music” coming through or if it sounded like the hiss and grind of some other frequency that wasn’t mine…time to step away to where my own vibration found its match. This method of interfacing with “place” has been my most reliable guide to everywhere that I have chosen to go for more years than I knew why I was doing it; and I’ve grown pretty good at it, listening to it attentively. I’ve also found that resonance with a particular place can change over time and that different places meet us at different parts of our journey; yet it is this key understanding, that it is the two-way relationship, and that it is much more than just our own personal stuff that we tune into, that makes a real difference. Seen beyond the personal, memory becomes a connection device; it’s what interlinks us all in ways that are complex and meaningful.

You have to admit, it makes so much more sense to consider that we amass our considerable, collective memories in some kind of supermassive computer chip to which we all have access than that we carry them around in our heads. In other words, the mind is not a product of the brain but of something outside of itself – a global mind – to which we contribute our own unique experiences. It helps explain how our memories seem to cross over with those of other people (even those we have barely met), how we can remotely access the same experiences in more than one place, even more potently in some places than others and how, when our receiving equipment malfunctions in some way, we receive interrupted service or can cease to tune into the channel of ourselves for much longer periods – as in Alzheimer’s or after an injury or illness. It’s not that the memories that make us who we think we are go anywhere, it’s that our receiver wires have become damaged…or have furred up like old kettle elements, or cut themselves off to protect us from further trauma…and so we lose access to all the amalgamated data regarding who we think we are, in the same way that we would if a satellite was down when we were googling information. This approach (which has been my own approach throughout a decade of intermittent and temporary, but sometimes distressing, memory lapse due to the severe brain fog of fibromyalgia…) offers such optimism since it means that, in healing ourselves, we can reconnect with all that we once knew about ourselves and each other, collectively. We can go back on-line with as much, if not more, clarity of signal than we started with by polishing up our own “wires”, making different life choices, healing ourselves in overt and more subtle ways. This approach says there is nothing really absent when we can’t remember (we use that phrase “absent minded” like something has actually left) nor is everything scrubbed from our hard drive never to return (since it wasn’t really stored there in the first place); its just that our radio equipment requires attention so it can regain the ability to tune into the appropriate “channel” connecting us to where memory is stored, offsite (not locally in the brain). Yes, losing memory can be horribly distressing yet I feel sure that healers will take leaps in understanding this, so that they can help people regain “lost” memory, over the next few decades.

“A significantly different image emerges for the two hemispheres, with the quasi-western side of the EIC made of well-separated patches of different kinds of iron phases. On the contrary, the quasi-eastern hemisphere appears less discriminating with a spotty-like distribution of points.” Candy Wrapper for the Earth’s Inner Core

But then studies have shown that the earth is not uniformly crystalline; that it varies between east and west hemispheres divided, in Dr Calleman’s opinion, by the twelfth degree longitude line (this point is made amply in his book “The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization”). From the study shown left “According to this model, the western hemisphere is crystallizing and the eastern hemisphere is melting”. Distinct iron phases seem to occur in the western hemisphere whereas in the eastern, it would appear, these distinct phases are absent or more than one phase could be said to apply at the same time, described as “elastic”. Moreover, as you might expect, waves travel quite differently through these varying structures. The west is tightly compartmentalized (that word I seem to be using a lot these days when I talk about the left hemisphere of the brain) and is that a coincidence? In Calleman’s view, the planet we live upon is a global mind that exists as the some sort of Mother version of each of our individualised human brains, with the same hemispherical division going on. In such a viewpoint, what happens to one affects what happens to the other (and thus, all of us) since they are, from this stance, one and the same; which fits exactly with my own view that we are localised expressions of Oneness inherently connected by our common humanity. Our planet has always felt like she is so much more than an insentient rock, a resource to be plundered, as our culture (especially in the west…) has liked to depict her. In plundering her resources, we have only ever been stealing from ourselves.

When and how do we tune into the core of earth? “When we engage in higher mental activities, our brain cells typically oscillate in the gamma frequency range which means they are in resonance with the most structured part of Earth, its inner core: at the 40 Hz frequency typical of crystal-clear cognitive functions or memorizing, our brains are in resonance with the boundary surface of the crystalline inner core of Earth. The close-packed hexagonal or cubic crystalline structure in this may then hypothetically provide support for compartmentalized thinking, computation and even the storage of memories” (Calleman – “The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization”).

So, potentially, the way that we store, and have access to, memory comes into this intriguing picture of what the core of our planet looks like, which is only just emerging. But, as we have just seen, some parts of the Earth’s core are much less compartmentalized than others, so how does this alter the nature of the memories that we have access to? And what part, if any, does the Schumann Resonance play in all this; if recent speculation about it rising to new (gamma) levels holds any substance, are we being plunged deeper into the planet’s memory core, retrieving parts of ourselves we may have buried “in” there for posterity, forcing us to (in effect) clear out the depths of our basement? Is this the shake up that pre-empts our next stage of evolution as we enter the Ninth Wave? What might this look like on the world stage; are we already seeing it play out in world events? Are we seeing it occur as, in effect, the east makes new headway while the structures of the west plunge into, well, some kind of meltdown? Certainly if east and west differ in crystalline structure, we could expect that difference to play out at the surface level (as, historically, it has) for, to quote Calleman “Only if the brain is in resonance with a geological structure with clearly defined compartments, such as a crystal, are its waves likely to be localized to specific brain compartments”. What happens if that crystal structure is undergoing changes during our lifetime; perhaps one side crystallizing more while the other becomes more flux? Is this the softening of hemispherical divisions; a sort of leveling process to meet in the middle – in our brains (perhaps also at a planetary scale) – that I keep talking about via my own experiences?

According to Barbara Hand Clow: “The first dimension is the iron-core crystal, which vibrates at 40-60 cycles per second, and remarkably, while in trance, the brain waves have been measured at exactly the same frequency? The person in trance is synchronizing with the centre of the Earth…As far as I can see, the alternate reality just opens up when humans pulse with the planet” (Awakening the Planetary Mind: Beyond the Trauma of the Past to a New Era of creativity – Barbara Hand Clow). In her opinion, our connection to that first dimension is every bit as crucial to our evolution as hooking up with those higher dimensions we seem so fixed upon. Certainly, in my own experience, working with and, in a sense, befriending the first and second dimensions (using her invaluable handbook, “The Alchemy of Nine Dimensions”) has contributed to my own healing journey, grounding me in a new and much more profound way than I was managing to achieve before. When we heal, we are often called to delve into places we never wanted to delve before, places we had (at some level) been avoiding, yet this can be the most cathartic thing to do

Perhaps, as part of our mass healing, we are on the verge of being flooded by the over-spilling contents of our own global memory bank (likely, coming as more of a shock to the tightly-organised sensibilities of the west than in the east; played out as the cathartic dramas of our lives, our politics, the great surge of reveal and leaked information that is underway). Like the opening of any Pandora’s Box, this might very well start with a certain amount of overwhelm and trauma as a wave of vile “stuff” we really didn’t ever want to see again comes pouring out of the world closet. In amongst the waves of shock-factor torrent all those old cultural and pseudo-religious grudges nursed since long before we can remember why they ever occurred in the first place and so we get triggered into all kinds of hostility that looks like conflict, chaos and meltdown. Is meltdown the right word? Well yes, perhaps it is that very thing; the volcanic lava-spill of the hand-me-down hatred of our forefathers spewing out from toxic sores where it has been compressed and stored out of sight (if ever-present) for way too long. Perhaps through these old grudges and wounds being allowed to see the light of day (since none of what we are seeing is new; it has just become more visible) we can quickly apply our higher consciousness to these obsolete old rubs and dissipate the toxic load of them. When we continue to harbour one man’s hatred of another and all the unspoken fear around that, the lack of love for one another, in our depths, those feelings risk becoming the cancer we come to rue further down the line. Like any detox, our memory needs to be brought out into the open to be healed. Transparency, communication, receptivity, flexibility, a sense of self beyond the material…all the key instruments of the right hemisphere…are here to help us sort through the heinous mess that spills out onto our floor from the boxes of our mind. Like most clear-outs, it generally gets worse before it gets better but at least we are clearing right to the very basement of our memory store…and what do we find there? That we are all, fundamentally, the same. So, yes, if we must have fundamentalism of any kind on this planet let this be it…a belief in our fundamental kinship and that we are all one.

What does accessing a memory feel like; how do we do it in such different ways? I know, when I studied history at school, I used to have to pin my memories of data to a visual landscape that I could “see” in my mind, making up mental cartoons and comic word prompts to help me recall complicated names and dates. It’s a device I’ve used all my life; engaging my right brain to assist with my ability to access the compartments of information I had stored on the left; the visual aspect of my learning device serving like a magic password to gain access through the door of the vault. Conversely, when inspiration comes flooding in, I feel like I have to grab it and pin it down with concepts and words before it slips away; and if I don’t catch it on time, like a butterfly in a net, it’s really gone. No amount of rationalizing will bring it back since it arrived without such a rational basis shoring it up; so I find myself blur-eyed  in the mornings, trying to type words even before my brain is ready for action lest they should disappear again. More like a vapour floating in a window than a progression of rational thoughts, I feel so blessed when such true inspiration arrives but I can never schedule for it to happen. In both cases, the one hemisphere works all the better for having access to the other; a collaboration of skills that either unlocks the memory box or nets the butterfly.

Does memory “work” more like that vapour wafting in on a breeze in the eastern hemisphere; are mental constructs only there to shore up those feelings that first fluttered in, rather than leading the march of progression, insisting upon driving and organising what we allow ourselves to recall to a strict set of material priorities as is the way in the west? Does that explain a well-documented sense of tipping out all our preconceived ideas and changing our priorities, even turning things inside out, when we travel to the east; one that can feel like a spiritual epiphany? Calleman asks “Is it not true that when we retrieve a memory we have the feeling that we are “going somewhere else” to search for it? Are we searching our brains to find it, which is the established viewpoint? Or are we searching crystal matrices in Earth’s inner core?”. If this is true then do those first few years we spent as children, gathering and organising the first of our memories, determine the kind of storage system we relate to; are the structured hexagons and cubes of the west very different-feeling to the relative elasticity of the east and are they like different formats of technology…one will not work with the equipment of the other?

So, when my mother sailed back to England from India as a seven year-old child, did she (in effect) leave her memories behind her in the east as she sailed up the Suez Canal? Did they not fit into the structures of where she subsequently lived so she discarded them; wrote them off as a misfit? If she had ever gone back there as an adult, would her childhood memories have opened up like a Pandora’s Box to which she suddenly had the key? Certainly, she had a strong dislike for the smell of Indian food if we ever walked past a restaurant, like it tripped her up or threw her off her equilibrium. Yet we had artifacts from those times around our house, elephants and Buddha’s, and she would lose herself in a trance as she polished them as though quite lost in another world. She treated them with such reverence as she cleaned, which became a fond ritual with which I helped her; and yet the words I longed for when I asked “tell me more about India” could not be spoken. She also became, I vividly recall, unspeakably angry when she discovered an uncle had thrown away photo albums from those times. Perhaps all she lacked, for such unstructured memories, being so young when she gathered them, were the words with which to give them form and perhaps they could not be subjected to the same “left brain” treatment as those other memories that came later without, somehow, losing them altogether. Had she had those pictures to show me…now that might have been a different matter.

Perhaps, as something largely intangible, memory relies on a collaboration with “substance” (objects, prompts…) in order to manifest as form in our three-dimensional world; a sort of partnership that enables it to surface from its storage-place at the core of our planet. So, in the east, does memory attach to different things to those with which it closely collaborates in the west? Is the eastern version of memory, in some sense, the exoskeleton worn for all to know about, a heart worn on a sleeve, compared to this thing we like to hide inside the boxes of our minds (and wrapped up in our material possessions…) in the western hemisphere? In such an inside-out perspective to what we have tended to consider our western norm, does memory flesh out like plump fruit whereas our own becomes the whirls and knots of something externally hard and finite like the insides of a walnut. If so, to what is it memory attaches there: tradition, faith, family, honour, love, maybe all these things, shown off and expressed, celebrated and honoured, in a much-more overt way as part of everyday life? In the west, do we make memory more subservient to the outward trappings and arrangements of material wealth, identity, success, control and possession; preferring to tuck the memories themselves well out of sight (though they continue to inform us in all kinds of ways, at the subconscious level)? Does our culture determine which route we go between these extremes, does it depend where we live, who we mix with, do we get to choose for ourselves, drawn to live in the places where the most comfortable stream of memory flows to feed our life-flame, like the steady jet of gas that turns on a lamp? If we suddenly switch from east to west as a child too young to have established the appropriate storage method for making us resilient and acceptable in the culture where we subsequently land, are our memories left stranded in no-man’s land; the unclaimed lost property of our lives? Perhaps my mother, having no cultural ties to India, had nowhere to keep her lasting memories of those years after she returned home to England and the loving bosom of grandparents and aunts that she always remembered with such fondness as the “normal” kinsfolk of her childhood; to whom India was a make-believe land. Like an old gramophone record in the digital era, she came home to find that her memories wouldn’t play on the “equipment” of her life and so she put them to one side and left them there.

So how did the boy in “Lion” keep his childhood memories of India intact, long after moving to a completely different culture? I suspect, because he attached them to his primary concept of Love. When he returned there in his mind’s eye, he found the family from whom he had been so abruptly separated and that kept him tied there, wanting to return after enough years had passed for many people to have forgotten what those people even looked like. A vibration of love played for him whenever he recalled the place and it kept it alive for him, kept him attached there, calling him back to a place in search of a feeling. Haven’t we all done that with somewhere that has had that effect?

And isn’t that, in essence, what memory is…a feeling attached to substance, be that place, object or person; it’s a particular frequency sent out by a cosmic broadcasting service that we dial up whenever we want to go there. My own journey through the swinging vagaries of my memory has enabled me to refine and polish my ability to remember who I am; not just from this life experience but from many others, which has the effect of softening the edges of them all. A viewpoint that memory is non-local and is just waiting to be claimed by me…that the only variable is my ability to dial in…fits perfectly with what I have experienced. The clarity of the signal received is affected by state of mind, diet, locality, time of day, openness and intention.  When I am feeling “high vibe” memory comes easily and without trauma, which corresponds with what Calleman says, which is that “when our minds go into high states of consciousness our brains attain a frequency corresponding to a sphere very close to the centre of the Earth, in the inner-inner core”. He then relates that connection to the Earth’s centre to the pineal gland, the “mind’s eye”,  which is at the centre point of the brain (and quite distinct in not being subject to the hemispherical division). In this place, memory is not about division; it is all about coming together.

Somewhere, somehow, faced with the vast global memory box that makes up our humanity and the jumble that it can all seem, is the potential to level it all to “what really matters” and what we can all relate to. It comes with the realisation that we have all been through versions of the same; that we are those versions of the same and that we care about the very same things. Like the blending of a zillion photographed faces, eventually the so-called differences find their likeness, softening around the edges until they all blend into one uniform…and incredibly beautiful…face of humanity. We find our own point; that point where we meet in the middle, and it is quite literally at the centre of all of us, where we all cross over and meet in the middle, beneath our feet.

Bit by bit, we do this thing by re-membering (= joining previously detached parts or “members” back onto ourselves) everything we know about ourselves collectively and at the deepest level of our memory bank, which holds an account balance containing many zeros and which we all share. It is the place where we are already millionaires; rich in love. We do this by eradicating all sources of fear…where they began…in our own hearts; bit by bit, in each portion of our life. Separation from one another melts away as we do this. As some feelings become more organised, others come spewing out of their boxes and we meet in the middle – where neither has to occur. We let go of our old stories by giving them some air. We consciously consider how we tell our fresh stories, in new ways, going forwards.

We build structure around memories whenever we tell our stories. How we tell our stories, whether they are written or spoken, told as stories of lack or stories of love, all makes a vast difference; these methods becoming the vehicles of softness or boxes with hard edges that carry those memories forwards. Where a story is told repeatedly but remains spoken not written, it remains soft, fluid, adaptable yet open to embellishment, even exaggeration, denial and abuse. When it is written, it can become brittle, strident, dogmatic inviolable; a weapon with sharp edges, a lid on our own expansiveness, a cage to our thoughts. In what new ways can we learn to hold our memories that take the best aspects of both methods yet avoiding what could become the next structure upon, or within, which the next cancer of humanity can grow, since where thought repeatedly goes, our next creations arise from? The more we repeat a particular story, the more it gains energy like a snowball rolling down a hill. The way we package what first began as a memory determines how adaptable it can be in the future, how malleable when it meets a contrary thought; in that circumstance, whether it sustains for good purpose or becomes the next rock that we simply throw back at ourselves. When two different methods of seeing the same thing meet, it can feel as though the very Earth puckers and cleaves; and, at some level, it does. We avoid this entirely when we meet at the middle, beyond such hemispherical variance.

Is that where we are heading; away from the hemispherical divide that has determined our history since the beginning of the Sixth Wave. Not necessarily because the very structures of the Earth are due to flip into opposites any time soon (though I suspect their differences will start to soften, meet in the middle, accordingly…) but because we get better at tuning into the planetary core, where we all share far more than we know. Perhaps we will all start to get “the point” of it all beyond geographical or cultural markers; will get together and join forces in the one place where it is truly possible to stand side-by-side without encroachment, in the shared mind-space that is the core of our planet and where we meet one another beyond the reaches of hemispherical division and duality. Will we all start to “get it” (this point) on the back of an evolutionary wave coming in after all rhetoric has failed, like we are awaking from a very “bad” dream? Is the alleged (even disputed) rise in the Schumann Resonance to the gamma range anything to do with this since the boundary surface of that inner-inner core “corresponds to a standing wave of 81 Hz, which places it at the higher end of gamma waves” (Calleman; in whose opinion “the theory that brain waves are connected to different shells of the Earth is the only one that explains why there are distinct brain wave ranges in the first place, and wy these wave ranges are limited by the particular frequencies that they are”).

Perhaps there, in that inner-inner core, the whole amalgam of everything we collectively remember is already held for us like the trust fund we are about to inherit and, who knows, all of our shared potential too. In our shared experiences, we find the unity we have always been looking for; the relation point that makes relatives of all of us. I imagine this zone as a sort of super-memory (somewhat akin to the Akashic Records) beyond having opinion or particular viewpoints about what is remembered; an impartial zone where we can all cool down from our long-running temper tantrum with each other. Somewhere between 40 and 80 Hz, we disengage from the cognitive machinations that keep us locked in a particular perspective, all the dogma and the blind insistence, and we simply get out of our own way. Perhaps our biggest cultural shift thus far took place with the arrival of the Sixth Wave, where we reached the threshold of 40 Hz which allowed us to organise memory into compartments for the very first time but at a cost; it fed our evolution and (equally) pitched us one against the other as we fought over who saw what how. Perhaps the next great leap sees us melt back into the flow, retaining what we learned…only looking at all of it in a whole new way. In other words, is it possible to (globally) change our mind?

In the words of Barbara Hand Clow “We all participate in this group mind, which is not solid or physical, and it is palpable. This surface mind is real but less dense than our bodies, and it is textured and colored by each person’s sense of time and history; it is fluid and changes as cultures and people evolve” (Awakening the Planetary Mind: Beyond the Trauma of the Past to a New Era of Creativity”. She could just as easily use the word “memory” in place of “sense of time and history”. It seems to me, that thing we think of as our memory plays a crucial part in making this global mind up; the way we organise it, what we prioritize, how hard and intractable or fluid and prepared to evolve, how optimistic or driven by fear. By taking responsibility for this aspect of our experience, doing the work to heal and let go, taking charge of the way we interpret those archetypes that are all about division and polarity in our culture, noticing commonalities with other people, following the threads that lead towards a future where we thrive together, not fragment apart, we get to consciously create the very structure upon which our shared mind is hinged.

As we do this more and more (starting in our personal lives…), I suspect, the outer surface of the planet cannot fail but to reflect that perspective change and we will see it manifest as our new world, born of an experience of Oneness that is occurring in the very depths of our consciousness. Such an experience supersedes all other memory; feels like it holds the over-ride key of all divisiveness, taking instead what is useful out of our collective experiences without making any of it as personal or painful as it has been with our blinkers on (like taking the sting out of its tail). Memory can then, perhaps, graduate to being this instrument of evolution; informative, colourful, exquisite and wild, a reference point and a cinema screen to look back upon on a rainy day, like a thrilling hardship we once  survived, that helped us to know ourselves better and to value this life…yet now, thankfully, benign. And we get to add new ones to the mix;  conscious ones, creative ones, profoundly personal, life-enhancingly collective new memories, cutting straight to the chase of fulfilling the individual while benefiting the all.  I can really get the point of that.

Final thought…

I just “happened” to watch another film (“The Vow”, 2012) last night that was all about memory. In the story, based loosely upon true-life events, the woman is involved in a car accident that wipes her memory of the last few years, winding her back to a time before she had made some very different life choices. Waking up from her coma and for all the frustrating months afterwards – since her memory never returned – she didn’t know or even relate to her husband with whom she had shared a whirlwind romance, their circle of friends or even her career choice as an artist versus the law career she had been training for all those years before. Her bewilderment was about so much more than the loss of her memories and had everything to do with the confused sense of self that, the film demonstrates, is so hinged upon the events we have lived through, forming the very belief system that we live by. The woman couldn’t grasp how or why she was even in her own life since it bore no resemblance to all those things that were so important to that earlier version of herself and, without the intervening twists and turns in her journey, she couldn’t even begin to tie them together to reclaim the feeling of belonging there.

This plot provokes the realisation that, but for a particular turn in the road, we would not be (perhaps, even vaguely) like the person we are today. Those varying potentials that we could have “turned into” might not find it easy to relate to, or even agree with, the life choices, priorities and belief systems that we possess today; they could even be staunchly opposed to one other. So what lies at the centre of all that; what makes us uniquely “who we are” at the core of such disparity (with ourselves). Where lies the pinprick starting-point from which all those other tangents emanate and towards which they return like the pieces of a pie pushed back together; the place where polarised views simply melt away and we understand or at least accept all of those other choices as valid. Perhaps my theory as above still stands and it lies right under our feet.

Books

Frequently refered to and highly recommended “The Global Mind and the Rise of Civilization: The Quantum Evolution of Consciousness” – Carl Johan Calleman, PhD

The “Sixth Wave” and “Ninth Wave” refered to come from “The Nine Waves of Creation”, also by Carl Johan Calleman, PhD (for many more references to this on my blog, search posts using the term “Nine Waves”)

“Awakening the Planetary Mind” Beyond the Trauma of the Past to an New Era of Creativity” – Barbara Hand Clow

“The Alchemy of Nine Dimensions” – Barbara Hand Clow