Is our memory a manifestation of our mind, intelligence or soul?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
You gave an example of pre-birth and people remembering their past lives. So, does the soul carry the memory? Good question.
Yes. So, where is the memory stored, especially when we see memories going from one life to next life, where exactly are they stored? We know that our existence has three dimensions. There is gross material, subtle material and spiritual.
So, now, for the time being, do not bother about the difference between mind, intelligence and false ego. Consider that as one unit. And we will call that subtle unit as mind.
So, using subtle material. So, there is the physical, there is the gross material, then there is the mental and there is the spiritual. So, mental includes mind, intelligence, false ego for our particular analysis right now.
So, now the physical, the current mainstream materialist dogma is that there is nothing beyond the physical. The mental is just epiphenomena, something emerging from the, temporarily emerging from the physical, that is the idea. But that is not sustainable, because how can the brain cells, no matter how complex they are, they are ultimately unconscious.
They are just made of the same chemical constituents as this table is made up of, as the eyes are made up of. So, how they produce consciousness, how they produce memory, that is all an incomprehensible mystery. They may be storing certain patterns, but what those patterns mean? There has to be somebody who can interpret that.
Certain memory will be stored in certain parts of the brain, that is true. It is like certain information stored in a book. But who is reading the book? There is no one to read the book and even if the information is there in the book, it does not make any sense.
So, the brain is like a book and some information is stored over there. But who is the reader of that information in the brain? So, there is the physical level, which is what materialist science talks about, but there has to be something else apart from that, which is the locus of consciousness, which is the perceiver. Now, Vedic science tells us that there are these three levels.
Among them, the soul is the R-O-U-T, root of consciousness, whereas the mind is the root of consciousness, R-O-U-T. Root is the source and root is the pathway. So, from the soul, the consciousness comes out, it is rooted through the mind into the gross body and then from the gross body outwards.
So, you are seeing me, you are hearing me, I am seeing you, I am hearing you. So, this is the consciousness coming out at the gross level and it enters the gross level from the soul through the mind, it comes through the brain into the gross level. So, now normally, memories are stored at all three levels, but there are different kinds of memories.
The soul has spiritual memories of life with God. Spiritual memories of life with God, they are in the soul itself, but they are completely inaccessible right now, because the soul’s spiritual consciousness is almost zero. The soul’s consciousness is material entirely.
Just like a person may be sitting in a room and watching a movie, and the person is watching the movie, then there may be some other person sitting next to that person, but he is so caught up in the movie that person forgets everything else. So, like that, that movie screen is like the subtle body, the mind. And what is being depicted on that movie screen is the gross matter.
So, we are souls, but our consciousness is rooted through the movie screen to whatever is happening in the movie, to the events happening in the movie. Similarly, our consciousness is rooted through mind to the gross matter. So, our original spiritual memories are inaccessible right now to us.
Now, there are certain memories just stored in the brain. Now, how they are stored in the brain is itself a great mystery. Because now, I am writing a book on reincarnation, elaborate books.
There I explain that a lot of research has been done that all the cells in the brain are changing. Earlier, people thought that brain cells don’t change. Only new ones are created.
But now they have found that everything happens. New ones are created, old ones die out and they get completely replaced also. So, it’s like if I write some message on a piece of paper and give it.
And then I change one by one by one all the molecules of that paper. All molecules in the paper of the paper I change and still I find the message is still there. How is it possible? Something like that.
All the cells in the brain change, but still the memories remain. So, how the memories stay in the brain is a great mystery. Some scientists are now proposing that the brain cells create some magnetic patterns around them.
And the memories are not stored in the brain cells, they are stored in the magnetic patterns around them. Now, it’s a nascent theory, not at all extracted from mainstream science. But the point which I am making is that the idea that memories are stored in the brain, it has not been scientifically properly vindicated.
And the understanding is that there are certain functional memories which can be stored in the brain. How exactly we do not know. But our deep-rooted memories that are there, they get impressed in the mind also.
So, the mind is a locus of desires, impressions from past lives and current concerns. Mind is concerned with past, present and future. So, those are peripheral memories, those which do not create much of an impression, they do not get too much registered.
In fact, they do not get registered even inside the brain too much. They have a brain from a functional point of view. See, the brain is analyzed in three different ways.
The structural analysis, there is functional analysis and neural analysis. So, neural analysis. Functional analysis point of view, they treat a brain like a computer.
And it is just a computer has a hard disk part, has this part, that part, that part, like that. Brain must be having all these processing units to be able to function the way it functions. But then to correlate which part of the brain does which exact functioning, we may say that certain part of the brain is connected with motor nervous system.
Another part of the brain is connected with, say, digestion, another with speech, another with balance, all this we can say. But actually, when we function, we do not function in terms of these discrete units, we function integrally. When I see a bird moving in front of me.
So, at that time, one part of the brain perceives the color, another part of the brain perceives the shape, a third part of the brain perceives the motion, a fourth part of the brain perceives the sound. I will leave aside sound among these, but still color, shape and motion. These three are visual stimuli.
But they are perceived in different parts of the brain. And there is no one part of the brain which is connected to all other parts of the brain. No one part connected to all other parts, because this part is connected to this part around it, this part is connected to the part around it.
It is not that one, there is no one center of the brain, where neurons come from all places. So, the question that is, it is called the binding problem in neuronal science. Binding problem is that how do the stimuli that come from different senses get integrated into a coherent picture.
Color is coming in certain part of the brain, motion is coming in another part of the brain, shape is coming in third part of the brain. Where does the integration happen? Integration means, suppose nowadays people have their own cameras, and they may do recording. Sometimes what happens when they do recording, the motion, the action and the sound are not synced together.
Sometimes in movies, in the shooting, if it is not happened properly, before the hero hits the villain only the sound comes. So, syncing has not happened properly. So, where does the syncing happen? That is a mystery to science completely.
So, I am going so much into neuronal science to illustrate the simple point that actually our understanding of neural science is quite inadequate right now, although it may be advanced as compared to the past, but it is inadequate. So, the memories are stored in the brain, but they are also stored in the mind. And when the soul goes to the next body, it goes with the mind.
So, certain impressions, Dr. Ian Stevenson is a pioneer in past life memory studies, but he has done other studies also. And he has done studies in prenatal impressions. Prenatal impressions means, he talks about this as paranormal modification of biological form.
That means that normally if I hit my hand, if I put my hand against a knife, my hand will get cut. That is normal modification. It is painful, but it is a normal modification.
But suppose a mother sees a knife cutting someone, and that creates a big impression on the mother’s mind, the embryo is born with a cut hand. There are many cases which have happened like this. And these are called birthmarks and birth defects.
So, now, what are the causes of birthmarks and birth defects is very difficult to know. The normal cause that is thought of is genetic. If it is not genetic, then it has to be some problem with the mother’s womb condition.
If the mother is malnourished, if the mother smokes, if the mother drinks, then it may create some problems. But if neither of these, there is no genetic problem, there is no functional problem from the mother, then what causes it is unknown. So, the understanding is that there are certain impressions which come from psychological perspective.
And certain impressions, so if a person has died, then when the person has died violently, so somebody shot a bullet in the womb, the last thing he saw was a bullet wound, somebody pointing a gun and a bullet coming in. That creates such a big impression in not just that it causes a fatal wound in the head, but along with that, it creates an impression in the mind, the subtle mind it is there. A bullet has come over here.
So, there was a case of a boy called Titu. He was a Punjabi boy and he was shot. He was Suresh Verma in his previous life and he was shot dead point blank with a bullet that came in from the right temple and went out of the left temple.
And when he was born, he remembered his previous life and right at the place where the entry wound and the exit wound were there in his postmortem of the Suresh Verma, right at the exact same location in the cranial cavity, there were swellings right from birth. So, this case was legally investigated, it was reported in BBC also in a program called 40 Minutes, the case of double birthmarks, exact same location. So, what is happening is that the physical wound is creating an impression in the mind and that mind is going to the next body and in the next body, the same impressions are being impressed on the physical level.
So, our memories, there are spiritual memories stored at the level of the soul, our normal day-to-day routine peripheral memories are stored in the brain, but when the memories are deep-rooted, they go from the brain to the mind and they are stored in the brain, in the mind and that is how they go from one life to another life. Of course, yes. What is left behind is the gross body, the soul along with the subtle body and that is why there is a continuity of desires.
It is continuity of desires. All of us have particular inclinations. Scientists try to say that, materialistic scientists say that it is because of our genes.
Some people are irritable, some people are introvert. So, it is because of our genes, but scientists have found that even among twins, there are differences in behavior and twins are also of two types. There are monozygotic and bizygotic.
Monozygotic means that first there is one egg that is formed and that egg splits into two. Two zygotes are formed. It means the genes of both the twins are entirely identical, the whole genetic structure, because it is just one zygote which is split into two.
It is not that two sperms united, but one zygote split into two. So, when that happens in monozygotic twins, the whole genetic structure is identical. So, when the whole genetic structure is identical and if our behavior is entirely determined by genes, then the whole behavior of the two twins should be similar, but there are significant dissimilarities, huge amount of dissimilarities apart from the differences that are caused by upbringing.
Normally, the same parents are bringing up the child. So, there is not much difference in upbringing also. So, where does the difference in behavior come from? There is no answer in mainstream science for this.
Is it clear?