There are different ways to define memories. Psychoanalysts say that there is long-term memory and short-term memory. Long-term memory is different to short-term memory. You can know what you had for breakfast today, maybe tomorrow you will remember what you had for breakfast yesterday. One month later you won’t remember what you had for breakfast on this date. This is one type of memory. It will remain with you, yet as the same thing is repeated again and again, the previous memories will be lost and the recent memories will be retained. That is one level.
Another level is the long-term memory. You travel to a place, say you come to the ashram and you are here for a week, ten days, one month; you see everything, you know everything. When you come back after three years, you will recognize things, ‘Yes, this colour was like that, the floor was like that, the room was like that, the buildings had a green colour.’ It will come back. At home, if you try to recall this you will not be able to. When you see something again, everything will come back, ‘This has changed; yes, I remember it like this. It was like this before.’ These are what we call the passing memories that deal with the daily routine.
Then there are other levels of memories like a sunrise that you recall which you have seen only once in your lifetime and never again. You can recall the beautiful sunset when the clouds took on different coloured hues and you said, ‘This is a picture postcard image.’ That sunset won’t come back again, it won’t be repeated again tomorrow, yet the image will be retained. Whenever somebody says, ‘What was the best sunset that you have seen in your life?’ then even twenty years later you will recall, ‘Oh, I saw one sunset. The clouds were like this, the sun was like that, the colours were like this.’ You will describe the sunset in detail.
Elderly people recall their childhood, the time they lived before the age of fifty. The time they lived after the age of fifty will become more shrouded in mist, yet the earlier memories will be sharp, precise and focused. That is why people say that the elderly go into their second childhood. They recall everything of their childhood and they behave as a child, for that is the strongest memory.
Then there are memories in the form of impressions; they are not visual but imprints. Something that your parent might have told you when you were young. ‘Don’t speak lies. Always tell the truth,’ is a sentence that sticks with you and for a long time you will remember it. ‘My father once said to me’ or ‘my mother once said to me’, those sentences will come out. They are not visual, they are more verbal and they are also memories. If you have a fight with somebody, you will remember the abuse for many years to come and all the good words said in an appreciative way will be forgotten. Twenty years of appreciation and one day of fight – which will be highlighted in your mind? Not the twenty years of goodwill but one day of strife.
These impressions are retained by the mind in the form of archetypes. When yoga speaks of clearing the memory, it is the memories which define your attitude, your behaviour, nature and mentality. Yoga deals with memories which are building blocks of human personality, not with the immediate memories or short-term and long-term memories. When Sage Patanjali says chitta vritti, people define that as ‘modification of mind’. They don’t realize that Patanjali has said chitta vritti which is not mind. If Patanjali meant mind, he would have said manas vritti. Manas vritti is the mental vritti, yet he uses the word chitta vritti which is deeper than manas.
There are four aspects: manas, the reflective cognitive mind; buddhi, the logical mind; chitta, the impressionable mind; ahamkara, the egotistical mind. It is the impressionable mind where all the impressions have been collected and stored which has to be cleared. It is the impressions of the mind that determine your attitude, behaviour, personality, way of thinking, optimism, negativity, your hope, happiness, anxiety and insecurity. Everything will be defined by the chitta memories, not by the short or long-term memory.
The approach to memory is different from the yogic perspective. We think of memory as one function of the mind; however, memory is not one function of the mind. There are many types of memories. You can deal with the memories of yesterday, the day before yesterday, one year ago, two years ago. How do you deal with those impressions and memories which you do not even recall, recollect, and realize that they are there in chitta? They come up from the unconscious mind. Short and long-term memories come up from the conscious mind, like ‘I know what I have eaten.’ The memories of the impressionable mind come from the unconscious. People go through traumas in early childhood. Many times they do not even know that they have gone through a trauma, yet that situation has affected their life later on.
13 March 2023, Bihar Yoga Traditional Teaching, Ganga Darshan, Munger