Chapter 1: … Is a World of Constant Becoming

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While traveling in India during the mid-1980's, I spent a night in a cave with a holy man.  The cave was small, the size of about two large tents inside with a short, wide opening allowing for plenty of sunlight.  The hermit practiced the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Hinduism, as did his guru, Sri Ramana Maharshi, a famous early 20th century ascetic teacher in southern India.  

The holy man believed the world is completely an illusion.  That our physical senses are deceptive.  Our “real” identity is our atman (the reincarnating vessel) and its transition through repeated lives until the chain of reincarnation is broken through life practice and achieving complete unity with the universe (Brahman).

I had fetched a simple dinner for us to enjoy together as we sat outside the cave in the twilight of the day.  He had fresh goat's milk that was brought to him by a devotee each morning from the town at the foot of Arunachala, the holy high point where the cave was located.  I brought sweet rolls from the market below and a few other treats.  He was hesitant to accept my offer to share the meal.  Perhaps it was too lavish for his regimented ascetic life.  But he smiled and partook meagerly.  

His broken English was far better than my broken Hindi and we were able to converse in a simple almost child-like fashion.  At one point after the meal his eyes scanned the clear sky.  “Moon will soon be coming,” he said.  We each sat in the lotus position, silent.  Then he turned to me, smiling brightly, and asked if I knew the Bhagavad Gita.  I had, in fact, read the Gita before I came to India.  I nodded and smiled back.

His dark eyes seemed to shine brightly.  After a moment he asked if I would like to hear him recite part of the Gita.  Thrilled by the prospect I cheerfully accepted his offer.  He told me this would be one "chapter" before looking away from me out into nothing in the open sky above us.  The words were in Sanskrit, perhaps the world's oldest language, and flowed in wonderful rhythm.  

For the first time, I realized that the whole of the Gita was a poem.  In Sanskrit it rhymed.  My English translation was in verses of prose, so I just assumed...I was transfixed as he continued on for a couple of minutes.  I couldn't understand a word he was so poetically speaking.  His contented gaze returned to me.  I put my hands together prayerfully at my chest and bowed to him.  Then we were silent again.  

That moment made a huge impression on me.  Like a lightning bolt through time, it has remained with me all my life.  I was suddenly struck on a variety of levels about the nature of the ancient texts and the simple life of this man.  All of the stories from ancient times were orally told long before they were written down.   They were mostly stories that rhymed because it is easier to remember a poem or a song because it rhymes.

If you cannot write something down, the easiest way to remember it is to put it into a story or poem or song or chant.  This has been the foundation for memory techniques taught by self-improvement courses like Dale Carnegie for decades.  Got a grocery list to remember?  Make-up a story and use it as a “mental book-bag” to place your items into.  Use it every time, change the items as necessary, but keep the story the same.  

“A is on a horse riding to B because a C is threatening the life of D.”  Something like that.  It doesn't have to make much sense.  Create sentences that carry three or four items and simply change the items every time while telling the story the same way.  Knowledge placed in stories and rhymes is recalled far more accurately than memory by simple lists of associated items or facts.  Before writing, all human knowledge was placed into stories and songs or it would degrade and be forgotten through time.

There is no better example of this than the preservation of the Vedas, the most ancient Hindu texts, and the Mahabharata the world's longest poem of which the Gita is but a tiny part.  This is probably the oldest "ancient" knowledge still actively used today, predating the earliest parts of the Hebrew Bible by several centuries.  This massive amount of text was all conceived and, more importantly, remembered for centuries within an oral tradition.  

These texts are likely based upon even older oral traditions transformed by the rise of complex languages like Sanskrit or ancient Egyptian.  The importance of story to human memory lies in a closer look at the completely oral system established by the Brahmin caste of ancient India to ensure all of this knowledge was precisely remembered.

The Vedas collectively fill many volumes when written down.  Probably predating the written word, a strict system evolved to remember not just the words of the various texts but how the words are supposed to be emphasized and pronounced.  Certain words and phrases were intended to have emphasis some 3,000 years ago.  That exact emphasis had already survived many generations of oral transmission before writing.

The Mahabharata comes more recently, about 2,300 years ago, by which time there is writing and perhaps reflects the impact of writing.  Our brains were freed of remembering things so, initially, we invented things to take the place of this habitual pattern.  Epic poems of usually tragic, magical, heroic stories were created for the first time.  The “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” as Joseph Campbell famously termed this.  Human creativity exploded.  The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Mahabharata are examples of this.  The latter contains 200,000 lines, an ambitious memory exorcise in itself, beyond the Vedas.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of Hindus devoted their lifetimes to learning, reciting and then teaching hundreds of others to continue the telling.  Of course, no one (except perhaps for a random genius) would remember all the Vedas.  Each person learned a part and various groups of people were assigned different sections.  Every Brahmin was expected to possess a good general knowledge of the Vedas but certain individuals were required to remember verbatim the portion(s) each was assigned.  Moreover, different groups practiced different methods in their memorization.

Pathas, mnemonic techniques, were employed.  Some concentrated on the phrasing of each line/sentence.  Some worked on the phonics of the words.  Others would ignore that altogether and actually... pause... in... between... saying... each... word.  Giving equal weight to each word so that the root meaning of each was maintained.  Still others would work on chanting the texts in various ways such as repeating every third or fourth word in every line/sentence.  In this astonishing myriad of ways, the Vedas were (and still are) orally preserved without alteration through time.

This immense cognitive and linguistic effort cross-checked the accuracy of each successive generation's recitation of the texts ensuring its pristine replication.  Although humanity's oral tradition was universal, no other culture ever invented such a complex system by which so much could be remembered by so many so precisely for so long.  

The oral transmission of the Vedas and the Mahabharata was truly one of the greatest cognitive achievements of ancient humanity ranking up there with the Great Pyramids and Stonehenge.  Only this was not a cognitive achievement of geometry/astrology and massive brute strength.  This was an achievement completely inside the human brain using language to preserve precise sacred knowledge.

Generally speaking, this was the way all human knowledge was remembered for tens of thousands of years before the Vedic tradition even existed.  When we think of memory, most of us think about what we are doing tomorrow or what we did last week.  Or, if we need to remember certain facts, numbers, concepts and techniques.  But none of us has to remember everything.  The Vedas were completely remembered.  People have yet to grasp how important writing was to freeing the human imagination because it freed us from the mental weight of maintaining knowledge itself.

With writing, memory transferred knowledge itself from the brain to the page or tablet.  That knowledge was then preserved.  It no longer required us to tell it to each other in order to remember it.  It was still taught, of course.  But now from written words.  Generations would come and go and that page or tablet would still hold that knowledge for others to learn.  For the first time in human history we were free to forget important things.  Or, more accurately, we were free to make things important that had never been important before.

The invention of writing must have led to an explosion of human creativity.  It freed our brains to become more imaginative and not devote so much energy to remembering cultural knowledge.  The act of writing itself eventually led to a new way to be creative.  Our flex-brain naturally expanded once writing came along.  

Much of the hard-brain became obsolete once the stories were written down.  The importance of the stories remained hardwired, of course, but the brain was unshackled from orally remembering the past.  For the first time, human beings could plan for the future in novel ways.  Writing is the ultimate origin of individual human freedom.

Of course, all sorts of things are beyond your control, but, theoretically, you can create your actual future.  You cannot create your actual past, however.  It already happened.  It remains whatever it actually was.  This is a fundamental concern with how most people encounter time.  You might think that you can't experience the future before the past.  But what about the person who learned they have cancer last week?  Or an athlete training for a competition next week?

In both of these cases, the present moment is motivated by future time.  In the first instance, past time is perpetuated into the future because you don't know what the end result of your cancer will be.  The future of your cancer already consumes your life.  In the second instance future time pervades the present as you prep to compete.  You have already placed yourself into the competition by preparing for it.   

So while we might casually think of Time's Arrow as the past pushing the present into the future, in reality we actually play with the order in which we experience time.  Sometimes the future grips the present as much as the past.  Time is so flexible because, like many other things, human beings created time out of their incredibly complex and notional imagination. 

Outside of humanity, there is no such thing as "time."  There are seasons, of course, rocks move around in space at various speeds but an “hour” or a “year” is just something we made up for the convenience of understanding physics.  Time is a mutually accepted hallucination, like many other things: money and corporations and nations.

Nevertheless, in terms of physics, Time's Arrow holds true for most of humanity.  The present comes from the past.  The past preservers through the present into the future.  Hence, the vast majority of human beings bring precedence and tradition into the present, keeping it alive through various highly-valued social, political and cultural rituals, songs and stories.  

This is a fundamental source of mass trauma in human society today.  Because the stories of past knowledge no longer keep up with the acceleration of technological change and the intermingling of technology with our brains, our bodies and our environment.  Overwhelmingly, human meaning remains narrative-biased (toward existing patterns in culture and behavior) more so than science-based.  Human beings are still better at remembering things through stories.  But stories did not make technology.  Science did that.  

The change that is happening is scientific/secular change.  To that extent, the Western Enlightenment is not something that happened four or five centuries ago.  It remains a current project.  And the faster it continues to become, the more the psychological past or simply standing still means you are moving backwards, past-shifted.  

This is the disorienting nature of the trauma.  It seems as if the future is flowing away from us but, in reality, technology places us already in the future and most of us are psychologically unable to keep up with the consequences, intended or not.  This creates all kinds of crazy human behavior.  The riot upon the US Capitol.  Accepting NFTs as “real.”  Equal outcome.  Virtual porn.  Tearing down statues en mass.  The emotional need for assault weapons.  Evangelic rage.  

This is the critical crisis of our time.  For at least 100,000 years we had to tell stories to preserve knowledge.  These habits of mind are hardwired into most human brains.  This is the source of the world's anxiety and anger.  We have yet to embrace that the experience of memory and time as story no longer applies.  

Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead.”  What he meant was that the stories of the past are irrelevant in a world of accelerating change.  Instead of old stories (which now, ironically, lead to nihilism) we are living in a world of constant becoming.  Nietzsche called this “falling in love with becoming.” (page 266)  Every day is an opportunity for us to discover something important that was never important before.