Memory, identity and reincarnation - Lent 2022: Day 24

I'm in the kitchen, having lunch. The smell of buckwheat (kasza gryczana) and pureed beetroot - PAFF! for a second I'm back in my childhood, Croft Gardens, Hanwell. My mother would make this often, together with kotlety mielony (meatballs). Nothing unusual about a smell triggering a memory, albeit a memory from almost 60 years ago. Another aroma-driven flashback, triggered (unusually, given the frequency of this ritual) by a freshly brewed cup of morning coffee. Suddenly I'm back on Greys Inn Road, London, opposite the Eastman Dental Clinic, just before a tooth extraction. I'm aged 13 or 14, with my father. Because I won't be able to eat for a few hours, we go into a sandwich bar across the road for a pizza. A proper Italian pizza - for the first time in my life. And - a cappuccino coffee, also for the first time in my life. That moment of getting the coffee and the pizza (with mushrooms, tomatoes, cheese and herbs) suddenly flashed by. Why this flashback came that particular morning, when I have been drinking daily espressos for years, I don't know.

These are qualia memories, triggered by a sensory stimulus. The memories prove that I am the same person that experienced those same smells in childhood and adolescence. The interaction between complex molecules in the air and the neural pathways between my nose and brain must have been identical, causing the response.

How can you prove that you were you as a child? How do you know that the story's not made up, that it really did happen? Thinking about your childhood is not a daily occurrence - normal dipping in to the memory doesn't go back that far (today I tried to remember when it was that Trump flew into Warsaw - 6 July 2017 - that needed a prompt - and when Moni bought me that espresso machine for Christmas (was it 2012 or '13?). Reaching back into childhood memories is helped by artefacts; photos, children's drawings and physical objects from long ago. It's why we tend to hang on to such mementos.

My mother's childhood ended abruptly at the age of 12 when her family was deported to a lumber camp in the north of Russia; after seven years of wandering, she ended up exiled in London with no artefacts from her pre-war life. And yet into old age she'd report strong memories of that childhood - the Kresy village of Horodziec. She had clearly maintained her identity across those traumatic years without any extraneous memory aids. 

So here we are then - our childhood memories tenuous and yet strong. Not a molecule of your body from your childhood exists in you today; total churn happens every seven to nine years. Yet long-term qualia memory lingers. Long-term qualia memory as opposed to short-term operational memory (like where you left your car in the supermarket car park for example). Long-term qualia memories faithfully recall the precise subjective experience you felt in a historical instant of time.

 

The memories can be conjured up, summoned. They can be triggered by a sensory stimulus. Smell is powerful - the smell of damp towels and sun cream from a beach holiday long ago. A somatosensory sensation - the sense of touch - the sudden hit of frosty air as you walk out of the front door on a cold winter's day. Sight - gathering clouds above reminding you of a sky you've seen before. A song you've not heard for a while. 

But the qualia memory flashbacks that interest me most are the ones that are neither triggered nor bidden. They just suddenly PAFF! manifest themselves into your stream of consciousness.

They fascinate. I hold them in my mind for as long as possible, examining them - like looking at the structure of snowflake that's settled on the palm of your bare hand before it melts. The sudden moment of realisation, the recall, the perfect congruence of what your consciousness experiences now matching what your consciousness experienced then. The moment fades. But I smile - they are warmly familiar; pleasant moments that draw past and present together. My identity. Since last year's Lent, I've been identifying them and writing about them (Qualia compilations, here, here, here and here. And indeed here.)

Qualia memory flashbacks from childhood or adolescence are one thing, but the ones that fascinate me most is when I have qualitatively the same sensation - but it is not from my life. These experiences suggest experiencing subjective consciousness in the life before. These 'past-life' qualia memory flashbacks happen less frequently, but they happen often enough, recognisably, across my entire life, for me to be able to clearly identify and appreciate them.

They can happen indoors (the worktop in the kitchen a common place for them), or outdoors - often when seasons change, when the sky is blue, when the landscape around me is somehow reminiscent of America from the 1930s to the 1950s. They happen to me far more frequently in Poland than they did in Britain. And they happen to me far more frequently still in Jakubowizna than they do in Jeziorki. Again, the same sense of pleasant familiarity - spirit of place recalled - place, rather than events. [Events tend to manifest themselves through my dreams - last month I wrote about them here.] 

What do I deduce from these anomalous-memory events, which I call exomnesia ('memory from outside') or xenomnesia ('foreign memory')? They are suggesting to me that the experience of consciousness transcends biological life. But it's not a strong link to a past life; just flashes. Stripped of the ego - just like in qualia memories of childhood or adolescence - these are memories of purest subjective conscious experiences, rather than events. They are brief, they are generally weak and you have to be sensitive to them. But they are real - I've had these experiences all my life, certainly since the age of around four or five. They give me a sense of what a next life could feel like - a different biology, a different environment, a different ego - but a life sprinkled with these odd, anomalous, pleasant, familiar flashbacks to London in the second half of the 20th century and Warsaw in the first half of the 21st century. And the purpose of these flashbacks is to show that consciousness carries on, enriched by having lived previous lives; hopefully growing ever-wiser in understanding, slowly unfolding towards Unity in God.

Onwards into the second half of Lent!

[UPDATE 02.04.2022: An unsolicited taste flashback to the Eastman Dental Clinic - a very specific mouthwash, strong cinnamon taste, unlike the minty one at my local dentist - very precise expression of the qualia involved. I'm sitting in my room writing, and suddenly, with no triggers - PAFF! There it is.]

This time last year:
Glimpses into past lives?

This time two years ago:
Prophetic

This time four years ago:
New bus stop for Karczunkowska

This time five years ago:
"Jeziorki bogged down in railway mud"

This time six years ago:
Ideas, and how they take hold

This time seven years ago:
Russian eyes peering down on Jeziorki

This time 14 years ago:
The fate of urban wetlands?