Forget-me-not

An episode of Outlander I recently watched brought to mind an odd virtue that is not in any standard lists of virtues. I found it when researching scriptural references to virtues from different faiths for  the board game I created in 2013 called "Heart to Heart." The virtue is MEMORY.

In early Buddhist teachings, sati, a term that means awareness or mindfulness, is rooted in the concept of the active exercise of memory.  It is a concept based on the 'aggregate of perception' (saññā) that allows us to make sense of the world by recognizing, identifying, and conceptualizing our sensory experiences.  A thorough examination of these ideas is outside the scope of this blog... if you want to learn more about memory as a virtue in Buddhist thought, here are a couple of resources.

Although more than a century has passed since the concept of a spacetime 'continuum' was perceived by Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein, we still think of space as something physical/tangible, and of time as something intangible.  At least I do! It's hard to break out of that box. There's something of this idea of a separation between the intangible and the tangible in Luke chapter 12 verse 25: "Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to your life?" (or, "a single cubit to your height?")

Put that way, it seems laughable indeed that our thoughts might affect our physical reality, but research has shown a certain uncanny alignment between thought and action.  About nine years ago (it seems like much more), I read "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool.  Peak debunks the oversimplification of 10,000 hours as a golden standard (first made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which I also read). It emphasizes deliberate practice—highly structured, feedback-driven, goal-oriented training methods—as the real driver of elite performance and highlights the role of strong mental representations—that is, using imagery and cognitive rehearsal to deepen learning beyond physical action.

The following quote from "Peak" explores how this mental imagery works (it isn't merely thinking about doing something that counts). The emphasis is mine.

"If you teach a student facts, concepts, and rules, those things go into long-term memory as individual pieces, and if a student then wishes to do something with them—use them to solve a problem, reason with them to answer a question, or organize and analyze them to come up with a theme or a hypothesis—the limitations of attention and short-term memory kick in. The student must keep all of these different, unconnected pieces in mind while working with them toward a solution. However, if this information is assimilated as part of building mental representations aimed at doing something, the individual pieces become part of an interconnected pattern that provides context and meaning to the information, making it easier to work with. As we saw in chapter 3, you don’t build mental representations by thinking about something; you build them by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over. When you’re done, not only have you developed an effective mental representation for the skill you were developing, but you have also absorbed a great deal of information connected with that skill.”

You can find more quotes on GoodReads.

I thought you might like to revisit the song "Never My Love." When I looked it up (I wondered if Ringo Starr had a connection to it, but apparently not), I found that one of the members of The Association, Larry Ramos Jr, was the first Asian American to win a Grammy Award.  Apart from the obvious connection to a love that travels through and transcends intangible Time, I wonder if that small fact had anything to do with why the producers of Outlander chose that particular song? 

One other small thing that stuck with me during that episode was a brightly orange orange (fruit) featured in Claire's mind's eye.  She saw it later on in the episode as well, after she had been rescued, when she decided she would "do no harm" to the man who had hurt and almost killed her.  I have a personal association with orange (the color). To me, it symbolizes safety, goodness, and rescue from the dangers that are a part of life. Also, intelligence (as in mindfulness), because it's the color of the robes worn by Ananda Marga monks. I had asked one of the Dadas (the term for male monks) why orange, and that is what he said. Intelligence, although the Internet says the orange robes symbolize "enlightenment, purity, and detachment from material possessions in Buddhist traditions." 

I suppose it's all the same, come to think of it! If the purpose of life is enlightenment, and if mental imagery (an important method of using our intelligence) can help with that, then intelligence, memory, illusive time, and a higher purpose are surely intricately aligned.