Memories of infancy and prebirth

[Flickering]

Last night I lit up a joint while reading from a child psychology textbook. I was just starting on the introductory chapter, and as the mild hallucinogenic effects kicked in, I started to imagine what it would be like to be the infant they were describing. Suddenly an image of the surreal, profound world in that state came to me, and I understood what it would be like to know nothing.

And I falter here because it would be almost impossible to describe, because it is a state that is beyond description. Yet it is immediately familiar to us when we glimpse it. We have all come from this same place. Your self was there, in an utterly untempered form, and there was one everlasting moment. Each experience was the first, they were the original riddles through which you figured out how things worked on the most basic level. Every thing in this world that we now consider mundane was once as dazzling as the depths of a DMT experience. And slowly, with our genius intelligence, we started to piece the patterns together into something we could understand, and interact with.

I tried to take it back before birth, my imagination now in the full creative light of marijuana... From that point on it was strange in a whole other way. I tried to imagine the beginning, in the dimmest possible state of consciousness. This was the origin of the soul. And I began to see the body as a window for a much higher being, a being who became more and more absorbed in the illusion the more it peered in, until it was a human who had been born and now fully associated itself with its body. In other words, what the Hindus might call incarnation. And what we consider to be the full breadth of our reality and experience is in fact just another layer of awareness on top of this greater being, a layer that begins at the moment of origin.

These weren't memories, per se. But I found the vividness of it compelling. The conclusion my mind came to when I asked what was in the void before consciousness. The way I got such a distinct impression of the world before knowledge of it, as though its nature was imprinted on the deepest layers of my mind.

Has anyone else had experiences like this, especially relating to infancy? How do you understand it on a spiritual or philosophical level?

 

[alasdairm]

i have the most vivid memories of the cuban missile crisis. i recall the tv reports, the general unease of my parents, an almost palpable awareness that the world was on the brink of something fundamentally devastating.

it happened 5 years before i was born.

alasdair

 

[herbavore]

When I was 19 I had a friend that was 82 and another that was 90. In both cases they were losing their cognitive ability to hold information and so they would repeat the same story or ask the same question within a short span of time without any recognition of the repetition; but in both of them, memories from early childhood became more and more "where they lived". While these memories were not from infancy, it was striking how the recent memory was failing and it was as if the older memories now could return in the newly opened space within. When my friend's Dad was in the middle stages of Alzheimers he could neither remember or recognize his wife or his children but his daily companions were his deceased parents and his siblings as they existed when he was very young.The silver lining to dementia IMO-provided your earliest memories were not of trauma or neglect.

I certainly believe that we have stored, somewhere in our subconscious, our first experiences with the sensations and sounds in utero. Before consciousness? That I could not speak to but I enjoyed reading your experience.

 

[Foreigner]

I've had vivid memories of the 70's since I was a kid even though I wasn't alive during then. Whenever infomercials came on TV selling those compilation disks of your "favorite 70's artists", I would get this weird nostalgia and longing, but I was only 5 years old. One time my mom was going through her closet and tossing out old stuff, and she had some ancient clothing pieces from the 70's in there. I asked her why she wasn't still wearing them because "it's how all the women dress", thinking it was still that era.

I was a weird child.

 

[Belisarius]

I've had what I consider to be past-life experiences: they were both brief, almost snapshot-like recollections of a single intense moment. The weirdest recent event,though, was going through Eugene, Oregon, on a road trip. I'd never been there before, and spent only a night in a hotel, but the place felt intensely familiar. It wasn't déjà vu in the sense that I knew things I shouldn't have known; I described it to a friend that it was more like walking back into your living room after a long, exhausting day. It was an intensely eerie experience I didn't feel in any other town or city I visited on the trip, or on any other trip for that matter.

 

[StoneHappyMonday]

Last night I lit up a joint while reading from a child psychology textbook. I was just starting on the introductory chapter, and as the mild hallucinogenic effects kicked in, I started to imagine what it would be like to be the infant they were describing. Suddenly an image of the surreal, profound world in that state came to me, and I understood what it would be like to know nothing.

And I falter here because it would be almost impossible to describe, because it is a state that is beyond description. Yet it is immediately familiar to us when we glimpse it. We have all come from this same place. Your self was there, in an utterly untempered form, and there was one everlasting moment. Each experience was the first, they were the original riddles through which you figured out how things worked on the most basic level. Every thing in this world that we now consider mundane was once as dazzling as the depths of a DMT experience. And slowly, with our genius intelligence, we started to piece the patterns together into something we could understand, and interact with.

I tried to take it back before birth, my imagination now in the full creative light of marijuana... From that point on it was strange in a whole other way. I tried to imagine the beginning, in the dimmest possible state of consciousness. This was the origin of the soul. And I began to see the body as a window for a much higher being, a being who became more and more absorbed in the illusion the more it peered in, until it was a human who had been born and now fully associated itself with its body. In other words, what the Hindus might call incarnation. And what we consider to be the full breadth of our reality and experience is in fact just another layer of awareness on top of this greater being, a layer that begins at the moment of origin.

These weren't memories, per se. But I found the vividness of it compelling. The conclusion my mind came to when I asked what was in the void before consciousness. The way I got such a distinct impression of the world before knowledge of it, as though its nature was imprinted on the deepest layers of my mind.

Has anyone else had experiences like this, especially relating to infancy? How do you understand it on a spiritual or philosophical level?

I always start from a point of cynicism. As I did reading your post. I rarely get beyond that point. But I did with your post. As herbavore says, it was an enjoyable read, and one that I can relate to.

Alasdair's I see as a created memory, not a true one. False memory syndrome if you like. Our memories are strange phenomena.

I'm not sure about herbavore's senility thoughts either. I have a theory that these brilliantly vivid memories senile people have of their childhood, while not being able to state what they had for dinner five minutes ago, are false memories too. Who is around to challenge them? You wore a blue dress on May 25th 1926 did you? With spots? And Uncle Fester pushed you on a swing? Well where's the proof? Who can corroborate it? Why should we believe what someone states is true, is true, just because they state it with conviction?

I don't believe in past (or future) life. I have no memories of past life. I have no memories of anything in this life before...three years old? Two at a push? And even then I'm uncertain. It seems like wishful thinking to me. The need to make sense of that which we have no sense of. Sometimes I think accepting our fallibility is the ONLY way.

However. I've always been intrigued as hell that we apparently cannot remember those earliest memories. Nothing before two years old? Is that a defence mechanism? (Who wants to remember the birth canal? Seems pretty scary to a claustrophobe like myself.)

However it's always intrigued me that we cannot remember our earliest memories. Perhaps it's in the same manner we cannot remember a ketamine trip. In that it comes from a different consciousness. Perhaps. Maybe. Just my 2 cents. Etc.

 

[Flickering]

I found all these memories interesting but this ^^^ was most in line with what I was getting at. I don't believe in past or future lives either, though I'm willing to entertain the possibility that it's possible to pick up events that happened to someone else on a superconscious level where there's no difference between you and me. I think the ketamine analogy is a promising one. This state of mind is something I intend to meditate on, see how far I can go with it. Words cannot describe how surreal an image my mind's eye turned the world into when I saw it through the mind of an infant. The same external environment, but a completely different way of interpreting it. I think it may have shifted the way I view reality permanently.

 

[Flickering]

Wanted to bring this back up in light of some recent findings of mine.

However. I've always been intrigued as hell that we apparently cannot remember those earliest memories. Nothing before two years old? Is that a defence mechanism? (Who wants to remember the birth canal? Seems pretty scary to a claustrophobe like myself.)

I asked a neurologist about this. The brain does not develop the capacity to store conscious memories until around the age of two or three. In my own case, I can recall things back to eighteen months, which scientists tend to claim is impossible. To me though this seems like circular logic - it assumes some brains cannot develop prematurely - and I've had several of these memories confirmed by my mother.

However it's always intrigued me that we cannot remember our earliest memories. Perhaps it's in the same manner we cannot remember a ketamine trip. In that it comes from a different consciousness. Perhaps. Maybe.

This seems to me like a psychological explanation of the same phenomenon. When I took LSA last week, my awareness expanded far beyond my little primate body. But when I returned to baseline consciousness, my human brain could only actually process so much of it. I've been struggling ever since to try and articulate the experience. I intuit that, indeed, the same is true for infant memories.