You’ve never had chocolate like this!
Willy Wonka
Here is something you won’t see every day!
‘You want to see some real Philosophy in practice—raw and fresh off the anvil?
—in which we explore Memory, Experience, Emergence, Language, Reason, Perception, Purpose, Belonging and the dichotomy of Knowing, and a little matter we call the Meaning of Life?
Then sit up, listen close and enjoy the Experience.
Experience
You have never actually seen a sunset. You have never heard a trumpet blowing, you have never smelled the smoke of a candle when it has just been blown out, you have never felt the cold wind on your face and you have never tasted honey.
Not really.
Actually, you have hallucinated all of it. Your senses picked up light and sound and other sensory information and passed it on as electrical signals and your brain did the rest.
None of us are able to engage directly with the actual world—we engage with the models we build of the world in our minds and our memories, which is never more than an incomplete inaccurate approximation. Factor in distraction and emotion and you get memories that can be as imprecise as they are incomplete.
In terms of what is really real or true about this world, we do not have the perception or the language to fully describe it, we can only say what it appears to be. What we could not perceive directly we evolved the habit of substituting with story, or metaphor.
For a start, we sort of edit out certain obstructions to our senses. Our noses are visible in our field of vision but our brains photoshop them out of the view. Our tongue has a taste in our mouth that is already there and was there this whole time, and we only notice it once someone points it out.
Technically, and intellectually we accept this is true, with one kind of ‘knowing’. But you do not live as if this were true, because of a second, different kind of ‘knowing’, which we derive from feeling—which we derive from experience. We may never have actually tasted honey or felt the bracing cold of splashed water on our face, we may never have heard the bell calling us to contemplation, but we have experienced it.
You have experienced the feeling of it, and we have built some shared language to describe it, to be able to call it something, and later recall it. Because of a shared resonance of feeling, we are able to recall, we are able to observe, from our second sense of knowing, that things feel like other things. Some music sounds sweet. Some words appear bitter. Some spaces feel cold, some warm. Some people have moods that we liken to stormy seas or sunshine. Feeling gives us experience, and experience gives us Language and Memory.
The limits of my language define the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Language and memory give us Metaphor & Analogy by which we build our frames of reference. Metaphor & Analogy is how we apply reason. Reason is how we apply Meaning to Life, and how we apply our senses of Purpose and of Belonging to our choices.
Remembering of course, that “Memory” means two related things, it pays to be clear. We use the same word to mean the information or experience that we store to be able to recall later, and it means also the capacity for doing so. Interestingly, both are an emergent property—the latter of life and the former of living.
For now, we are focussing on the former. When we say experience gives us language and memory, we mean the relevance that is stored, not how we arrived at the capacity to do so.
Without both these kinds of Memory, we would arrive fresh and naive in every moment, suffering the torment of raw experience with no context and no aim. Without memory, we could not integrate language and motor skills. Without memory, we would not know what to eat or where to find it. Without memory, we could not build relationships, tell stories, use tools, honour our dead or plan for our future. It is no wonder babies arrive seemingly so helpless and so unprepared for life, they have no memory of the life and the world they now belong to. Without memory, there would be no sense of congruence between one moment and the next—anything in life that requires us to think and act according to a process, or even anything that requires an appreciation of space, movement, and timing would simply not be possible. Some aspect of memory is in fact the only way we can be sure we are conscious at all because we have a continuous sense of awareness, something that would only be possible if we had the context of an earlier moment to support it.
Without memory, how can anything really have meaning?
This philosophical foray we’ve just been on together challenges conventional perceptions of reality, arguing that our experiences of phenomena like sunsets and tastes are not direct encounters with the external world but are constructed by our brains interpreting sensory data. We delved into the dichotomy of knowing, distinguishing between intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge, and highlighting the limitations of our sensory and cognitive systems. We considered the pivotal role of language and memory in shaping our understanding of reality. We posited that without memory, life would be an unintelligible sequence of incoherent moments, lacking meaning and continuity illustrating how these elements are crucial for reasoning, conceptualizing experiences, and finding meaning, thereby constructing a sense of purpose and belonging in our lives.
See! Now we’re doing Philosophy—right up in that motherfucker.
The Meaning of Life
What could be a bigger consideration than the Meaning of Life?
No sane person blurts out what “The Meaning of Life” is and expects to be believed or understood, being itself the pinnacle of that cathedral of many spires that the project of philosophy is ever trying to architect. It is the question—so much so that it gets capitalised like a movie title.
I can say it in one sentence, but I won’t—not here, not yet—it deserves better. As such, my own contribution to that effort is going to be the subject of another article, wherein we shall do more “Philosophy”. Forsooth!
Instead, we are going to explore how human beings derive meaning from anything at all—from all the efforts and experiences that define a human life. How I arrived at my conclusions, was by studying the current sense of meaninglessness and working my way backward from there. In one sense we can say that how we derive meaning must be described by what the projects of our lives are organised around. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs comes in handy here: From the bottom of the hierarchy upwards, the needs are physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. This five-stage model can be divided into deficiency needs and growth needs. From the bottom of the pyramid, the projects of our lives at least, would be about avoiding death and harm, getting stuff, having stuff and keeping it, finding connection and belonging to our loved ones and our communities, and finally chasing our star in the sky.
Even more simply put, it is Vitality, Empowerment, Connection, Belonging and Purpose.
The inverse of those things reads like a checklist of everything that is wrong with the world and what we have been taught to describe in terms of depression, anxiety, languishing and aimlessness.
What is Soul? Soul is what is missing when life feels wrong.
Soul is the human thirst and capacity for connection, purpose and belonging, from which we derive our vitality and creativity and our ability to renew and be renewed, from where we derive all meaning.
Soul is what is missing when life feels wrong.
How we define Meaning then, is via ‘Soul’.
There was a psychologist called James Hillman who followed in Jung’s footsteps, richly adding to the field of Archetypal psychology.
James Hillman said our job is not to grow up out of the world, but rather to grow down into it. If Spirit is the part of the tree that stretches into the sky and towards the light, Soul is the part below the surface, the branching roots and how their belonging to the world below, enable the whole tree to belong to life.
In archetypal psychology, the roots of the tree represent our shadow, our subconscious, the natural world and its cycles and phenomena, as well as our ancestors and our biological heritage. The key word for soul is Integration.
In archetypal psychology, the branches of the tree represent our aspirations, our ambitions towards transcendence. The key word for spirit is Actualisation.
The nature of soul is connecting, anchoring, belonging interfacing. What would connection and belonging mean without memory—what would purpose ever mean without it? What would even be the meaning of vitality without memory?
The Death of Forgetfulness
Imagine that this is how Life worked: Imagine that we lived full lives to the measure of our Fates, and at the end of it, we had to travel to the Underworld. And then imagine, based on the virtuous nature of your soul, not your deeds alone, but the nobility or virtue you may have done them with, less so by the deeds themselves, that your Fate in the afterlife would be decided. And imagine the best destination you could hope for, was to come to Elysium, a place so idyllic that it lent its name to “a state of great happiness; perfect and blissful.” And imagine the worst fate one could come to, was to drink from the river of forgetfulness, wherein the colour of your life is forgotten but not the shape of grief and longing that you might carry, and then be left to remain in that grey troublesome destination for eternity, as a shade, unable to escape, unable to change.
This was how the ancient Greeks processed their notions of mortality from a psychological perspective, and by that how they attached meaning to virtue. This was how their individual and collective conscience was arranged. This was how they derived motivation to live more virtuous lives, and thereby to pull themselves up from their bootstraps, to not be so quick to blame their Fate for their poor choices, choosing for themselves instead, something of a nobler destiny.
That being said, the notion of forgetfulness, the notion of oblivion, how that robs a life of all meaning, and the psychological terror that implied, was aptly identified in their mythology as something ominous and unwished-for. The Underworld was everyone’s inevitable destination, after death. Death itself was the door between ‘life’ and the ‘afterlife’, between which existed a veil of forgetfulness.
Memory is the ‘knowing’ we inherit from our past selves. Memory is the record of Experience. To relate to how the ancient Greeks perceived the world, we need to put ourselves in mind of their mind, we need to reason as they would have: “Since we have no ‘knowing’ of what happens beyond this Life, we must conclude that there is a barrier between this life and that, through which human ‘knowing’ cannot pass.”
In this way, we can imagine the idea that to forget is to die in a way.
Whatever the legacy value of experience might be, part of that has to be memory and knowing, which implies not just facts and details that can be recorded and tallied, but the psychological and emotional valence as well, which is where everything that matters in the end is measured. Without memory, information cannot have meaning—without the valence that we attach to facts and details, our histories become just the frozen facts we call information, whittled into shape by ideological or political narrative and coloured by the romantic fancy of the author.
According to Jung, “Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings—The subject matter of myth is the unconscious, not the world.”
In the Greek mythos, there was an elaborate geography to the underworld which served as a metaphor for the nature of our own psychologies that were shrouded in Shadow and veiled from normal waking perception and understanding. The Underworld was the domain that housed all the aspects and personifications of shadow, destruction, mortality and whatever we currently relate to that aspect of psyche.
The Underworld itself was a primordial personification called Tartarus. In the same way that the human psychology is an emerging, unfolding process, the mythology that described it via allegory, follows a similar path of emergence and unfolding. Across the progressive arc of Greek mythology, the resolution of Tartarus begins as a non-descript domain of shadow and incarceration and later is described in greater detail with separate domains, caves, rivers and a certain kind of ordering.
Reading the myths from beginning to end, we become aware the wider story being told is that of a progressive creation, whereby after the original primordial creation, different classes of beings establish different Orders of creation, in succession.
Chaos is the Zeroth Order. The First Order is presided over by primordial Ouranos, the lustful sky god that fathered the first Titans and Monsters, that rejected his offspring. The Second Order is presided over by the titan Kronos, who usurps his father by castration and banishment and establishes himself as Tyrant. The Third Order is established by Zeus, who outsmarts his father and forms the alliance we recognise as the Olympian Gods. The Fourth Order is the Age of Heroes. The Fifth Order is the Age of Kings where the myths run out and give way to our histories. Our histories are actually always part myth, but they attempt at least to stitch those legends and narratives to some kind of fact, about names and dates.
In each progressive order, we are introduced to different story arcs that weave together like threads, and in those threads, further complexity is subtly introduced. Following this meta-arc, the deities go from being primordial, to titanic, to simply capricious with very human scruples and vices and at each level more colour and tone and nuance of motivation are added to the archetypal characters.
This is the mythic device that gives us Helios as the Sun, the Titan that was the primordial and elemental personification of the Sun and how they were later placed under the rulership of Apollo, the Olympian God who drove the Chariot of the Sun. We can call the device Unfolding, which allows the mythology to be emergent, which according to Jung, allows our integration of our shadow psychology to be emergent.
In the same way, the underworld in Greek mythology is gradually provided with texture and context through the stories that entail encounters with it. As the gods and titans, the heroes and monsters play out their comedy and drama, their forays into the Underworld and their encounters with its denizens gradually add detail, topology and ordering.
Part of the ordering of the Underworld, was the existence of Five rivers, that flowed through it, serving different functions to the souls that were sent after death, to dwell, to endure their afterlife, in the Underworld. One of these was the River Lethe, whose name literally means “Forgetfulness” or “Oblivion”, which bordered Elysium, the final resting place of the virtuous, but flowed first through the Cave of Hypnos, the Deity of Sleep.
The River Lethe was part of a vast network that processed the souls of the dead into their proper places under the direction of the god Hades, god of the Underworld.
The idea was that the arriving souls would either drink from the water and lose all memory of their past lives, or would be conveyed along the river, and lose their memory along its course.
Applying Jung’s intuition, and our consideration of Memory as the draught from which we distil the essence of experience, we can infer that forgetfulness, was a kind of death of essence, of context and relationship to the way we might inhabit our present experience.
Huginn and Muninn
Norse mythology has rhyming archetypes and memes. Both versions have a pantheon of gods—the Greeks had the Olympians and the Norse, the Æsir, who in turn contended with the Titans and the Giants respectively. Both have a trio of sisters as old as the creation of the world, who preside over Fate.
One of the key differences is that where Greek mythology had Zeus installed at the head of the pantheon, with his lightning bolts as his weapons of office, the storm god in Norse mythology is an equally powerful god called Thor, who was the son of the king of the gods. The Allfather is called Odin, and rather than having a resumé typified by seducing nymphs and goddesses, Odin is best known for his wanderings through all the worlds and the extreme sacrifices he makes in his quest for Wisdom and Knowledge.
Because rather than being related to Zeus as Thor is, Odin is related to Hermes.
In one story, Odin sacrifices himself and pierced in the side by his spear, he hangs on Yggdrasil, the world tree, for nine days and nine nights in order to gain knowledge of other worlds to obtain the wisdom of the Runes. The sacrifice was necessary because the Runes would not reveal themselves without it—nothing for nothing—something must be given or endured to obtain something else of meaning.
In this tradition, the Runes are not ordinary letters of the kind used to communicate everyday matters in. They are the 24 sacred letters that were a part of the world, not crafted by men or gods, but came into being as creation and life unfolded, and whose knowledge granted the user mastery over the forces and forms of creation.
At the bottom of the great world tree, dwells the Norns, the three sisters of Fate, whose names were Urd, “what has been”, Verdandi, “what is becoming” and Skuld, “what shall be”. One of the sisters, Urd, whose name meant “what has been”, was the keeper of the fathomless well of Fate. “What has been” is an apt term for memory.
After the ninth night of hanging on the world tree, at the border between life and death, all the while peering into the depth of the well, the Runes at last revealed their secret forms to Odin, as well as the secrets that lie within them. Having fixed this knowledge in his formidable memory, Odin concluded his trial with a great cry of exultation.
Having been initiated into the mysteries of the runes, Odin recounted:
Then I was fertilized and became wise;
I truly grew and thrived.
From a word to a word I was led to a word,
From a work to a work I was led to a work.
“From a word to a word”—the way we build language and memory (in a tree).
In another story, Odin sacrificed his own eye, casting into the well of Mimir, guarded by his primordial uncle. Mimir was known for his wisdom, the source of which was yet another deep well at the root of Yggdrasil.
When Odin asked for a drink, he was challenged with the notion again, that for something exceptional to be gained, something valuable had to be given. In response, Odin tore out his eye and cast it into the well, after which he was granted a drink, through which he gained knowledge.
Ever after, Odin was called “One-eyed” for one of his eyes remained in the bottom of Mimir’s well, looking into the impenetrable dark where the secret knowledge of the world is found. To augment his vision, Odin commissioned a pair of ravens to fly between the world of men, and the world of the gods, to bring news and information to the All-father. Their names are Huginn and Muninn, which mean “thought” and “memory”.
What to Remember When Waking.
In traversing this rich territory of story, memory and consciousness, we acknowledge a profound truth: forgetting is akin to a subtle form of death, marking the loss of self and of whatever imparts meaning to our history. This exploration, rooted in philosophy, mythology, and psychology, highlights memory's essential role not just as a cognitive function but as the sacred keeper of our collective heritage and the meanings we derive from our existence. The critical insight here is the loss of connection to our past and the wisdom of our ancestors diminishes the richness of our identity and our understanding of the world.
Our world of modernity is fast-paced and overwhelming, filled with distractions and a narrow focus on the present. In this unfolding reality, remembering becomes a vital act. By preserving our collective memories—our mythos—we resist the erosion of meaning. This preservation is more than nostalgia; it's an active commitment to the depth and continuity of human life, ensuring our essence endures beyond the present moment.
The imperative to remember is fundamentally a call to engage with life's essence. It encourages us to safeguard the essence of our collective journey, honouring the legacies of our predecessors, as well as our own past selves, and integrating these narratives into our current and future existence.
Each act of remembrance counters the death of meaning. At the crossroads of memory and oblivion, choosing to remember ensures that the essence of our shared human experience continues to enlighten and guide future generations as well as our own future selves. In memory, we find not only the reflection of our collective soul but also the foundation for understanding, connection, and the realisation of our common humanity.
WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance. You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged. Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be what urgency calls you to your one love? What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk? —David Whyte
Invitation
In reflection, the essence of our experiences, so vivid yet so ephemeral, invites us to question the very nature of reality and our place within it. Our senses, those imprecise gatekeepers of perception, craft a world rich in detail yet fundamentally incomplete, a mosaic of experiences pieced together by the mind's interpretive weaving.
Memory can serve as both anchor and compass in our quest for meaning, bridging the gap between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknowable. It is in the act of remembering that we weave the tapestry of our identity, finding threads of continuity in the disparate moments of existence. Nevertheless, the spectre of forgetfulness is the only looming existential darkness we actually fear. That pending possibility reminds us of the fragility of this construct, urging us to delve deeper into the wellspring of collective wisdom preserved in mythos.
The ancient narratives of Greek and Norse mythology, their intricate explorations of fate, virtue, and the afterlife, offer a mirror to our own psyche. In this mirror is reflected the perennial struggle to understand the forces that shape our lives and our eternal struggle to define and defy the limits of what we can master and what we are helplessly subject to. These stories, via the inherent symmetry of symbolism and archetype in our psychology, underscore the importance of memory not just as a repository of past experiences but as a vital force that imbues our lives with meaning and direction. As we navigate the liminal spaces between memory and forgetfulness, we are reminded of the delicate balance that defines our existence.
The invitation, then, is not merely to remember but to choose wisely what we carry forward, discerning the lessons that hold the key to our growth and transformation.
We are invited to embrace the complexity of our being, to honour the depth of our experiences, and to forge a path that is both rooted in the wisdom of the past and open to the infinite possibilities of the future. How might we hold space for the memories that shape us?
A biography, a resume, a dating profile, or the short bio we attach to our work, are such staid and shallow encapsulations of the stories that define us, and such poor substitutions for the profound connections that bind us to each other and to the world around us. Conversely, there are too many of us and our interactions too brief and numerous to make space for each of us to tell our stories in a verbose way.
The profound implication is that our very essence, our soul, and the continuum of human experience are not only about understanding the world but about shaping it according to the wisdom we derive from what we remember and how we interpret those memories. This underscores the idea that from the fabric of our experiences and memories, we extract not just knowledge but a directive—a moral compass—that guides us towards living a life that is meaningful, purposeful, and ethically grounded. This connection between memory, meaning, and morality emphasizes the intrinsic value of reflecting on our experiences and the narratives we tell ourselves, highlighting the pivotal role of memory in not just preserving the past but in constructing a future that aligns with our deepest values and aspirations.
Memory is fundamental to how we derive Meaning and Forgetting is a kind of death.
Being mindful and discerning of what is worth remembering, how to distil vital essence from experience, and how to preserve that essence, is the domain of Mythos, and the language of symbols of archetype. How to articulate that essence and weave it in such a way that it might live on in the world, cherished and appreciated, is the craft and calling of the bard.
I promised you real Philosophy, and this, is how we get an “ought” from an “is”.