Is there a way that a person who knows how to read can become illiterate? I suppose maybe some kind of brain or neurological-damage probably would do it. But can you do it intentionally and selectively through some kind of esoteric practice and what would happen if you did it? Would your mind automatically revert to some other pre-literate format? Would you remember or forget all the information which had been encoded into your mind using written letterforms over the course of your whole life?

Maybe that’s like wondering if you forgot about needles, would they still be able to hurt you. Maybe it’s not like that at all.

This afternoon I was walking home from pizza and the bank considering a sci-fi fantasy world in which omnipresent surveillance was committed against citizenry by way of living creatures instead of cold mechanical cameras and audio recorders. Crows, in particular, came under my radar, or maybe I under theirs. It’s happened to me before that as I walked down a Seattle sidewalk a crow would squawk and try to chase me out of its territory by lingering overhead on powerlines and updating its location to track me out of its realm entirely.

Two crows began doing this to me today. One would fly ahead along the lines, and then wait perched until I stepped under it. The second crow would then fly forward and position itself a little ways ahead until I reached it, and then they would move forward again in concert. Precisely at the moment of my ponderings, one of the crows then dive bombed me from the back and I felt the brushing of its black wings against my head before it lumbered off to wait on a nearby rooftop.

I considered turning and giving it the finger, but thought better of it.

When I was a kid, about five years old or so, my family and I were at a hotel during a vacation or perhaps a cross-country move. We were all hanging out by the pool. Though I didn’t know how to swim, I could tell that the toy I held in my hand - a scuba diver - did know. So I threw him in and then jumped in afterwards to retrieve him, assuming his swimming mojo would rub off on me.

At this point in the memory, I more typically switch to a third person perspective and see myself descending into ultra blue sunlit water, a trail of bubbles commemorating my passage. The image is one of great peace for some reason, though its ultimate effects in my life have generally caused me to panic whenever I try to swim. And hence I have never learned.

I was talking about this yesterday with some friends over brunch, in light of an upcoming sailing trip I am supposed to take next month. And my friends decided they would try and do Reiki on me in order to help unlock that traumatic memory and overwrite it with a new and more useful one.

I don’t know if it worked, but as I was leaving I realized the whole thing had triggered for me a new understanding of how important moments in your life become frozen into shape. In particular I began to understand it by describing the “fight” I got into while in Northern California this past month. After having chased a bunch of belligerent kids off our porch, there is a moment in time flash frozen into my brain or my auric record or some shit. The lighting is all red in my memory, though I wonder if it was in real life, or if I was just “seeing red.” Maybe this is indicative of a strong chakra activation experience: red being the color associated with the root chakra, survival, etc. (Just as perhaps in the water incident above the blue light reflects choking, the closing of the throat chakra?) In any event, the moment features my internal camera facing directly south as two kids run off west towards the cemetery and two kids spring up in front of me, one close and on my right, the other some 8-10 feet off to his left. The one closest to me is reeling in for a ridiculously overplayed punch. They both look scared out of their minds.

I dreamt a few days ago about this young rascals again: that they came back or that we were in an alleyway. Their leader (the puncher) stood at the mouth of the alleyway and hurled a rock at me, which I promptly picked up and threw back at him. I then caught and pinned down two of his cohorts with their arms behind their backs and took them to the police station. I suppose that is some kind of subconscious progress towards dismantling and creatively transmuting the memories and pain captured into that flash-frame moment of my life.

Reviewing these two incidents through the lens of both energy healing and altered states of consciousness has allowed me to open them up a bit and recognize their great power in the configuration of my internal life. I think this is what they mean by “engrams” in Scientology:

Semon defined it as a “stimulus impression” which could be reactivated by the recurrence of “the energetic conditions which ruled at the generation of the engram.” … Engrams are said to contain all sensory perceptions, but are not directly available to the conscious mind, which is termed the analytical mind; engrams are considered to be formed when the analytical mind is not fully functional, in moments of physical pain and painful emotion.

Dianetics holds the engram to be the single source of all psychosomatic illness and aberrations of the human mind via the literal content of these engrams being imposed on to the analytical mind when similar sensory perceptions unconsciously recall the engram; this process is referred to as “keying-in the engram.”

Though I don’t have a copy of it in front of me, this also calls to mind some sections in that book “The Holographic Universe,” wherein author Michael Talbot explores the possibilities of memories being stored holographically. Based on my own recent experiences, these models of human memory and experience seem extremely accurate. Now I am figuring out how to go about making them useful. That is, how can I go back in and modulate elements within the frozen memory moments so that they are no longer frozen, and energy can flow in and out of them as it should, instead of getting stuck and reactivated when sensory and emotional circumstances are similar.

I have a feeling that these frozen moments end up creating for the vast majority of us unconscious life scripts which are acting out again and again without knowing. Probably the easiest place to see evidence of this within your own life would be in relationships - most often of the romantic nature - wherein you seem to be running through the same problems and patterns again and again without making much of any progress. Why does that happen? Isn’t it fucking annoying? L. Ron Hubbard believed these engrams getting built up in the mind were the ultimate source of all illnesses and personal problems. I guess it’s sort of like they clog up the pathways through which energy can travel within the mind and act as magnets or something, sucking you into these patterns again and again without much of any control or even any awareness that this is happening.

Scientology uses the process of auditing to identify these nasty hidden and explode them using various interpersonal techniques. Neuro-linguistic programming seems to use something similar as well, which they refer to as anchors:

An anchor is simply a stimulus that is linked to a physiological state. When the anchor is fired (the stimulus activated) the linked physiological state is triggered. …

Anchors in NLP can be created to both intentionally trigger a positive state and to actively neutralize a negative state. It’s a pretty interesting subject.

I also watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the other day, which in addition to being awesome also seems to deal with these subjects. I have to run at the moment though, so I will have to pick up these strands again some other time. Just wanted to blast these thoughts out there while I was having them…