Our apathy towards benign moments has made simple yet vital acts like breathing lose their place in our memories, and thus, in time. Turning our minds inward is an intuitive act – as if as fast as you can conjure a thought, your body can flip outward, exposing flesh and blood. It is an act that you did not learn on your own, your body taught it to you.
It taught you so that you can greet your rising chest, your blood’s flow; and your nerve-packed fingertips. It taught you so that you can check in with yourself.
We’ve been taught to only remember occurrences – things that happen – and as such human history shows us how flawed memory is. The 1983 French travelogue documentary by Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, is a mind-bending work that serves as a meditation on the nature of human memory, revealing our systematised inability to recall the context and nuances of memory, and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories is affected. It is a series of uneventful shots weaved together by mundane thought-like poetry.
An opening line translates to only banality interests me now.
Why are the lives that precede our current bodies so poorly remembered? Perhaps it is because stories and memories need to be woven together by those things that do not happen. By inviting the parts of our lives that exist in constant states of flow, like our senses, in. While sensuous knowledge is key to ensuring our collective and environmental wellbeing, it is also key to living a fuller life of presence at the individual level. This seemingly spiritual thought is backed by science; state-dependent memory is a phenomenon whereby people remember more information if their physical or mental state is the same at time of encoding as at the time of recall. This is especially true during organic states of consciousness such as mood. However, it is also believed that sadness can move through generations and that what we ate a thousand years ago can shape our hungers of today. How can biting into a fresh peach evoke nostalgia? Is it because of a thousand-year-old memory? Perhaps this is a sign that positive change requires us to begin making space for the senses as we collectively tell the news - so that the history books might one day be remembered more like a sacred and intimate memory.
But there are times and places where what exists at the margins of being noticed are viewed as sacred.
We give little thought to the fact that we are breathing constantly and effortlessly (and would likely go mad if we didn’t). Yet, in the late Vedic and post-Vedic Sanskrit texts that contributed to the emergence of Hinduism, the Upanishads, there are numerous statements and illustrations of the greatness of Vāyu – the God of Breath. In it, there are stories of the gods that control bodily functions once engaging in a battle to determine who among them was the strongest. One by one the deities took turns leaving the body, but the human was capable of living on (though successively impaired in various ways). Finally, when the forgotten Vāyu began to withdraw, the other deities were immediately weakened. Resultantly, the deities realised that they can function only by the gentle power Vāyu.
Advaya Takes You Outside offered me a chance to sit with banality. Like an out-of-body experience, I began to feel the labour of my bodily functions - blood flow and heartbeat - working in a way similar to the ecosystem that surrounded me. I quickly realised that I walk past the same oak tree every day, yet have never introduced myself; I share my window with the same song birds all summer, yet regard them as if they’re freshly restocked ornaments every morning. Why are we so disconnected from our inner and outer surroundings? Why are we such strangers to the world? When we begin to recognize the gentle power of the benign, when we begin to surface the things that have long existed at the margins of memorable to society, only then will we be able to move into a future where we exist as an ecosystem that does not forget because of something as fickle as time.
