Our entire lives consist of learning. Early on in life we learn to crawl, stroll and jog, then we may learn certain historical facts and mathematical equations for school, and as we grow we learn various aspects of our social and cultural existence such as knowing which fork to use with the salad course or that underwear probably doesn’t make a very good hat. Learning, though, doesn’t necessarly equate to becoming more aware and conscious. We can all learn destructive or dysfunctional patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving which lead us far away from evolving as a person and as a species. The organ of the brain most responsible for learning is the hippocampus. The hippocampus is connected to learning via its function of storing memory. In order to learn one has to remember. In order to be awake and conscious one has to remember. In order to acquire higher cognitive and emotional functions one has to remember.
The hippocampus is located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain and is a part of the limbic system and circuitry of emotion. The word hippocampus is Greek for “Seamonster” or “Seahorse.” I imagine myself standing on the shores of Loch Ness and shouting to passersby, “Hey, did you see that huge slithery Hippocampus over there?” The Scottish people on the shore would turn to me and say, “Pipe down you crazy American nutjob!”
In a prior chapter on free will and choices I wrote that the hypothalamus was responsible for the ego and false personality formation. Upon further reflection of the symbols of the hippocampus, and its functions, it seems I may have miswrote slightly. The culture we frolick in plays a crucial role in limiting us to a hypthalamic expression of ego identities based on primary human drives of sex, rage, indifference, consumption and eating and drinking. It is the hippocampus, not the hypothalamus, however, which formats the context of our experiences and memories in accordance with societal norms and programs. The hypothalamus is simply doing its job, problem is the hypothalamus shouldn’t be in absolute control of our spiritual life, that is if we want to have one. We are supposed to be awake at the helm of our hippocampus, so when we encounter distorted and dehumanizing cultural influences, we can balance their deleterious effects with study, research and awareness not just anger.
In mythology and art the hippocampus is associated with two well known symbols: Pegasus, the winged steed of Perseus who slew the hideous Medusa, and the Hippocampi who were fearsome sea monsters with the body of a sea horse, two front legs and the hind quarters of a dolphin. These two diverse symbols relate to how the hippocampus functions in each of us. Are we able to apply awareness to our memories and thus ride Pegasus to slay Medusa, who is the false personality of ego identities, or is our hippocampus a hypothalamic sea monster which will rise up from the depths of our own Loch Ness and end up devouring us with its addictive power hungy ways? The choice is ours.
I like to think of the hippocampi as my very own university of higher learning. I call it U of J or University of Joe. My mascot is a butterfly, a tough butterfly though, with lots of muscles, tattoos and a three day growth of stubble. When I go back through my memories of all my childhood programs its like packing my bags and heading off to U of J. Through perusing my various past shenanigans I hope to learn more about myself, why and who I am, what are my repeating patterns of distorted behavior, and what work is absolutely necessary to be undertaken. Learning doesn’t come easy and, as in college, there is no cheating. Cheating when it applies to memory work means mentally defending yourself, or your ego, when one clearly needs to honestly and critically assess one’s role and responsibility in engaging in self-limiting or self-destructive behavior. The ego thinks that memory work is all about judgment and punishment, when delving into memory should really be about awareness and responsibility for one’s health and well being.
Let’s further contemplate the concept of the hippocampus as a university on a societal level. If we go to a university to improve our mental and intellectual capacity, then it is our goal to strive to learn and improve so we will eventually be qualified to go out and be a productive member of our community. If our university, or hippocampus, is focused on hypothalamic concerns then the things we are most qualified to participate in are excessive partying, the military, being a pole dancer, being on the Jerry Springer show, becoming a Hollywood producer or starring in a reality television program. Now, imagine everyone else in the country having similarly slanted hippocampi and what sort of society are we going to end up with?
We have two hippocampus or hippocampi on each side of our brain. These two hippos may look the same, but boy are they functionally and energetically different. If we look at the body we can see the principle of mirrored images built into our anatomy. We have two hemispheres, or halves of our body, such as the the pinky toe on the right foot is similar to the pinky toe on the left foot and our right knee is similar to the left one. Nifty.
Looking the same is not necessarily being the same. In considering our energetic hippocampic selves we need to become familiar with both masculine and feminine qualities. The differences in anatomical structures, which may appear similar, is rooted in the feminine energy of creativity, openness, rejuvenation, spontaneity and expansiveness and masculine energy of logic, systems analysis, hierarchy, structure and self involvement or contractiveness. The two energies of feminine and masculine are at work throughout our body and being and also in our hippocampi. Learning and memory when it involves simply masculine left brained pursuits is when our nature spirals down into a purely hypothalamic existence of anger, sex and aggression. Learning and memory when it is overly feminine means descending into a hypothalamic existence of endless victimization and depression. Balance means nurturing the nature of the whole and sifting through our memories to determine where and how one or the other of our masculine or feminine natures was reprogrammed or damaged.
The primary function of the hippocampus is to structure and store memory. There are different types of memory such as spatial, procedural, cognitive, long term, short term, associative and facts and figures based memory. During REM Sleep we’re not just fluttering our eyelids, and dreaming happy dreams, but are busy consolidating memories in our hippocampus. As the night lengthens and our snooze deepens, the hippocampus is hard at work fusing our life choices and experiences into a spatial, temporal, memory map which results in our perspective or picture of our inner and outer realities. It is this picture of reality which we then apply to our day to day existence so that we know how to weave our car in and out of rush hour traffic, when to take our medications and what those medications are for, and how to respond or react in every social, intellectual and emotional situation we may encounter.
All this remembering should help one to develop a significant knowledge base which should guide them through most of life’s hairpin twists and turns. Knowledge of one’s self and one’s surroundings should become a foundation for assembling a cogent, clear and accurate representation of reality. However, as we are conditioned our entire lives to accept and embody a version of reality which is distorted, manipulated and which substitutes lies for facts, we place our selves and our health at peril.
We are, as a species entirely stage managed, from birth until death, so that we can never completely assemble an accurate picture of reality. Yes, we may solve a problem or two, or find three pieces of the puzzle, but as our education is entirely specialized and not conducive to critical thinking, and our food, air, water and information are poisoned, and we are also lorded over by psychopathic corporate entities which know no national boundaries, exhibit no true patriotism and are cruel and inhumane to the extreme, we are left with little else to do but pray and try to keep up. Think about the flow of money. On a personal, class, national and world level who is money flowing from, and who or what is money flowing to?
Disease enters into our bodies and our hippocampus every single day in the form of lies. Every time we believe a lie, and incorporate it into memory, over making the effort to sincerely discover what is truly happening we jeopardize our health and well being. Let’s take television for example, how does television effect one’s hippocampus? Your hippocampus is supposed to store YOUR memories of YOUR experiences so that YOU can gain an accurate perception of reality.
Watching television, and yes even the purported history and public t.v. channels, is one big distortion. One gains an entertainment history, entertainment religion, entertainment romance, entertainment political view and all of this programming once again incorporated into YOUR memory without a modicum of awareness or discernment. It’s not even YOUR life, but it sure as heck feels intimate enough to be your life, as television is smack dab in our livingrooms and bedrooms.
Since we have never been taught actual critical skills we fall back on our ego/hypothalamic identities to decide for us whether or not we “like” something, are “afraid” of something or agree with some issue as that issue “feels” good to us. This liking and feeling is not expert intuition or true critical skills even though it may seem like it. Real intuition is a tightening of the gut so intense that you definitively know the truth, and all of a sudden a comprehensive thought dawns on you about the nature, magnitude and scope of the lie. It's a real AHA moment. Intuition doesn’t stem from likes and dislikes, but from a rather deeper pool of connections of having researched and studied widely, diversely and with discernment and knowing how one’s childhood programming propensities enter into our thoughts so as to distort our view of the truth and reality.
PAST LIVES LIVED, LESSONS LEARNED?
Autoimmune disease begins with not protecting one’s self with knowledge and critical thinking and then following through with the appropriate behavior. From our lack of awareness we stumble into various situations which confirm our world and inner views. Now, throw some karma, or what I like to call nature’s equilibrium, into the mix and we are really in a pickle. I’ll give you some general examples from my own past lives and how they apply to this one I’m living now. The hippocampus, by the way, does contain the memories of every life you have ever lived and everything you have ever done only most of us don’t possess the skill and energy necessary to access it all. If we work diligently through this life and its programs, then past life issues will emerge in a natural fashion when we are psychologically and bio-chemically able to handle them. Past life memories should not try to be induced artificially with halleucinaginic assistance. Ever.
In a few of my past lives I was in the military, not an uncommon profession in the past just look at how many people today are employed by the military. In this particular past life I was a gay man in charge of various troops during the Crusades and belonged to an order which placed very severe restrictions on troop morality and sexual hijinks. Of course it being the military, and filled with hunky masculine men, there were bound to be curious overtures of the I'll show you mine if you show me yours sort. If I was to stay in charge of my troops, it was the crusades after all, I certainly coudn’t be in any way, shape or form seen as feminine or vulnerable. I had to behave as a masculine, aggressive, decisive leader and certainly not someone who would lust after men. I also could not allow my troops to be morally decrepit either and harsh punishments for those who flouted moral standards were commonplace.
In another life I actually guarded the Pope and was part of his personal body guard. Yep, a gay man guarding the pope how screwed up is that? Like any closeted gay man in the military, I compensated for my lack of coming to truthful terms about my true nature, by being extremely good at my job which was raiding, pillaging, conquering, and lecturing. I certainly got my comeupance in that life as eventually I was betrayed, tortured and burned at the stake by my “friends.” Kind of funny that life, makes me chuckle now that the flames aren’t slowly roasting me alive. A gay man protecting the Pope, that's funny if it weren't so twisted.
In this life I grew up in and around the military having as a child and adolescent lived in New Mexico. I never joined, even though my father and family wanted me sign up, so at least that’s a first step in the right direction. The pressures of military mindedness certainly did play a part in my inability to stand up for who I was and be accepted as a healthy normal individual in my earlier years. Again, though, with the help of other valiant individuals who were coming out of the closet in the eighties and nineties I made the choice to be truthful. Another step in the right direction and a further healing of my past life debacles.
It was not going to be so easy though to escape from the mental, psychological and emotional fall out of this or other lives. Remember, the hippocampus remembers, and even if one is not consciously aware of why they act the way they do, one can bet there is a hidden memory inside driving one over the cliff and towards ill health. In my case, there is an autoimmune accountability in this life, which is the accumulation of past lives lived where I buried my sensitive proclivities in violence or religious fervor. In several of these past lives, I would psychologically and systematically try to kill off the gay part of me, because of religious pressure, and ridiculously think the rest of me would remain intact. Contradictions such as these pop up in past lives all the time and what I've noticed is people swinging back and forth on a karmic pendulum and never truly learning how to move on and up.
The shame and disgust of those previous lives were not my own, but had been artificially installed into my hippocampus and reality under the guise of social and religious custom and practices. I had adopted and vigorously promoted the religious and moral attitudes of the day never fully questioning the veracity or health of those beliefs and if they served me or society. I realize that coming out into the open in those days would most likely have lead to torture and death, but as an individual and human being the least I could do for my emotional and spiritual well being would be to internalize my own truth quietly. I speculate that many of the "followers" of the pious religious types of today lived lives like me, hiding their true human and spiritual nature so that they can feel like they belong to a group which supposedly serves god.
Once a particular religious organization snares someone, that person with any amount of sight will soon discover that truth is not foremost on most group member's minds but rather acquiring more power, prestige and property are the driving forces. At this point, what I did in some of my past lives and what these religious followers do now, is sublimate our true natures to that of the group and cease thinking for one's self. The ego then kicks in and makes one feel special, unique and chosen among God's people which is indeed reinforced by the power structure. Group think also forms and becomes a big tumbling boulder careening down a hill, one had better get out of the way by disguising any aspect of themselves which disagrees with the official party line, or they’re gonna get plowed over.
THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD AND THE HIPPOCAMPUS
The ancient Greeks used to have enormous theaters next to their oracles and places of prophecy. The Greeks were the founders of modern theater and comedy and knew that life was simply a play. The actors, or we human beings, would enter on the stage and proceed to live our lives or participate in plays of tragedy, comedy, philosophy and music. Plays back then were designed to heighten one's emotions, be inspirational and educational entertainment, pose intellectual and philosophical quandaries, with the words and experience of the performance resonating off the stones the audience was sitting on and penetrating their very being.
The stone structures used to construct their amphitheaters had tiny quartz crystals in the rock. Today, in radios and watches, quartz crystals are used to complete an electrical connection and to isolate certain frequencies. Imagine sitting on an enormous electrical transmitter surrounded by other people experiencing and adding their own human electrical and emotional energy and speculate as to how connected everyone must have been. See, the Greeks knew about and honored the human energetic body as well as toning the physical body. Plays in Ancient Greece were like therapy is today, in that they helped resolve community and psychological issues in a positive, affirming and uplifting electrical manner. Intellectual and emotional transformations of the audience happened in these amphitheaters which raised the vibrations, brain frequencies and health of everyone involved.
Another thought about crystals, emotion and the raising of one's energetic vibration, is in my dreams, I see these velvet cloth cases laid out with multitudes of crystals inserted in them. I suspect, though don't absolutely know, that this dream was trying to tell me that DNA has a crystalline base. If these ancient amphitheaters conducted emotional and electrical energy then it could create a piezoelectric effect on the DNA and bone structure of those in the audience. Piezoelectricity is when an electrical potential is created due to applied mechanical stress, with stress meaning both pressure and anxiety. Pressure or stress can come in the form of electromagnetic vibrations, which if applied to those watching a play in an ancient theater, would mean that these people were literally having their DNA crystallized toward one purpose or the other depending on the play. Betcha that these electromagnetic vibrational plays and amphitheaters helped magnetize one's blood, as blood contains iron rich hemoglobin, hardened bone in the body, supplemented and enhanced one's energy body and supported healthy protein production via proper DNA transcription.
Somewhere along the perilous march of history we forgot what the Greeks knew which was life is a play or we should be play acting at our lessons in order to grow and evolve. We've forgotten that this classroom illusion we're in is designed to foster growth not stagnation. Our current trend, which is picking up the pace, of a dehumanized, decultured and degraded state of society is being crystallized into our very DNA and bones much like health, philosophy and wisdom were crystallized into ancient Greek culture via piezoelectricity and entertainment. I often have dreams of being in a grand theater or a giant stadium and watching as all these people perform and I know that nowadays everything is directed and produced by those we can't even see and don't even know. We all seem to be trapped in a time loop play which endlessly shifts actors or human beings in and out of roles while real suffering and ignorance continues unabated life after life and generation after generation.
I think that the origins of what we consider today to be popular entertainment have their roots in ancient Rome and the Coliseum. Coliseums, gladiators and gladiatorial contests, when real war wasn't available, steadily displaced amphitheaters, theaters and plays as the preferred mode of entertainment and experience by the masses. The vibrations in the coliseums were decidedly orchestrated to emotionally highlight danger, death, violence and aggression as those frequencies were more befitting of an empire bent on world domination. Even today we think, behave and are distracted along the same lines as the Roman Empire and its bread and circuses attitude. Boxing, wrestling, ultimate fighting matches and other full contact sports and sports team competitions are the most popular entertainment choice of the masses. Higher cultural music and arts programs receive decidedly less support and funding than sports do in high schools and colleges around the country.
The soul of the gay community used to be firmly rooted in arts, music and theater soil. Now, the focus in the gay community, and straight as well but gays were first to pick up on physical improvement movement, has shifted towards building, grooming and decorating one's physical body. Looks over substance. I also chained myself to weight machines and treadmills for a few years but eventually that looking good, combined with childhood programs lead to more and riskier sexual activity on my part. I think for me, I felt less likely to be assaulted and more respected as a man when I had a bigger chest and biceps. I was working from the outside in and that attitude eventually failed me health and physique-wise until I reversed the equation with hippocampus memory work. With consistent memory work and higher cultural involvement my emotional, intellectual and spiritual state has improved considerably. I have developed a better ability to assess information, and study and write for longer periods of time, am less likely to dissociate, and new realms of creativity are expressing themselves through my life and shamanic work.
