Good memory is considered one of seven signs of good health in the practice of macrobiotics. Macrobiotics is a discipline that uses natural principles to achieve health and happiness primarily through the use of good nutrition. It follows the tradition of Oriental medicine which suggests that a healthy spleen/pancreas organ system promotes good memory and is the center of our being as it is also related to the element “earth”. Having a healthy spleen/pancreas stabilizes and balances our health.
Macrobiotics goes further to propose that when you eat like ancient man, you will remember the thinking of the ancients. Ancient man lived closer with nature and was more attuned to nature. The ancient Hawaiians are a great example of this. Their tradition, for example, of women not eating fish, fits into the principles of macrobiotics because their common aim to cultivate the natural harmony of life leads ultimately to the same conclusions. Michio Kushi, a leading exponent of macrobiotics, says the great philosophers around the world came up with the same understanding because they were tuned into universal memory. For them, the past and the future were one and out of that oneness comes deep universal understanding. Thus to understand the mystery of the Stonehenge, an ancient calendar composed of great slabs of stone precisely laid out, you must eat the food of the ancient Celtics who created Stonehenge four to five thousand years ago. If you want a taste of ancient food, include more seaweeds into your diet. Seaweeds are the most ancient plants on earth.
Kushi even talks about the memory of ancient people. They had memories of catastrophes that form the basis many legends and similarities between different cultures. Ancient man also remembers his ancestors who first came to earth from other planets and those that were present on earth at the time. Ancient man experienced no barriers between the earthly world and the spiritual world. They could communicate with spirits and ancestor worship is an outgrowth of that. ESP was a common phenomenon.
What Kushi suggests is quite far-fetched for the average person, but, on the other hand, how many of us have been eating the food of the ancients to test his thesis? In any case, Kushi gets indirect support from a walk down memory lane with Ellen Wambach’s book, Reliving Past Lives. Wambach shares her research experience using hypnosis to regress over 2000 individuals into their past lives. She shows what time periods subjects like to choose, what they wore, how they lived, and their race and sex distribution. Whether any of what she finds is real cannot be easily proved, but the fact that most of the past life stories are corroborated by historic cultural facts is astounding. Did those individuals really live the lives that they remember? Or did they just tune into a spiritual essence in the universe like a radio might tune into a particular frequency? In any case, no matter what causes them to tune in easier to a particular vibration in the universal vortex, they are somehow connected and thus identified with a part of that spiritual wavelength. Whether they actually lived their past lives is up for debate.
Again this shows us how our identity, our concept of who we are, is related to our memory. Do we see ourselves as this time-limited being here for a short history and then gone? Or do we view ourselves as beings connected to the universe beyond space and time? Our views on reincarnation and death have thus an important bearing on who we are and how we then choose to live.
The idea of death is not appetizing to me; and reincarnation has not been one of my enthusiastic interests. However, because I want to enjoy my death, I have decided to work on the process of my death when the time grows near. In Wambach’s study, subjects often had difficulty going through the death experience during their past lives and needed extra support. This transition is not an easy one. The Tibetan Book of the Dead explains what death, as well as what life, is all about and may be the foundation for my future preparation.
Memory then has taken us into the farther reaches of consciousness. It can take us beyond who we usually think we are and brings us face-to-face with our divine self. Memory is higher consciousness as Ouspensky suggests to use self-remembering to develop ourselves. As we develop higher consciousness, we inevitably have more consciousness of other beings. The end result of memory is love, love of ourselves, others, and life.