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Memory "Flavors"

Shiftkitty

Shiftkitty

Registered User
I was driving today and the weather was awesome. The sun was warm, but an occassional breeze had a crisp little chill to it. Something about it made me remember quite vividly a day in late spring/early summer, running through the sprinklers with my friends and crowding around an ice cream truck. I could hear every squealing peal of laughter and could almost taste the cherry popsicle.

The level of intensity of the memory was quite unexpected and it got me to thinking about how that memory compares to PL memories that pop up. There was a different "flavor" to it that's hard to define. It's like a PL memory has a mistier, more distant feel, like trying to hold water in your open palm, while the current life memory is a tall drink of nostalgia and reverie.

Do you notice a difference between how the memories feel or "taste"?
 
Interesting ideas...and yes, I get a different "flavor" from pl and recent memories...every time I smell citrus blossoms I am taken back to age 19 and driving my grandparent's car at about four pm with the windows down through a central California county road surrounded by blooming orange trees. I sipped on a Henry Weinhardt and somehow felt bullet-proof and amazing, senses inundated with that sweet, fresh smell, fixed at an age in which my whole life was that endless road through an orange grove ahead of me. This is indeed a tall, clear drink of a wonderfully nostalgic memory.


This compared to the damp, slightly sweet, smoky aroma of dung fires in Nepal and India. From the first time smelling that particular odor in this lifetime, it brought back a multitude of vignettes and impressions of times long past. It was as if the smell was "loaded" with memories. For me, it is less of a "misty" effect and appearing more suddenly and carrying a sharp outline of the time/place/event though it eludes any further definition...it seems to serve to let me know we've been there before.


Cool idea because every one's taste is different, and "flavor" provides a tremendously descriptive vocabulary with which we each convey our impressions.
 
Everyone should have the experience of smelling an orange grove. I live a few blocks from one, and I hope that's what heaven smells like. If I'm lucky, I'll remember that in my future life! I think the blossom's scent is why they were traditionally used in bridal bouquets. Interesting post, Shiftkitty, and beautifully written. Sometimes what stands out for me about current life memories is the quality of light. For instance, I remember being three, and watching light filter through floating dust motes. I don't seem to notice the light in PL memories, but do in PL dreams.
 
I know that scent you are describing about the oranges! I spent some time near orange groves in my college years, and the smell is fantastic!


I do agree, with the idea that there is a "particular flavor or scent" to past life memories... Mine have a particular musty, down home, and floral scent to them. Like a nice leather, gunpowder and woodsy/floral complextion, and childhoods favorite foods and smells. This is the easiest way to describe it. I think all of ours has the uniqueness, like each persons fingerprint, thus it only makes sense to each individual.
 
Everything you have all said makes perfect sense and I couldn't agree more. When I first started researching my PLs, my memories from this life became much easier to access, they are full, rich and all-encompassing, with a sense of the surrounding environment. In contrast, my PL memories are faint, hazy, a little like glimpsing a cottage through a wood whilst going past on a high-speed train. I'm guessing that maybe the length of time since experiencing the PL might account for that, or maybe something to do with accessing the memories with a different brain to the one that experienced them : angel
 
BriarRose, your comments about light really resonated. I find the light significant...shining through the dripping spanish moss after a passing thunderstorm, or at dawn or dusk streaming through clouds and defining them piling up on the horizon...or even a single candle conveying a yellow, golden warmth, in a dark room. To me these aspects of light, something often taken for granted in daily life as we drive by, if allowed, will evoke strong emotion...emotion based in memories or thoughts first cast...where? Well, I'm aware of some, but I'm sure the vast majority are still "forgotten." I too, find pl meditation leaves a lot of "data gaps", while in regression or lucid dreams details seem to be nearly complete...the light, the smells, the emotion and the entire "flavor" of the event witnessed.


Edelweiss, I also like your thoughts of the aromas of a pre-industrial age...and I agree they do indeed evoke something different for each soul who gets to experience this amazing world.
 
A favorite memory from this life is blackberry picking with my cousins. Big patch of wild blackberries.. oh the taste. So sweet. Oh the thorns... so long! LOL


The past life ones tend to be without details like the taste...more misty..
 
I think you were all poets in past lives. You continually astonish me, and make me see and feel everything that you feel.
 
When I smell something in this life I can pinpoint it to memories with ease, but then with others... not so much.


There are some smells, like chlorine for example, that cause me to remember my childhood quite vividly. Not only did my parents have a swimming pool, but at least once or twice a year we would take trips to the Wisconsin Dells, or the "Waterpark Capital of the World." The giant, humid rooms, with the sound of rushing water and people talking and shouting. The heavy smell of the chlorine mixed with hamburgers and french fries, and the clean linen of towels.


...Then there's spring. Every single Spring the freshness and newness of everything, mixed with the warming weather, sends my mind whirling back to...well, that's just the thing, I don't know. It's like there's a wall in my mind preventing me from associating the smells with any memories. I just know it's something very, very pleasant. It's a little irritating though! I can feel it pushing through with all it's mite, but there's nothing!
 
Cryscat,


Do your blackberry memories include mosquito bites? My days with blackberries tend to have as much to do with those doggone bites as it does with the delicious taste of the blackberries. :laugh:
 
Mama2HRB


No mosquito bites! We used to go in the early afternoon and these bushes were not near any pond. The major problem were the thorns and the bears. Bears love blackberries too!
 
Bears!!! Okay, so it's either malaria or get eaten alive. Those must have been some gooooooood blackberries! :laugh:


Curious, does the taste of the blackberries take you back further than this life? Or are there any senses that do? For me the taste of a good rare steak evokes a sensation from probably several lifetimes. The biggest one hit me when I was treated to an elk steak from an elk that a friend of mine had actually hunted himself. Different taste than your typical porterhouse. The scene was like a modern-day interpretation of the memory. We were at his house and my husband and I and his brother's family had gone over there and we got to meet our friend's family and his other friends, it was like a big tribe or clan gathering, and yes, it was to celebrate his successful hunting trip. The kids were running around and it was like we were all family.


The oddest thing about the whole evening, and I got this from several of the people there, was the sense that we had done all this before. Even my husband, who is skeptical about reincarnation (still), said on the way home that the only thing missing was the forest. "Then it would have been..." I could read it at the edge of his lips; "... just as I remember it." But he never finished his thought.


It's possible that we all may have been a tribe or clan elsewhen, or it's possible that we belonged to different tribes or clans who had that custom in common (though I'm sure they all did back then) or were from the same area. At any rate, it was an ancient and comfortable feeling, and I'm not normally so relaxed around strangers.
 
Shiftkitty, your continuation of your husband's unspoken thoughts resonate with me very clearly..."it was just like..." what? "Well, you know...when..." Exactly...it was when we did it before back when we were so and so...that being a true statement doesn't make it invalid if it happened and we don't remember exactly when.
 
I hear ya. He has what I think are pretty clear memories of Viet Nam, and I do wish he'd open his mind a little more. When his back acts up (he's in chronic pain, so "acting up" can be taken as "more excruciating than normal"), his dream is more intense, but he keeps insisting he must have seen the event in a movie somewhere. I tried to get him to do a regression hypnosis at a psychic faire once, but he wouldn't do it. I think he's afraid that if he accepts reincarntion as a possibility, he'll have to accept the whole "New Age" thing, and he's just not a spiritual person.
 
Shiftkitty said:
...but he keeps insisting he must have seen the event in a movie somewhere.
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To make a brief aside from the original topic...I initially saw "Saving Private Ryan" and was in tears during the initial invasion battle scene...bullets whizzing by, men falling in agony or dead, the whole maelstrom of activity and destruction was overwhelming. It was incredibly realistic, and it remained in the back of my mind and I played it over and over again in my head...I could have narrated the entire scene, and had a very clear memory of it.


A few months later I saw it again...but the scene didn't follow the same sequence I remembered, and it was somehow different from the very clear "memory" I had of the scene from the movie...the "memory" I carried which I labeled "Saving Private Ryan" was my own pl memory from an invasion in which I participated, not from my initial view of the movie, which now pales in comparison.
 
Shiftkitty, the feeling of "tribe" or clan gathering that you describe is missing from so many people's lives. I have always loved how light and wind interact with trees. One of my favorite games as a little girl was "Robin Hood". I wanted to live under that giant "greenwood tree" in Sherwood Forest. It seemed like the perfect life, at least to a little girl. When I read your post, I imagined you, your husband, and your clan, with the green light filtering into an ancient forest. Perhaps, one of the purposes of past life recall is to help us remember what was good about the "long ago" times, so we can put what is missing back into the lives we live now. Your descriptions are exceptionally vivid, and beautiful.
 
Thank you, BriarRose. We're both itching to get to our little patch of forest in Maine. The last time we were there deciding on where the house would go. Standing in the middle of some old growth we both just went silent. For some reason he said "All that's missing is the stream." He sounded like he was so far away in his mind. I asked him where the stream would be, but he kind of snapped out of his reverie. I wish he wouldn't resist these things so much!
 
That forest in Maine must be your "Anam Kara", Shiftkitty, the "home of your soul". God Speed on both your "soul journey", and your journey to Maine. I hope your "anam kara" is waiting for both of you there.
 
I can relate to smells triggering memories. The smell of sweat or blood can give me flash backs or at least bring up a feeling/sense of my times on battlefields...And like others describe, in our current lives memories can be triggered that we have forgotten as well.
 
BriarRose said:
That forest in Maine must be your "Anam Kara", Shiftkitty, the "home of your soul". God Speed on both your "soul journey", and your journey to Maine. I hope your "anam kara" is waiting for both of you there.
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I'll have to look that concept up. Years ago aspot near Granite Dells in Arizona held such a strong attraction for me that it would probably be the perfect definition of an "anam kara". Sadly the precise region that attracted me has been blasted and developed. I remember spending days feeling like part of my soul was being ripped to shreds only to learn that that was the time when the developers were blasting my precious granite away.


Years later my husband and I took a day trip to Yosemite. We around behind El Capitan and that gorgeous white granite was calling to me so loudly that I started scaling a rubble choked landslide without thinking. No matter where I stepped, my hand or foot kept coming down on this partiulcar fist-sized chunk. My husband had climbed up after me to talk some sense to me. After told him about the chunk, he said for me to take it. It was El Capitan's gift to me.


I'm not entirely sure, but I think there's some granite out in our forest. If not, there will soon be a chunk of genuine Yosemite granite out there, compliments of El Capitan! Yes, that forest is calling louder and louder. It just might be my new "anam kara"!
 
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