Last week, at my atheist discussion group, I presented on the concept of memory.  After describing the physiology of memory and the "history" of memory (how people have viewed and treated memory through the millennia), I offered some thoughts on the spirituality of memory.  This being a gathering of atheists (except for me), such thoughts were of course not fully aligned with the viewpoints of most of the people who had come that night.  Nonetheless, we all left with some things to think about.

    As I described it, memory is almost otherworldly.  It’s here, but it’s not; everywhere, but nowhere.  We know and believe it’s here (or there), somewhere, but we also know that this somewhere is a somewhere that is not “there” for long.  In this, I quoted Henri Bergson who, in the opening pages of his Matter and Memory, opines that memory is that which lies at the “intersection of mind and matter.”  It is the phenomenon that connects, in the human being, material and ethereal, and spirit and matter.  Linking together inner rumination and outward experience, connecting and fusing mind, heart, and spirit, memory centers us even while it deepens us, grounding us as much as it extends us, stretching and guiding our vision between what we see and what we do not.  It brings us to the liminal, the border, the boundary, the formless membrane between physical mystery and the invisible and unseen presence encompassing it all.  Memory demonstrates that materiality does not fully explain us.

     Indeed.  Although we can readily describe the physicality of how memory works, we have not yet found a reason as to how we can "see" our memories without actually "seeing" them.  What is it about us that we are able to picture that which we cannot physically see?  While an obvious answer is that we are creatures of imagination, the larger question is why?

     How can inert matter birth the ability to see the unseen?