Memory and Personal Faith

In the unfolding experience of our personal awareness, it is the process of memory that is used as justification for our life-attitude. We judge everything that we encounter by association with past experiences, referring consciously and unconsciously to memory for guidance in any situation. We do this because memory represents how we have survived.

Memory may be thought of as each being's diary of their life journey, and is the major portion of what we think of as the subconscious. The subconscious is not a deductive function, but it is assessed by conscious awareness which then acts on the information stored as memory. The deduction drawn by the conscious mind is that if past experiences preserved the self then what is believed about one's self has to have been right for continual survival. What this reveals is that each of us can be only what we think we are.

When new data is met that conflicts with what has been stored in the subconscious, the reaction of conscious awareness is to assess it as a threat to personal survival. Each person's past mental programming has established given patterns of thought as being logical, so when the subconscious inserts conflicting data, such as truth or rationality, it is regarded by consciousness as incorrect.

That which has been established by the self as its belief system is then adhered to as having proven itself to be inviolately correct, and the new data is assessed as a threat to personal survival. A person's conscious reaction to new subconscious data then acts as the primary initiator in most of our experiences of conflict.

This means that all problems that are encountered as life experience serve as the environment that the conscious self has created for itself. Any new conflicting (or rational) information is then strongly resisted in fear that one's self-created environment will be contaminated.