Memories From Here To Eternity…..

Memories From Here To Eternity…..

There are different types of memories and different versions of these memories. Operating / short term working memory, long term / life span memory, sensory memories, documented memories from notes to USB mass storage devices etc., etc. All of them can be dependent on / influenced by memories which early on were repressed by survival reasons. They were made unconscious due to an early trauma / unbearable pain. Therefore to re-live an early trauma and remember / re-experience the original pain makes many memory clusters change / able to interconnect and create access to a new depth and become conscious awareness. 

Blockages between different memory types and memory clusters can be resolved gradually and links between emotional and intellectual memories can be faster, straighter and less affected by neurotic act outs and influences. As a result of improved conscious awareness, which has happened to me, memories of previous unreal / neurotic "successes / achievements" become uncomfortable, make you feel ill at ease when they are no longer pain propelled. My experience is that this personal audit is like a mini Primal, which is accompanied by dissolution of a suffering that was the price for the neurotic success / performance.

In recent decades, I have with growing awareness / consciousness activated / exploited my short-term and long-time memories by re-living traumatic pain and practicing new skills. I have through Rolfing and The Primal Principle been aware of my sensory memory and I see the past years deep tissue massage as a crucial factor in my re-living of traumatic pain. During the past year, my awareness regarding sensory memories multiplied. This has been done by that I decided to learn to understand music and play the saxophone. 

There are three types of sensory memories. Iconic memory is a fast fading store of visual information. It is a type of sensory memory that briefly stores an image which has been perceived for a short duration. Echoic memory is a fast fading store of auditory information, a type of sensory memory that been perceived for small durations. Haptic memory  is a sensory memory that represents a database for touch stimuli. Daily, when I am practicing musical scales on my saxophone, it's my iconic and echoic memories I constantly put to the test when I build up the long term memory I need if I, eventually, want to be able to handle the saxophone to my own satisfaction.

"Practice makes perfect" and after half a year I start to get a first feeling for pitch, fingering, and rhythm. An insignificant step for a talented musician but a giant step for me. In addition, my saxophone trip reminds me constantly about the struggle / battles I fought during my epileptic journey. Many exciting memory clusters are formed that often leads to resolutions of subtle blockages. 

Today, in the morning, when I walked on the Mediterranean beach in Gandia and sang scales - "do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-si-la-sol-fa-mi-re-do" - and, imagined the associated fingering of notes I was suddenly interrupted by a strong, long term / sensory memory. I was suddenly on a beach in Hawaii in a film, “From here to eternity”, with Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift which I saw in the mid-50s. It was Clifts sensible trumpet tap for his killed friend (played by Sinatra) that “brought me to Hawaii”. 

I stopped singing and could hear the mournful tones of Clift’s trumpet and I became 15 years old and felt my own sadness.

Jan Johnsson

PS
Art’s Reflections have for years served as a provocative reflection om my collective memory, both the conscious and the unconscious. It is not my memories / understanding of the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse that matters but the successive changes in my feelings, memories, and needs that Arts message has meant.

Arthur JanovJune 14, 2016 at 9:05 PM

Jan, interesting letter. I remember Clift too, a terribly tragic figure. As you know, I disagree with your general idea that Rolfing helps a lot. I had it done by Ida Rolfe’s associate and was not impressed. art keep up the sax. Are you listening to jazz?

My answer:

Art,

I'm sorry for your bad experience with Rolfing, which, like the PT is a natural treatment method against defects / repressions incurred in connection with traumas during, before and after the birth process. I was lucky, when I took a risk, to get good, though rough, treatment in Boulder, Col., 1979, and excellent, soft, treatment in Valencia 2009-10. I have since experienced how my friend Eva and my daughter Isabel, has felt great after being treated by my Rolfer in Valencia, Jordi (who combines being a professional musician with giving treatments in Rolfing).

Anyway thanks for your tolerance and for publishing my articles even though my hints of Rolfing. As you often point out; To live and let live.

In this context, I can reveal the following: In my inner emotional world, you represent my father and Ida Rolf represents my mother. Since both of my parents had time to realize their shortcomings associated with my birth and my upbringing and asked for forgiveness the "merger" between them, you and Ida Rolf is a natural evolution that has made it easier to re-live repressed pain. Add to that the outstanding luck I had throughout my process of change when I during four decades had access to you and your guidance and the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse. Four decades and one therapist /guide. Extremely unique. A remarkable experience that made my life meaningful.

I listen since several decades constantly to jazz, particularly with saxophone elements. Stan Getz was married to a girl from my home region and you might remember your Danish patient and "my" jazz singer Grethe, she lived for several years with Ben Webster in Copenhagen. These two and other classical saxophonists have long been represented among my old LP records. However, I have not until now, when I am trying to get the sound of my saxophone, begun to understand how big virtuous Charlie Parker was. He will get more time. His magical charisma, when he was at his best, reminded of another, now dead, black virtuous, Muhammad Ali. Both were pretty and could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, each one in his specialty. They changed the world. Like You!!!!!

Jan

Chromatic Scale vs. Electroshock Therapy.

Chromatic Scale vs. Electroshock Therapy.

Due to my 48-hour birthing process, back in 1940, I have re-lived / experienced how I was subjected to physical pressure, choking, strangulation and anesthetics during hours and how I finally was turned around and pulled out with the tail first as a breech. These experiences I have re-lived, on and off, for 20 years until the source of repressed pain apparently was close to empty. My last two decades have been pretty normal and I have experienced how emotions and intellect have been able to interact/cooperate freely without medication. Occasionally, some unexpected experience has provoked a stab of anxiety and blues which I have been able to solve by laying back and feeling the reason. A process that eventually has become rare.

An important part of my life pattern has been to develop addictive challenges/struggles. These imprints/tendencies are still there, deep down, but I have reached a point where I am now aware of the addictive process and can, with some efforts, cancel a neurotic process that does not correspond to real needs. Since I have filled my life with a lot of challenges and struggling of sometimes doubtful character I have of course also missed out to fulfill real needs. One of the needs I have missed for a lifetime has been to be able to sing and play an instrument. A lot of my time has been spent, in adulthood, struggling with the Danish, English, German, and Spanish languages.

I have for decades enjoyed listening to the best jazz saxophone players. I have internalized this sound to a degree that I often have dreams with saxophone music in the background. I decided in 2015 that I would learn to play the saxophone. Easy to say, easy to acquire (the tenor sax). At 75, I had, suddenly, given myself a Sisyphus task, to roll a stone / a tenor saxophone up the hill, over and over again, without any basic knowledge of music, fingering, rhythm, sound, etc. To learn English at 30 and Spanish at 50 was a breeze. It suits, however, my historical neurotic life pattern, and new parts of my brain are getting activated, its neurons forming new clusters. To feel like a child who starts from the beginning can be a nice compensation for fear and anxiety to fail.

I have written about my dream about the chromatic jazz scale (A Different Way Of Using A Chromatic Scale). It was not a one-off. My primal, often begin when I enter rem sleep. During the last two months, on two occasions I have re-lived how my head during a primal suddenly is hit by electric impulses, an utmost painful feeling with certain similarities to my first petit mal fits in my late teens. My primals nowadays are far less painful than before, so the first re-living of electroshock treatment was just that, a shock and surprise, when I finally after 3/4 of a century had the strength to experience it. 

“Electroconvulsive therapy (ETC) was introduced in Switzerland 1937 och was already 1940 widespread and Nobel Prize-nominated. Electroshock is a psychiatric treatment that involves electrocution of the patient and putting the patient into a seizure. Mainstream psychiatry argues that electroshock is therapeutic and alleviates mental illness. Many electroshock patients receive the treatment against their will. Psychiatrists also claim that electroshock is safe during pregnancy and give treatment to pregnant women. A study in 2007 (!) found that electroshock during pregnancy can cause brain damage to the fetus!” Surprise!

Thanks to my new addiction (learning to play the saxophone) I have found out that I / my brain is strong enough to re-live the effects of a treatment which, fortunately, never got the Nobel Prize. With less luck and with a more old-fashioned neurologist than David Ingvar, I could have been treated with an even worse method, lobotomy, which, outrageously, won the Nobel Prize, 1949, when 20.000 lobotomies had been performed in the US alone. This treatment was applied to a daughter of friends of our family. She died within 2 years.

Jan Johnsson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cZF2dOZPM