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operative within us either in the form of specific recollections of past events (e.g., remembering one’s first time riding a bicycle) or more frequently in the form of impersonal, bodily based distillations of past events (e.g., the set of internalized motor skills it takes to ride a bicycle well). According to Bergson, these two more personal forms of memory (i.e., what I am going to call “recollection memory” and “habit memory”) help to create the fullness of our concrete, lived experience by interweaving themselves into each “pure perception” so seamlessly that “we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is memory” (MM 103).2 As Bergson notes, in our day-to-day concrete perceptions, the “immediate and present data of the senses” (i.e., pure perception) is mingled “with a thousand details out of our past experience,” details that are so extensive that for the most part they supplant our actual perceptions (MM 33). A pure perception by itself is rather thin—it is simply a type of schematic outline which in order to be most effective needs to be filled in with a wide range of memories. These memories are typically not specific memory-images of past events. Instead, they are preconscious, highly distilled internalizations of cultural and psychological patterns of belief that merge with the raw perceptual data, and by doing so, shape these perceptions, giving them order, structure, and meaning. According to Bergson, this interpretive overlay from memory is so extensive that we end up “constantly creating or reconstructing” our present experience based on the sum total of our past (MM 103). Therefore, for the most part, what we refer to as our “perceptions” are in actuality, in Bergson’s words, primarily a “cloak” of memory covering a “core of immediate perception” (MM 34). In the final analysis, perception for Bergson is simply “an occasion for remembering” (MM 66). To illustrate this fusion of memory and perception, let’s imagine that we are in a room with someone speaking a language that we do not know (e.g., Italian). Our ears hear the same sounds as the native speakers from Italy who are also in the room. Nonetheless, our experience is quite different from the experience of the Italians. This is so because their past experiences of learning Italian have been condensed within their consciousness, have been compressed into a fluid and useful distillation of memory that can superimpose itself upon the sounds of the language being spoken, thereby enabling them to hear meaningful words and sentences, while we hear nothing but a confused mass of noise. Similarly, when we look at a purple pansy in a window box, we may think that we are perceiving in a simple and straightforward way a pansy that is “out there”; we may think that anyone who chose to look at this pansy would invariably perceive exactly what we are seeing. However, according to Bergson, only a small “percentage” of our concrete perception of the pansy is rooted in the impersonal, objective, raw data of our pure perceptions. Most of what we actually see is the end result of a preconscious “overlay” or “extract” of memories that is superimposed upon the “sketch” of our pure perceptions of the pansy. ThereTHE INTERACTION OF PERCEPTION AND MEMORY 147 fore, the pansy that we actually perceive concretely is in many ways co-created by us and is to that extent our own unique experience, an experience that is not shared by others.3 Indeed, as Bergson notes, it is only because memory is added to perception that the objective, externalized moments of pure perception (which actually take place “outside of us,” among the objects themselves) are converted into experiences that seem to be subjective and internal; that is, it is memory that makes it appear that our experience takes place “inside our heads.” Rumination: Cappadocia, Turkey, 2004 I was traveling on a pilgrimage with forty students, all graduates of the Full Spectrum School of Healing and Self Transformation. We had just gotten off our bus late that afternoon in Cappadocia, Turkey, and had walked together up to a barren bluff overlooking a stark, surreal landscape. My wife, Sandra, the director of the school, asked us all to find a place where we could each sit quietly by ourselves . She instructed us simply to observe—carefully, attentively, and mindfully —the expansive vista before us, without analyzing it and with a minimum of internal commentary. I walked...

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