The problem with too much thinking

After reading "The Accidental Buddhist" this past week for the second time, I am stopped dead in my tracks by the assertion that we are the composite of everything that we see and hear.

They are recorded in our minds and become a part of us. This furthers the belief that we are not a singular being but exist in duality with everyone else, therefore we are all one being.

It is logical that we are influenced over our lifetime by the things that we see and do. And it would make sense that persons seeing the same things would view them through the prism of their own experiences.

Before the memory chip came along, we used to think of our brain as the repository of all our memories, our personal memory bank. When we had the need for a memory, we would access our memory bank much the way that Google and other search engines comb through billions of information bits that are within the confines of the Internet.

Think about the way our brain works, we can conjure up an image of our childhood simply by thinking about it. We have this miniature screen on the inside of our forehead upon which we view the past.

If a special sound is heard, we have an instant memory, a certain smell prompts another. The triggering devices are varied. We can even project ourselves forward to imagine a scene yet to be experienced.

One writer stretched this concept to the extreme suggesting that the natives did not literally see the ships of Columbus' small fleet as they had never viewed such a thing before and had no memory upon which to draw a vision. Think about that for a moment.

In "Funnycide," the story of the 2003 Kentucky Derby winner, the author opines that we all root for the underdog because most of us consider ourselves the underdog. We are prone to doubt our worthiness and when in groups, we tend to consider ourselves as the one who does not belong.

If we are, in fact, a conglomerate of every experience, then it would be logical to be for something rather than against something. Ergo all good things to others accrue to us in some existential fashion.

Sometimes the arcane gets too convoluted for me. I am still thinking about each and every experience becoming a part of me.

If it is imprinted on my brain, why not on my psyche? It makes sense. As Popeye once said, "I yam what I yam."