Memory - The ultimate culprit

Have you ever asked yourself the question "Who am I". I know this is loaded with ideas from spiritual literature but leaving all that aside, if you ask yourself the question "Who am I", what would the answer be?

Let us not fool ourselves by saying that I am the spirit, I am the soul and all that. We do not know that, nor it is our experience. So for a lay man, what is the obvious answer.

If one investigates into this, one will realize that he is nothing but all his cumulative past knowledge in the form of memory. That includes everything - our guilts, jealousy, anger, desires, hate etc. All that is ME. As a matter of fact, when I utter the pronoun 'I', I mean all that. 'I' is nothing but a representative of my past memories.

This is exactly why, we do not experience anything in sleep. Sleep is a lapse in memory. Its an abyss that gets created naturally in the memory sequence.

So if I am the memory, then whatever I experience in this world is seen through a screen of that memory. I cannot experience anything new, because the memory interferes with the perception process. Perception is always muddled.

Now the question is: how can one be free from memory at the time of perception but still have the memory for reasons obvious. Without memory I cannot function in this world. I need to know how to play tennis or how to go from A to B and for that I need knowledge, I need memory. But I do not want this to interfere in the process of my perception. How can this be achieved?

I was watching J Krishnamurti and he gave a hint in that regard. One has to observe without being the observer. The quality of brain that records cannot be stopped. But the quality of the brain that is passing judgments while the recording is going on, can be stopped.

So OBSERVE without being the OBSERVER and that will set us free. You may ask HOW? But there is no how for this. If you understand what it means, then it will start happening :)