Memory is, of course, where all the mind moments are stored, collated and connected as association streams. The raw material is made up of experiences, but each experience is connected with a word and in some cases a symbolic character.
It is these words that permit complex storing processes rather like the hard disc of a computer in which mind moments are not stored together, but as neurologically associated strings. The words also make retrieval more efficient and rapid, which is a biological advantage, and each word can be retrieved with the experience, which Identity unfortunately casts aside.
Now if we examine "words" in and of themselves, we find that really they are also experiences for they are forms which are visual and auditive. The difference between the word experiences and the true experiences is that the range of the natural experiences is unlimited and this makes for difficult storage and retrieval.
In Vipassana we work only with the experiences which have been developed and set in place within memory by COGNITION, but with these five contemplations we touch the unconscious experiences which are more primitive. However, when they are discerned at the unconscious level and then are retrieved, the form is transformed once again cognitively and attached to cognitive words already stored in memory.
However, there is sufficient similarity so that the unconscious fount can be recognized by deduction as having been being elicited.
The cognitive experience and the word then is used only as a confirmation of the correct development of the practice, while the curing action rests neither in the unconscious experience nor in the appearance of the experience and word during recall.
THE CURING EXPERIENCE
What happens as a curing process is that the cognitive presence which has been produced when the practice is developed and stable arises as a background experience accompanying every action. It also elicits the unconscious experience with which it was associated.
When this occurs we say that there is a PRESENCE or, better still, a UNION of the Illusory experience and the Primary Experience which is beyond words.
This combined presence acts as a natural brake on the staining tactics of Identity. As a result, CLINGING and CRAVING are reined in and we say that when the five are everpresent, the mind that operates daily as a controller, overwhelming the Natural Process, is tamed.