Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0474: Specific mnemonics for memorizing John

Episode Date: December 31, 2015

Kina asks about memorizing the gospel of John. Building off of episodes 206 and 359, I present mnemonics and a full plan for memorizing the entire book. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 474. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Kina requested more memory materials for memorizing the Book of John. Now, as I've mentioned before in episodes that I've done about the Gospel of John, this is a particularly difficult book to memorize because of the writing style that John uses and the low number of actions of things that happen in the book

in proportion to a very high amount of dialogue that's in sermon format. So this book uses a lot of sermon-like writing and uses very little actual actions, especially toward the latter half of the book. But what I'd like to do is present some specific mnemonics and some specific techniques that you can use to memorize this book, particularly based on some things that I've been doing recently in my scripture memory to make it very scalable, so you don't just memorize individual books like we did in the James course at masterofmemory.com slash James. But we're using more advanced and more scalable mnemonic techniques for memorizing the book of John

and for memorizing all the other books of the Bible without confusing them and without even confusing the individual chapters, but making them really sharply distinguishable and very easy to memorize. So what I'm going to do is in this episode, I'm going to present the first four chapters in their basic topics and key verses, but I'm going to present them in a scalable way so that you can actually memorize the rest of the book as well using a similar technique. So what I want you to do while listening to this episode, Kina and everyone who is interested in this technique, is choose four rooms in a building that you know very well, but not your own house. Maybe pick a library that has four rooms. So think of the library that you've spent the most time in in your, you know, in your life and that

you're most familiar with and divide it into four areas, four different rooms. Now, in the first room, I want you to imagine that all the lights are out and everything is dark. Now, there is a reason for this. The word dark starts with a d sound, which is the number one in the major system. So chapters 1, 11, 21, 31, and so on of any book of the Bible that ends with the number 1 will be in a dark room. So we have number 1, chapter 1, in a dark room. Now let's go to the second room, and in that room, imagine that the lights are on, or the sun is blasting in through the window, or maybe both, so it's so bright it's almost too bright to see. So we're contrasting with the first chapter, this is the second chapter, the logical thing to do is to make it as almost too bright to see. So we're contrasting with the first chapter, this is the

second chapter, the logical thing to do is to make it as bright as possible to distinguish from the first chapter. In the next room, imagine that there's a very strong cold wind. So maybe there's a draft, or maybe it's just the AC going wacko, but just make it so that the defining characteristic of the third room's environment is that there's cold air blasting through it. And the reason for that is that the number three, not in the major system, but if you turn it the other way, is a W. You can just imagine the number three as a W, and so that's the cold wind blasting through the room. So we're distinguishing that from the other two rooms.

And then in the fourth room, it's pouring rain. Yes, despite the fact that we're indoors, there's rain pouring into the room. And if you're in a library with books, maybe the books are getting soaked. And just imagine what that particular room, that fourth room would be like if it was pouring rain. So now we've created four different areas in a memory palace that are very different from each other. They're not just different rooms, so they are actually physically different locations, but they're also very different in terms of the environmental characteristics. The first room is very dark. The second room has the sun blasting into it. The third room is being, you know, blown through by a very cold wind,

and the fourth room is pouring rain. All right, now that you have that, let's go to that first room again, that dark room, and I want you to imagine and pick five different spots in that room. For me, I'm imagining the entry of a library that I used to go to as a kid, and I have the sliding doors at the entrance, I have the books on a little shelf, I have the carpeted floor and the rug that's sitting on the carpeted floor for some reason, I have another shelf on the other side of the room, and then I have the door that you push to get into the main part of the library. So that's my entrance. Now in the first location, which for me is the sliding doors, imagine a tire.

So the tire is being closed on by the sliding doors and tie that to the idea of the word becoming flesh or the incarnation. So actually what I'm doing is I'm imagining that something is written on the sliding doors, but they're slightly opening and forming a tire. So it's like the idea of the word is turning into a physical object. Now what this represents is tire is 1-4 in the major system, and so John 1-14 is our key verse for the section about the word becoming flesh. In the next location, the little bookshelf, we have 1-23. So imagine a gnome for two three. And this is about the testimony of John the Baptist. So you might just imagine that this gnome is dressed in camel's hair, and he's in this dark room, in this dark entryway, and he's sitting between two books that are leaning on him.

So that's John the Baptist, and you have verse 23 as the key verse of the next section of chapter 1. In the next location of this darkened entryway, we have the number 2-9, which is a knob for me. So we have a doorknob underneath this little mat on the floor. And it says, Behold the Lamb of God. So this is when John sees Jesus for the first time. So you want to relate the object in its location in this dark room as seeing something, maybe under the rug, maybe seeing a little sheep under the rug, and it's a doorknob. So you want to imagine what that would look like if a doorknob is sitting under a rug. But anyway, that'll help you remember that in chapter one, the dark room,

we have the knob for the number 2-9 with the topic of behold the Lamb of God. So John recognizes Jesus. So that's the third major verse in this chapter. The next verse is verse 37, which is the key verse of the story of the first disciples starting to follow Jesus. So we're still in the dark entryway for chapter 1. The object is a hammock for the number 37, and for me, it's being placed on a bookshelf on the left side of this dark entryway. So I'm imagining that the hammock is strung up in the shelf, and what's happening is there are two disciples that are

kind of lying there, but they see something interesting, and they decide to go and follow it. So that represents the first disciples following Jesus. And then verse 45 represents, for me, a rail. So we have a rail that's kind of holding open the door that closes, and this rail represents the number 45, but it also represents the fact that Philip and Nathanael are following Jesus. Now what happened in that particular story was that Jesus mentions that he saw Nathanael in a particular place. So, I'm going to imagine that Nathaniel, and I have a visual for Nathaniel. You want to come up with something. But he is sitting under that rail in that doorway with that door propped open by a rail. So, anyway, I can just think

through this palace, and I remember verse 14 in the original door with the tire. I remember the 23 with the gnome on the shelf representing John the Baptist. I remember the knob for verse 29 under the rug with, behold, the Lamb of God. I remember verse 37 from the hammock with the other shelf on the left side of the room. And I remember verse 45 with the rail and Jesus calling Nathaniel and Philip. Now, fortunately, that's the chapter with the most points. The rest of the chapters will go by quickly. We have verse 11 in the first part of the second room, which is very bright. And that's the miracle at the wedding at Cana. And so verse 11 for me is a tooth. I just imagine water and, you know, wine being produced from a tooth in my first place in the second sunny room. And then verse 15 is Jesus clearing the temple. My object for that is a doll. And so I imagine that the doll has a whip,

which is what the verse mentions in verse 15 there. And then verse 23, again, a gnome, is Jesus' following is growing. And so you want to create a visual of a gnome and a following growing in the third part of your sunny room. In the third room, which is the windy one, Jesus is speaking with Nicodemus about being born again. And the object is number three, because that's where Jesus mentions being born again. For me, the object for number three, because that's where Jesus mentions being born again. For me, the object for number three is a semi. And then the next section, the key verse is John 3,

16, which is about God's love for the world. And so you want to represent that by a tissue. So, you know, one six is a tissue in the major system. And that's pretty easy to remember in the windy room. You just remember the Kleenex is being blown on by the wind and you have to tie that to the representation of God's love for the world. So it might be around a heart or something like that. And then you have John the Baptist glorifying Jesus in the next section, which is verse 30. And my object for verse 30 is moss.

And so the wind is blowing on the moss, and John the Baptist is glorifying Jesus. Maybe he's dressed in some moss clothes instead of, you know, the camel's hair that he's usually dressed in, and it's blowing on him. So that's chapter three. The next room is where there's pouring rain, and first of all, we have Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman, which is represented by a hinge in the rainy room. And so the hinge is getting rusty where it is in the room, and the Samaritan woman is sitting on it, and she's starting to get squashed by it as the pressure is going up during her conversation. And then the last verse that we have is verse 40, which is

representing the story about Jesus healing an official's son without even going there. And my object for that is a rose. So you have a rose with its thorns and everything, and you just find a way to represent that with the rain falling on the rose and the petals starting to fall out of it, and that representing that Jesus heals an official's son in a long-distance fashion. In the end, you'll remember all of the topics from these four chapters, along with which key verse from each topic kind of sums up what's going on in that chapter. And you'll remember both the chapter from the environment of the room and the verse from the particular object that you're using to represent the event that's

happening. Thanks for the question, Kina. I enjoyed doing this episode. And for everyone who wants to be able to do this kind of memory work with these objects and be able to memorize things quickly like this, I encourage you to go to masterofmemory.com slash start for a full guide for memorizing all of these object pegs and being able to memorize basically unlimited information that involves numbers and passages and things like that. Just go to masterofmemory.com start for a guided exercise in doing this. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at

masterofmemory.com question and I'll talk to you again soon.