For a long time, I didn’t want to remember anything in my past. It began in high school when I would do marvelous on my exams. I would cram information into me and then consciously disregard it right after I finished my exam. I became resentful because all that data did not seem practical for living and a head full of facts gave me no peace. Carlos Castenadas’ book, Journey to Ixthlan, also spurred my quest to forget. He encourages you to erase your personal history because then no one can be angry or disillusioned with your actions. No one can pin you down with their thoughts of what you should be or do. You’ll have the ultimate freedom of being unknown. It reminds me of the freedom I feel when I travel to another state where no one knows me; I can explore whatever I want without the threat of criticism. Two alternatives await, you, Castanadas claims: one is to be predictable and bored to death; the other is to create a fog, a mystery and an excitement about your life such that no one knows where a rabbit might pop up.
All of this forgetting oneself easily promotes becoming an enlightened being. When you let go of who you are, you indeed become lighter, and even so light as to become no one. In the Taoist tradition, one of the images of the enlightened being is that of a fool. Taoists believe the fool can sometimes be the man of Tao. After all, people thought Jesus was somewhat of a fool when they pinned him to the cross.
Having memories makes you more a creature of the earth. In C.G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, the famous psychoanalyst tells his biography with the touch that only an analyst could have. In it he shows his integrity by the match between his memories, dreams, and reflections and his true character. You are what you remember.
Many clients in my world of psychiatry have difficulty because of their past memories. There are those who suffer also because of what they have suppressed out of their conscious memory. In spite of their attempts, the unconscious past forces its way out as an irrational display of mental disturbance.
I believe the only way to forget is to be finished with the past. Absolute forgetting means erasing your brain. Too many drug addicts and alcoholics have tried it. The problem is they erase the rest of their brain along with the undesirable parts. The need to escape your memories means that you have not processed the feelings associated with those experiences so that you are “done” with them. You are done with a particular experience when you think of the experience and consistently don’t have emotion come up about it. If you emotions do come up, in spite of your idea that you were done, then you still have not sufficiently dealt with the emotions of the experience.
What about good memories? I find it interesting that I don’t seem to retain good memories either. The defense for my not keeping them is that if you need memories to make yourself feel good, then you aren’t creating newer good feelings in the present moment. Often comparing the present to the good old times leads to frustration for not having things be the way they were. Bob Dylan says, “don’t look back”. What seems proper with memory is to remember what will lead to a good experience presently or to remember what will produce practical results.
Since I have been more willing to remember myself and what I experience, my memory has improved. The attitude that I can remember better, or that I can remember certain things, sets the stage for it to happen because it programs my perceptions to produce the desired result. In remembering a face and a name, you can create mnemonics to help, but what helps most is the intention to remember, the effort you put to create the memory (with a mnemonic), and the process that all of this takes to make memory better. The more we are with the experience at the time we go through it, the more likely it will be retained. If we are preoccupied with our own mental stirrings, we will not take hold of the experience before us.
What we remember makes a statement about how important we think that particular memory is for our lives. To refine who we are, we must refine the way that we remember.