Please remember to forget

You might have gotten used to me teaching the opposite of the teaching of convention and conventional wisdom; maybe it's the way I try to forget convention which takes me into this domain where senses must be reinterpreted and tested.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the madman is not one who has lost his senses, but one who has lost everything except his senses.

We start off life by learning to remember all things, as it is vital for our survival, but as we grow older we might wish to forget those things we do not like; like pain and faults we made, dished out, received or invited.

Maybe Alheimer's disease is not so unwelcome as we think it to be. I think we need quite a strong dose of that as we grow to be older, to overcome the grief of remembering and restituting too late.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and things we did to injure or denigrate people, or things they did to injure or denigrate us, in our younger days, will come back to haunt us in our older days, and that would not be so easy to assimilate and digest, as the chickens come home to roost.

The pain of a wound is but superficial and fleeting, compared to the emotional and spiritual pain of regret which endures.

Regret is one of the higher calling of humans if it is accompanied by restitution. In fact, forgive and forget is our highest calling. It is a divine calling, worth the pain and trouble it costs to swallow our pride and be set free from the memory of bitterness.

The trouble with paying or digesting these things too late, is that it gets more diffiicult with time to digest and spit out. The cause of that is our memories. We tend to forget pleasant things fast and remember unpleasant things forever. 

That brings me back to trying to forget, whilst I murmur the beautiful song by Johnny Ray:

Just walking in the rain

Getting soaking wet

Torturing my heart by trying to forget

Just walking in the rain

So alone and blue

All because my heart still remembers you

People come to their windows

They always stare at me

Shaking their heads in sorrow

Saying: "who can that fool be"

This is because we do not remember to forget. Most of those acts and words of yesteryear have vanished into the air, have been settled somehow, have even been digested and forgotten, but in our memory it lingers and lives on. It even sickens, adulterate and kills us.

Who will intercede for man. I will ... with dedication, conviction and passion.

As humans we are frail, fickle, free, fallible, forgiving, funny, foolish, faithful, fastidious, facetious and phenomenal. We truly do not wish to hurt people or denigrate them.

But we are human ...

Let it pass, forgive and forget.

And above all, please, remember to forget.

On a more psychological and deeper level, the best way to forget completely, is to first remember completely, and that is the field of psycho-analysis to uncover a very light type of our post traumatic syndrome.

Our subconscious mind stores this data and we do not have easy and full access to it, similar to the reasons why we do not have access to a Windows operating system. It prevents the user to make unauthorised changes, like changing our heart rate manually for instance. There are functions which are called API's which gives us very limited access to the information contained in the operating system.

Similarly we need special tools to access our subconscious mind, but it can and should be done. Psycho-analysis and hypnosis are but two of these.

If we can access that information more fully and digest it, it would be much easier or even simple and joyful to forget it.

What a bargain.

Our memory was meant to be primarily directed to remembering the past, but rather use it for the present, whilst we use the past only to protect us from past dangers. 

Do what has meaning in the here and now, and not what is expedient in the here and now, the latter lands us in trouble every time.