The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.
This kind of forgetting does not erase memory, it lays the emotion surrounding the memory to rest.
Some people have a mistaken idea that all thoughts disappear through meditation and we enter a state of blankness. There certainly are times of great tranquility when concentration is strong and we have few, if any, thoughts. But other times, we can be flooded with memories, plans or random thinking. It's important not to blame yourself.
The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one.
We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.
My own memories are packed tightly away. I very rarely bring them out for viewing.
Like Jesus, every human being has enough memories in his past to occupy his time and thoughts continually. It is not the remembrance of these incidents but the reliving of them that creates havoc in our souls.
There are moments of life that we never forget, which brighten and brighten as time steals away.