Remembering
In reading Stanislav Grof’s monumental study of LSD psychotherapy many years ago[1], I found that human memory begins with the contractions that initiate the birth process. In the unconscious of every person, there lies the memory of these vibratory contractions, travel through the cervix and down the birth canal, and finally the ecstatic release of pressure and actual birth.
From the point of the contractions that begin birth, nothing is lost to human memory. All of a person’s experience can be recalled either by conscious effort or by controlled or spontaneous regression.
I am led to these reflections by discovering that I don’t like to remember my past experience. Our minds drift back to memories very frequently, which seems to be a normal process, and therefore I was surprised when I saw that I disliked drifting back like this. It is as though I feel about any memory, "What does it matter?”
In an earlier essay in this collection, “Zazen and Ego,” I described my experience of suddenly losing my sense of personal self and of my consequent realization of the truth of the Buddhist principle that the self or ego does not substantially exist. Since this realization, I have tried to discard a feeling of self and to discard self-reactivity, and to pretty much live without it, to live without a sense of “I.”
When I am without “I,” at least now and then, I see memories in a stark and unpleasant light. I frequently see the selfishness of my then ego-driven behavior. Perhaps I wounded a girlfriend. Perhaps I threatened someone with violence who had offended me. Perhaps I was unduly critical of someone. Memories bring a panoply of experiences in which I misbehaved because I felt that my personal self or ego was real and that it was due reverence, retribution was allowed to it, only its needs were important, and so on.
So it is no wonder that I don’t care for memories. They frequently represent a person that I like to think is different now and that it is inconsequential to remember.
Footnotes
- Stanislav Grof, LSD Psychotherapy, 1980.