Before answering the question of memories, it would have been good to ask ourselves what are we? Then the role that memories have in the construction of the self..
The individual is like a cow in a meadow, an eternal ruminant. It filters and distorts the moment in reaction to memory and all its accumulations. Thus, without memories, the individual becomes free from conditioning and the past. Memories as images and sensations are archived and do not need to remain like open files on a desk that are constantly consulted. They hinder the proper functioning of perception in the moment. We then identify with the past to forget our inability to make the changes that are needed in the present moment.
Nostalgia for the past is a form of avoidance, a flight away from reality.
Thus, all that one has accumulated is of little value. They are only memories, wounds, images, pleasures, certainties and beliefs, without any understanding of what forms a unified whole. Seeing this honestly is the beginning of intelligence. Yet we spend most of our lives accumulating memories. Memory belongs to the past, and habits and traditions are of the past, they act as authorities which condition the present, and to which one must submit.
The present is therefore the modified past projecting itself into the future.
The time, not chronological but psychological, of yesterday and tomorrow are the enemies of man. There is no time, psychologically, no distance separating us from reality. There is only the omnipresence of what is now, without choice.
Time is thought, which is a reaction of memory. Time is therefore not now.
We have created daily lives responding to the dictates of the chronological clock, sequenced by needs for accomplishment, prisoners of duty, attachments, all freedom absent.
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