"Memory is corrupted and ruined by a crowd of 'memories'. If I am going to have a true memory, there are a thousand things that must first be forgotten. Memory is not fully itself when it reaches only into the past. A memory that is not alive to the present does not 'remember' the here and now, does not 'remember' its true identity, is not memory at all. Those who remember nothing but facts and past events and are never brought back into the present, are victims of amnesia."
Thomas Merton
I take this to mean that we need to constantly re-invent or experience. Life is then not a hostage to past events or constantly reoccurring thoughts, and the mind is cleared out to have the opportunity to experience the present properly. Like much of FUC logic, this seems paradoxical, and yet I think it is the only proper attitude to hold in order to feel the possibility of each moment as fully sacred - even the crap moments too for that matter. Life's not all beer and skittles, but it does need to be experienced without hindrance from past programming.
I guess that's what the journey's about - trying to eliminate the past (self) programming. Eliot says a lot about this stuff doesn't he, realising the true significance of the past through the present moment and even through the observed secondary experience of others' experiences. But in the crap moments (when the beer has been drunk to the dregs and the skittles have failed to fall) sometimes you can only see and smell and hear crap and then the trick is to try to understand what's Holy in the crap or at least have a sense (faith?) that the crap is blessed too. Trouble is, its when we're in the crap that we forget all our lovely FUC resolutions for self-improvement and return to the little snotty-nosed lost children with all our behavioural ticks and duff programming which we'd been happily convinced we'd long got rid of. Falling upwards is like bungy jumping with God as the Elastic - guess you just have to believe It's going to hold :-)
ReplyDeleteVery much like bungee-jumping indeed; much of our falling upwards is about falling apart, and much going forward is about going backwards – or so it seems, feels, smells, tastes. I would only say that, if we are to accept the present fully, then we may have to go a step further and consider a possibility that the elastic will NOT hold -- and acqiuesce to this too as part of the immensely big picture in which our poor understanding is utterly at a loss. Crap moments are priceless; by them we grow and transcend our false selves. Let us be grateful for them.
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