How Do We Escape the Traps of Memories?

Behind all of our habits and repetitive experiences, in life, is memory.  Memory is the persistence of an experience.

Memory is one of the four expressions of intelligence.  It works hand-in-hand with imagination.  Without memory, imagination evaporates without a trace.

Memory is our way of capturing our ideas, giving substance to foresight, voice to conscience, and getting good grades, in school.

So, we prize memory above all of our other expressions of intelligence.

Wrongly.

Two reasons:

Other expressions of intelligence are necessary for memory to work:

attention:  For memory to work, we must pay attention to it.

intention:  For memories to have any meaning, they must be flavored with an intention.

imagination:  A little twitch of our imagination calls up our memories.  (If a little twitch doesn't do it, a heavy effort of remember rarely works, have you noticed?)

All four are needed for any one of them to work.  None of them is superior to the others.

That's reason #1.

Here's reason #2:

Memory, without balance by the other three expressions of intelligence is a trap -- the loss of peace, the trap of stress,  or obsession, or compulsion, or bigotry, or willful ignorance -- or stupidity, the incapacity or refusal of intelligence.  We forget what peace feels like.

We have a little clue about how to overcome the persistent force of memory and very good reasons to do so.

The clue about how to overcome the persistent force (or alternately, the incompetence) of memory lies with the other three expressions of intelligence.  There's an oddity, about it.

This is the oddity:  As soon as all four expressions of intelligence come to balance with each other, all four become optimized -- and experience automatically loses its entrapping quality.  Said another way, the seeming substantiality memory evaporates, leaving mental space.

The trap of experience evaporates, and yet all four expressions of intelligence -- including memory -- are optimized.  Odd, don't you think?  No teacher ever taught you that, did they?

Well, here's the rub:  How do we balance our four expressions of intelligence -- attention, intention, memory, and imagination?

There are ways -- slow ways and fast ways.

So, how do we know we are trapped by the force of a memory?

We're just a little bit ... annoyed ... or obsessed ... or inconvenienced by conscience or foresight, or that song just won't stop running through our mind.  But mostly, we're just bothered.

The first step to overcoming for force of memory is to recognize that we've lost our peace.

Recognizing that takes just a bit of intelligence -- actually, a lot because we tend to get buried in the details of our daily experience.

Stay tuned.

Next expostulation in about two days!