Because We Don’t Want To
Why can’t we remember the way we used to be?
A friend and I were chatting the other day, asking each other’s thoughts on poetry and prose, and on ideas and feelings. At one point, an odd question just hung in the air for me — I don’t think either of us asked it: Why do many adults say they cannot understand children’s poetry?
Later, I got to thinking about the question and wondered this: What do children seek? Where do adults focus? What happens as we grow up and grow older?
Here is a short answer to indicate where this is going:
Q: Why can’t we remember the way we used to be?
A: Because we don’t want to.
Ideals
I thought about how children might form ideas and interests. I tried to remember from my own childhood how children might discover ways of experiencing, thinking, and doing things, and I came up with a simple scheme. I do not claim this is accurate or relevant to any theory of child development, but I thought it useful to consider here. There are other ideals as well, particularly around family and comfort. This is more about outward-facing ideals like, “What can I do today?”
Ten kinds of ideals, more or less by relative age up to maybe 18
Find magical surprises.
Discover wondrous things.
Make things better – more surprising, more wondrous.
Overcome obstacles – learn how to do things.
Fix problems that need fixing.
Help people who need helping.
Heal what needs healing.
Correct errors that need correcting.
Correct situations that need correcting.
Correct people who need correcting.
I think of these as childhood wishful thinking. I am not going to go much further with these ideals as such, other than to say firstly that I think these are worthy to keep in mind in many circumstances, and secondly that the practical implementation of these in society is unimaginably complicated and is also fraught with peril due to the complexity of life — for example, we cannot simply demand a law that makes them so. And of course, sometimes bad things just get in the way.
Next, I also considered young and middle-age adults and what their ideals might be. Here, it seemed a list of ideals like those above might not be useful on account of the complexities of adult life. Besides, I thought it could be simply stated like this:
Seek order and usefulness amid chaos and complexity. Where appropriate, hold on to some childhood ideals as heuristics and guides.
This agrees with my concern about the implementation of ideals developed in childhood: adults are often more practical about life than children are.
Lastly, I considered older adults like myself, and the kinds of things we tend to think and worry about:
Find meaning and strength amid doubt and decline. Adhere to fundamentals and to what we truly know.
Time
Before we try to answer the question about not remembering our past, let’s set the scope of time: it is at least the entirety of a human life span. To understand the question at hand, about looking back in our lives through whatever means, we need to understand that we have a wide range of memories of different times, some of which might be very difficult to grasp if we haven’t thought about them already. I copied the following quote from the “Gospel of Thomas” in the Nag Hammadi library at gnosis.org. This library of scrolls and translations is quite different from the religious ideas I heard when I was young. “End” refers to death and after death, while “beginning” refers to birth, before birth, and before conception.
“(18) The students said to Yeshua, Tell us how our end will be.
Yeshua said,
Have you discovered the beginning and now are seeking the end?
Where the beginning is, the end will be.
Blessings on you who stand at the beginning.
You will know the end and not taste death.(19) Yeshua said,
Blessings on you who came into being before coming into being. ….”-- http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gosthom-meyer.html [emphasis added]
I’ve written elsewhere about the same or similar questions. Consider the ideas and titles below (they are linked at the end of this post). For the moment, the ideas and titles alone are enough to think about.
The beginning is like this: Memory of Being Born. What it was.
The end is like this: Ocean of Light. Realizing the obvious.
In between is like this: Self-Sacrifice. The power of our desires.
Motivation is like this: We Always Do the Best We Can. There are no exceptions.
Belief is like this: The Mystery of the Ordinary. The search for truth.
The truth is like this: The Flowering of a Wonderful Law. The reality of being.
Obstacles to looking at childhood memories
Try this exercise — best read slowly:
All text is abstract. Take time to stop thinking about words. Instead, just notice what the words suggest to you as you read them. The real meaning is not present in the words.
Here is a small puzzle related to context. Notice how your focus of attention changes while you consider it.
Nothing is not a thing. Nothing cannot exist. The words, “it is nothing,” do not say there is a thing called nothing. So, what were you before you were born?
What happened in your awareness when you read that question? Did your focus of attention change? The original context of that exercise is a discussion on what happens in severely traumatic situations when attention may become so narrowly focused that it excludes all but the most demanding features. During a trauma event it is difficult to think about what is happening; then afterward there is difficulty recalling many critical details of that experience. The exercise calls attention to exactly the opposite effect: a lessening of demands on you with an expanding focus of attention.
I mentioned earlier, in regard to the kinds of ideals that children develop, that “sometimes bad things just get in the way.” The effects of bad childhood events can last long into adulthood. When an adult reads a children’s poem, the experience tries to take the adult back to the ideals of childhood. But for many adults, that path is blocked or diverted.
Here is a personal account:
“When I was 2, my war-damaged father started using lengthy, extremely graphic threats of physical harm as a way to control my behavior. These frequent and stressful events altered my childhood. From that point on, less and less of my energy was spent in ordinary childhood things, while more and more was spent constantly scanning my environment to anticipate and avoid both the verbal attacks and the promised harm. This affected the way I grew up, and later in life it affects the way I look back at those years. The bad events outshone the good things I might have done. Today, it is still difficult to look back to ordinary childhood delights. Some of them just aren’t there.”
Going further back into childhood, being born is also very stressful. People can, if they want to and if they work at it, remember events surrounding their own birth into this world. There is a lot of valuable information there! It happened to us all; and so, somewhere in each of us there is the memory of those events. There are two main problems with remembering such things.
First, they are almost completely invisible to the mind today. To remember things, the mind works on what some call “handles” and “connections.” Handles are key words, images, ideas, and such that trigger memories; handles are the kind of thing that make us say, “Oh! That reminds me.” Grasp the handle to pull up the memory. Connections are the mind’s way of linking handles to memories. The problem is, there just aren’t many recognizable handles for perinatal experiences – certainly not many words. Handles are there; but they can be very subtle and very difficult to grasp.
Second, there may be something that blocks access to those memories. These are handles without good connections. When you grasp it, it says “Stop, nothing here to remember,” or it says, “No, remember this other thing instead.” You can see this happening if you watch carefully. It isn’t that these are difficult handles. Some handles lead to the memory they say they are connected to, while other handles lead away from the memory. “Oh, I remember what happened then and I just don’t want to think about it right now,” or “That reminds me of something I read last week.”
Why not remember?
Let’s work down from older adults to children, to see why we might not want to remember the way we used to be
Most adults live in some degree of continuous traumatic stress. They force out of their attention things that are not relevant to immediate needs, whether these needs are physical, mental, emotional, or social. When confronted with things that interest children, they could say they are not interested in such childish things or say they just don’t or can’t understand these things, in order not to remember them. Older adults might say, “I just don’t understand that kind of behavior.” Younger adults might say, “I’m not interested in those things anymore.”
Adults with overly stressed childhoods might say to themselves, “I don’t want to do that,” “I don’t want to go there!” or, “Don’t make me have to deal with that again.” They cannot visit their childhood easily because the good things and bad things are tied together and cannot be selectively remembered. Adults will not understand a poem for or about children if they simply do not want to remember associated childhood problems. Children’s poetry can conflict with emotional memory. Their polite answer is, “I don’t understand that,” meaning, they do not understand how to deal with that right now.
Most children seem to live today in a condition of continuous excited exploration. They turn their attention away from those things that are not immediately relevant to the magical surprises of preschool days, to the wondrous new experiences of early school, or to the opportunities to participate and contribute in later school. When confronted with times much younger than theirs, they may disdain such childishness because they want only to keep moving ahead with their ideals. They may politely and pleasantly reminisce about prior pleasures, up to a point, but seldom do they really want to think back to what they may see as a smaller, more naive, and rather embarrassing time. If they were excessively stressed in earlier years, they will have turned a substantial amount of energy away from their ideals to focus instead on fears for their own security and (this is important!) on fears for the security of their parents. I suspect there are truly a lot of abused children in the world because I have met what seems like far too many of them, but I do not really know. Does anyone know?
For a while, each newborn remembers being born, and many of them remember well the unchanging constancy of their awareness before and after delivery. I remember these things; so, that is the perspective I am writing from. Within days, weeks, or months, the world of magical surprises (I remember when I discovered my toes!) is too compelling, and the unforgettable memory – “the background memory” from the beginning of this life – gets set aside in favor of magical surprises. That’s OK, we might say, because the memory of limitless being is always here for us whenever we need it!
But, where is this here? Where did this simple memory go? Is it easy to retrieve after decades of wishes and habits? Have bad things gotten in the way?
Throughout the journey from birth through adulthood, we willingly become addicted to the illusions of this world because we want to experience this world. We try hard to live well in this powerful swirling stream, and soon the nightmare of daytime (that’s a Zen phrase) lives on and on within us. Much later in life, we may set aside that nightmare amid our unhappy exhaustion, and one day we may even be surprised to suddenly remember again what we have always known and what we have always remembered before.
All people have the innate ability, even in the most stressful moments of their lives, to remember their experiences right back to the discovery of their own pure awareness. Is there any way more people can recall this earlier and more often, or does it just happen when it happens?
While most of us fear to look back too closely through the troubled confusions, we may find ways through practice, guidance, training, and the kind words of others, to look back to childhood — to infancy, birth, conception, and even before — to recall the simple awareness of what and who we really are. There are things to be remembered from within ourselves that are vastly more enduring and more significant than misery and suffering. There is limitless being.
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The links mentioned above:
The beginning is like this: Memory of Being Born. What it was.
The end is like this: Ocean of Light. Realizing the obvious.
In between is like this: Self-Sacrifice. The power of our desires.
Motivation is like this: We Always Do the Best We Can. There are no exceptions.
Belief is like this: The Mystery of the Ordinary. The search for truth.
The truth is like this: The Flowering of a Wonderful Law. The reality of being.
This exercise follows “What were you before you were born?”:
The Rain “Look around you.”
Read Reality and Being on Substack.
Download the book for free at the Internet Archive in PDF or Ebook formats.