Inspiration - And if it was better to forget?

2026-01-06

In Greek mythology, Memory is a goddess, Mnemosyne, daughter of Gaia, the Earth, the first goddess to appear at the origins of the world, and Ouranos, the Sky; she was therefore born almost at the beginning of Creation … When we get to the word “memory” itself, it is taken from the Greek word mnèmè which in English has become “mnemonic” or “amnesia” (absence of memory). One also finds the root in the Latin word mens “intelligence” (derivation of “mental”, “mentality” …), in mathematics¸ but also in amnesty, in mania (from Greek mania, “madness”) or in visionary activities (necromancy, chiromancy…), and finally in automation (“operating on its own”). The root of all these derivations? The Greek noun ménos which means nothing less than “spirit, principle of life, principle of will”! This shows how fundamental and constitutive memory is to our being and our experience!

Yet this memory, so fundamental, is sometimes embarrassing; there are certain memories that we would rather forget. Memories that bother us. Or that weigh us down and hold us back. Wouldn't the solution be to be able to forget them, to be able to slip them into a little locked box labeled “embarrassing subjects” and never open it again? This is what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought when he wrote that forgetting fulfills a vital function: “Forgetting is essential to action of any kind, just as not only light but darkness too is essential for the life of everything organic”^[1], specifying elsewhere that forgetting “is rather an active ability to suppress, positive in the strongest sense of the word...”^[2] Jean-Paul Sartre goes further. For him, this past is a tool for his future, so it is up to him to decide what to do with it: “The only power of the past comes from the future: however I live or appreciate my past, I can only do so in light of my plans for the future.”^[3]

However, what makes this memory uncomfortable is perhaps the elements that we do not know about. In Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the philosopher L. Ron Hubbard distinguishes between the analytical mind, which deals with conscious memories, and the reactive mind, a very ancient mind dating back to the origins of the human species, which kicks in during moments of intense stress and then guides humans through stimulus-response movements: “The source of aberration has been found to be a hitherto unsuspected sub-mind which, complete with its own recordings, underlies what Man understands to be his ‚conscious‘ mind. The concept of the unconscious mind is replaced in Dianetics by the discovery that the ‚unconscious‘ mind is the only mind which is always conscious. In Dianetics this sub-mind is called the reactive mind. A holdover from an earlier step in Man’s evolution, the reactive mind possesses vigor and command power on a cellular level. It does not ‚remember‘: it records and uses the recordings only to produce action. It does not ‚think‘: it selects recordings and impinges them upon the ‚conscious‘ mind and the body without the knowledge or consent of the individual. The only information the individual has of such action is his occasional perception that he is not acting rationally about one thing or another and cannot understand why.”^[4]

Perhaps it is this unconscious part of ourselves that continues to fill our worst memories with fear and despair, preventing us from seeing them for what they are: experiences of a life that continues to move forward: “The antagonistic forces of the exterior environment thus become entered into the individual himself without the knowledge or consent of the individual. And there they create an interior world of force which exerts itself not only against the exterior world, but against the individual himself. Aberration is caused by what has been done to, not done by the individual.”^[5] Far from being a process of forgetting, Dianetics allows us to open this box of uncomfortable memories and finally understand it, so that “complete remembering seems to be a synonym for complete sanity”.^[6]