> Hey Doc, have you ever seen the movie 50 First Dates? Is that what awakening is like... without the brain damage? Every day is a new day and there is no past. I think that would be the greatest thing ever but we do have pasts and memories.... fucked up as they may be. It seems like a person has to be cleared of the past stuff before they can be happy in the moment. How does a person do that? Especially if they don't remember it all? I wish I knew how to get a grip on everything.

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Hi--

Awakening to True Nature does not mean forgetting anything. It simply means noticing that "future" is only a fantasy, and that the "past" no longer exists, except as thought. You can't change it. You can't influence it in any way. And you can't experience it apart from memory. Memories are thoughts, and thought can never evoke any actual "suchness" or "NOWness." That vastness and incomprehensibility is only NOW. Thoughts of the past cannot bring any actual NOW or suchness into being.

 

Thoughts arise and are known in the present. So what you are calling "pasts and memories," is really only memories which arise and are known NOW. That knowing is without effort. Knowing and NOW are one and the same. Knowing IS now, and now IS knowing. The two words are identical in import.

 

I am not saying that you cannot have memories which are disturbing and require somehow being understood and digested in order for you to move forward with your life. You may have memories like that, and if you do, the best thing is to do that work, using help, if necessary, like the kind which is available in psychotherapy, or in conversation with a good friend if you are lucky enough to have one like that.

 

We have been speaking in this thread about the topic of whether life is pointless which was the original question, not about memories and forgetting. But since you have raised the issue, to begin with, no one can FORGET anything intentionally. Remembering and forgetting are spontaneous, unchosen occurrances. Memories just arise on their own. No one has to TRY to do any "remembering." Remembering just happens. That "just happening" is what we call "knowing." What's known is known, and no one is responsible for what is known. Knowing is not chosen. You just KNOW, and that knowing IS you. If, in this moment, awareness is filled thoughts of some remembered past, that does not mean that the images in those thoughts exist in reality. They do not exist except in memory, and in memory all that arises is known only NOW. And that knowing is timeless and non-material. No one can can get a grip on it by any means whatsoever. Knowing simply flows. Past is over and gone. Only now ever exists. This must be seen in order to understand any of this.

 

The idea that "life is pointless" arises due to the persistent thought--the cultural meme, really--that human beings are the center of life, and that human desires, fears, beliefs, and motivations have some special significance apart from their being occurrances or happenings in a vast, endless sea of happenings of all kinds. This is anthropocentricism, an ego-based, self-centered idea which manifests as a contraction and almost total dumbing down of what life really is—a complete and total mysterious vastness of unspeakable complexity and apparent intelligence. How could what we call "life," or "nature" ever be understood by any human intellect, which refects that total apparent intelligence, and is contained in it?

 

Humans are PART of life, and the part can never comprehend the whole. Once that is seen, the idea that the part must have a "meaning," and ought to understand that meaning and be able to put anything about it into words, is both arrogant and foolish. Reality, which is life itself, contains human beings, and everything else. The grass comes up every spring regardless of what you think about it.

 

When you tell yourself stories which are not true—in this case that "you" are the CENTER of something, or that "you" must have come to "be here" for some particular purpose or pre-existing destiny—you suffer. In this case the suffering is called "the feeling of meaninglessness," or, perhaps more precisely, the fear that one may NOTICE meaninglessness. When you see that you not the center of anything apart from your own dreams and fantasies—when you awaken, in other words, to the vastness of reality, and particularly when you fully grasp that only NOW exists—you will no longer ask what the "point" is. Such a question would never even arise.