It is not as you think

A group of people were asked to write down their account of an earth-shattering event like 911 and what they personally did around that time. These observations were safely stored away for a few years and the same group was then again asked to comment on the same events. The most amazing thing happened, many reported very different personal accounts and they felt so strongly about them to the extend that some responded to their original memories 'Well, I know that this is my hand-writing, but I am telling you, this is not what happened.'

The believer of a rational world and a rational mind will have to get upset about the surge in psychological studies that shows again and again that we are full of biases. Some will conclude that that only means that we have to try even harder to be mindful of our mental imperfection. I would say, don't even bother. Our hardware is biased and imperfect but it works just well to bring you home to our Source. Memories are there to show you finally what you didn't appreciate in perfect clarity when it happened, namely that you are pure love. Problems in the past are remembered but you feel strangely detached from them whereas every loving gesture, smile and kind word is remembered the way it really happened. You recall the event and the impact with the force of a blazing sun. It is not as you think, but it is as you feel if you allow your heart to talk to you.

Memories

My son reads with me 'The Magic Treehouse Series' every night. He loves these books and his school asks him to read every day a couple of chapters. Already I have tears in my eyes thinking about this time spent together, though in reality I am always dead tired when he does. How magical do you think I will remember these times in twenty years from now? We live in a fairy tale. 'Reality', the way your mind grasps it, doesn't exist. What does exist is love and that is why parents' one-sided memories are the only memories that come close to the truth.

When you see ugliness in your day to day work interactions you unfortunately can't block it out, sometimes wrong choices are made and you need to acknowledge them. Yet what you can do is to fast forward in your mind and think of retirement speeches. Do you really think any of this stuff will make it into the speech? No, when you look back and reflect on the essence of your relationship other points will be remembered. Smiles, laughter, generous acts. True history is nothing but the filtered deposit of loving thoughts. Nothing else exists.

Memories

I have young boys and I sometimes tell my colleagues who have older children about some of the struggles that I am facing and they smile benignly and say "this is such an age of innocence, you have no idea how much you will miss it later on".

Of course that will be case, all the feelings of love will be recalled as reality, whereas as problems, ear-infections or anger tantrums will be a faint memory. You may say that we are psychologically messed up, we have a selective memory and only store what we want to remember, right?

David Hawkins devised a spiritual power scale, arguing that the power of feelings and emotions grow geometrically from despair, fear or anger to love. What if the memories concerning our children happen to be the 'realistic' ones, and all our mind does over time is to filter out the unimportant from the important memories. After a few decades we finally get to the insight that applies all the time: in the end only love and kindness matters.