Love Without Memories
From the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993
If the whole world lost its memory, then we’d be very close to love. If you lost your memory, of course you wouldn’t be able to remember your old lover, or remember your old pain – what your mother or father did to you and the resentments you hold in you. All that would go and the screen would be blank.
‘Horror of horrors, I’ve lost my self!’
But when you lose your self you’ve always got me - 'me’ inside the body hearing these words, the place of joy and of the instantaneous knowledge of love. That doesn’t need any memory. That’s the place of presence, which is the present.
While you’re performing any action, like walking along the street, and you’re just the action, there’s no memory. No memory, no problem.
In deep dreamless sleep, when you’re never happier in your entire life, where’s your memory gone? What’s happened? Deep dreamless sleep is purely the loss of your memory. You have no problems there, no unhappiness. But as soon as you wake up, you enter your memory and all your burdens descend upon you. And as you go through the day, whenever you have a spare moment, you start thinking.
Memory, as I’m talking about it, means the attachment to memory - the irresistible need to remember what’s not necessary for the moment. Give up that attachment to your memory and you are in the state of deep, dreamless sleep while awake and conscious. That’s the state of the Master, the state of enlightenment. That state is available to every body but not to my self.
My self, just inside the body, consists of memory. There is a mental memory, or let’s say an 'image memory’, but its substance is an emotional memory – the sticky stuff that’s the source of all the imagery. My emotional memory is where I’ve recorded all my past experiences, particularly hurts and pains. If I cut off mentally from it I will start to lose the images. But then the emotional substance of my memory is going to get very uncomfortable, because my emotional memory is my self.
For instance, you remember your car and you don’t get emotional, but if you’re attached to your car, and it’s been stolen, that’s when this emotional stuff in the self starts to seethe, because you’re attached to the memory of your car. If the car’s been stolen, that’s an actuality in fact for now and you do whatever you need to do about it. You contact the police and then you don’t think about it. If you think about it you’ll get the substance of all the deprivation you suffered in the past whenever you lost something. You will put more virulent past loss, such as having lost a child, onto the present. That’s what the self does.
If you insist on remembering your emotional self, and you go into that can of worms, you are likely to excite the self and it will drag you into a sort of tunnel. Then you have to go from one end of the tunnel to the other, which might take a day or two. So the best thing is to have the least possible attachment to anything in your life.
That does not stop love … There is, for instance, a love providing sufficient air for your lungs now. That’s natural, but finally it’s love. You don’t have to remember to breathe; it’s instinctive. It’s already programmed into the system. It’s pure memory - no memories in it.
Suffering