Making Memories

Last night our Jungian friend said something that really caught my attention - actually amazed me. She said that sometimes she goes back to a memory and carefully goes through all the details so that she has a feeling of every part of it. Not as a way to explore something difficult but as somethings pleasurable - or that’s how I understood her. Now that picks up something I have been thinking about since writing the last piece on Me, Me, Me that explores the nature of our personal stories, our narrative. This is actually a ‘memory’ of mine and it concerns my first encounter with Jungian psychology and a comparison between it and the shamanic world of the anthropologist and writer Carlos Castaneda.

Castaneda tells how his shaman teacher, Don Juan Matus, instructs him to begin remembering the whole of his life backwards, starting in the present, and discarding the memories as he goes. If I understood it correctly this was designed to be a process of letting go of his personal narrative, a means to be free of his history. I found this quite shocking when I read it because I had become absorbed in Jung who was absolutely entranced with his own personal history and how as he dug deeper into it, it seemed to extend and expand into the history of the whole human race. A descent through layers of the psyche moving from the the personal to the collective unconscious. Why would Castaneda want to delete all this? From the Jungian perspective it was mining gold.

These thoughts coincided with my own observations of how I remember my own memories. Lots of threads come together here. I had recognised that my memory was in fact not an unbroken continuum but rather a series of high-lighted vignettes. More like a sequence of stepping stones through time where the stones were events that stood out interspersed with nothing at all. Where had all the stuff in the gaps gone? I also realised that each time I went back to the high-lighted events I was in fact changing them a little. My memory was not a static recall of what had happened but rather a dynamic process within my imagination jamming on a progressively obscured theme. Basically I was making memories about memories as I went along. This all chimes in with what we are discovering about the brain and its perception. This is enormously complex but the take away is that what we believe we are objectively sensing is being subjectively ‘filled in’ without our realising it. The brain - my brain - turns out to be an organ that is literally creating its own reality during every conscious moment. And lastly this is what the whole of Buddhist philosophy is about. Layer upon layer of speculation about how our ignorance of how things really are - because we distort everything - is the root cause of our dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

While I have been deeply engaged with the excavation of my own memories during my time in psychoanalysis I have - because of all the stuff above - come to be suspicious of the therapeutic worth of this. Here I want to tread carefully. Telling our story, having it properly heard, is a deeply healing event. There is something essential in the human psyche that needs to be seen, heard, known by others for it to come into its own full ‘self-hood’. We are literally made, come into being, through the reflection of others. However, there is also a down side to this. It is equally true that we spend a lot of time defining who we are and defending what we have created. This is the ‘self-cherishing’ that I talked about in Me, Me, Me, the reification of my sense of self. This activity is as ultimately futile as it is compulsive. No matter how hard I try I can never win against impermanence. As I make myself I am simultaneously melting away. I’m fighting a battle I’ve already lost.

Given this I’ve kind of gone over to Castaneda’s way of seeing things. I no longer value my memories in the way my friend does. Or perhaps more accurately, knowing I’m largely making it up, they have lost their fascination. I’m not saying I now live memory free in the eternal present but I am saying there is a freedom that comes from lessening the hold of all that ‘me’ stuff - of who I am and what I’ve done and what I stand for and what I don’t. Of course all this stuff is still there but it can be more lightly held. It’s insubstantiality more explicitly known. Or as Tsoknyi Rinpoche says, having the experience of a ‘mere self’. This brings me to two other ‘memories’ (I know, an instant contradiction!). The first is sitting on our sofa and the feeling of utter relief and gratitude when I realised that my days of being a meaning making Jungian engaged with my individuation had finally come to an end. Having lost interest I could just breath and this had nothing to do with my personal self and all its history. And the second was a line Philippa used when teaching mindfulness. She said that once we have read Gone With the Wind , (or any other huge narrative driven book), a dozen times its plot has lost all interest. Me, Me, Me, finally becomes boring and with this another door opens.

NW.  13 April 2026