The nature of the memory is to hold an impression, agreeable or disagreeable, and therefore a person holds a thought in the mind, whether it is beneficial to her or not, without knowing the result which will come from it. This is like a child who holds a rattle in his hand and hits her head with the rattle and cries with the pain, and yet does not throw the rattle away. There are many who keep in their mind a thought of illness or a thought of unkindness done to them by someone and suffer from it, yet not knowing that it makes them suffer, nor understanding the reason of their suffering. They go on suffering and yet hold on in memory the very source of their suffering.
Memory must be one's obedient servant; when it is a master then life becomes difficult. A person who cannot throw away from her memory what she does not desire to keep in mind, is like a person who has a safe but the key to that safe she has lost. She can put in money but she cannot take it out. All one's faculties become invaluable when a one is able to use them at will, but when the faculties use the one, then onehe is no longer the master of oneself.
Concentration is taught by the mystics in order to exercise the will, making it capable of using all the faculties. A person with willpower can remember what she wishes to remember and can forget what she wishes to forget. All things which deprive one of one’'s freedom in life are undesirable. The mind must be free from all bad impressions of life, which take away one's rest and peace. By concentration one is able to hold a certain thought one desires and to keep away all other thoughts, and when one is able to keep away all the thoughts one does not want to think about, it becomes easier to throw away the impressions of years, if one wishes to forget them.
Bad impressions, however old and intimate, are like rubbish accumulated, which should be removed in order to make the house clean. The human heart is the home of the soul, and upon this home the comfort and peace of the soul depend.
|
