Remembering and Forgetting

Introduction: The goal is to raise the self-determinism of the preclear. Memory is an automaticity which is not under the control of the preclear. By taking over the automaticities of memory and forgetting the preclear is capable of greater self-determinism.

The Art of Remembering and of Forgetting

A Thank you to Ron!

One of Ron’s greatest achievements is the development of the so-called recall processes. Anyone who begins with the philosophy of Scientology encounters them already in the Communication Course – such as in TR 3. The basic intention behind this drill is to receive an answer to a question again and again. Of course, it is also about getting your question answered at all.

What may appear absurd at first glance is, in its usefulness, brilliant.

In Homo sapiens there seems to be a fundamental fear of forgetting. It manifests in the feeling that one must not forget – because whoever forgets can no longer justify or prove what happened. And whoever cannot prove something has lost. In addition, we are regularly asked to give an account: what we have done, where we were, how we obtained our money, and what we spent it on. Our society is based on countless records. It begins with the birth certificate, continues through various registers – and today nearly unlimited storage of our electronic communication has been added.

There is a strong urge to know everything about everything and everyone. Nothing must be forgotten. Whoever knows nothing is considered foolish; whoever knows a lot is considered intelligent. This shapes our relationship with memory. Already in school we are conditioned to remember.

The purpose of a memory or a record is that it persists. Otherwise one would not create it. It is like building a house – you want it to remain standing.

Thus one hold on to memories and do not complete the cycle. It is like with a hoarder: more and more unfinished cycles accumulate until it becomes impossible to move through the space. Everything is cluttered; no free space remains. In an overcrowded apartment, one can only restore order after creating space again.

It is exactly the same in the mind: it can become so cluttered that one can no longer evaluate anything. To bring order into an overcrowded mind, one must first create empty space.

Perhaps this also explains why, when one assumes a new body, one cannot – or does not want to – remember previous lives: one does not want to bring the old baggage into the new apartment.

Remembering

Here the true brilliance of Recall Processes becomes visible. The invention of the repetitive

Recall Process is – in its significance – comparable to the invention of the wheel or of money.

Recall processes form the backbone of the so-called Grades.

Recall processes are training in handling memory – and in handling forgetting.

In auditing it is not only about dissolving misemotions and pain. It is about completing numerous small and larger memories and being able to say: “The cycle is finished.” Or also: “It no longer needs to be created. Thank you, it is complete.”

Interestingly, the easier one can forget, the better one can remember.

Forgetting is an ability.

One may imagine the mind like an apartment in which every memory has its fixed place. Yet this is an impractical form of remembering. A thetan can simply know. He can recall a memory from “nothing.” It is not lying in a drawer – it is not stored. For if it were still stored away, the cycle would not be complete; one apparently still “needs” it for some reason and continues to carry it along – consciously or unconsciously.

A thetan can recreate a memory even if it no longer exists. To do this, he must abandon the idea that it might still be needed. Instead, there must be the willingness to recreate it when necessary – just as one can remake or reacquire a piece of furniture or an item of clothing.

Here one also sees a difference from AI: the thetan can create something new. He is not dependent on merely copying or storing. He is the source and does not require vast archives.

Recall processes are training in remembering. Auditing trains a whole-track ability – it is the conscious creation of knowledge and, if desired, the recreation of memories.

Remarkably, all of this begins with the ability to forget.

Below follows an excerpt from the book Straightwire – A Manual by L. Ron Hubbard, which I warmly recommend.

Happy Birthday, Ron!

Much love Max

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Modern Straightwire

Extract of the Book "Straightwire – A Manual of Practice

Free PDF download – Book 20.– CHF + Porto

On the theory that someone may pick up this book and have only time to read a few lines, or have a constricted ability in amount of material assimilable, right here in a hurry I wish to give you the type of Straight Wire which is today producing phenomenal results on preclears.

The Command:  "Recall a moment of ______."

Number of Times Command Used: Until the complete flattening of the preclear’s communication lag takes place, so that he can readily and at some length and quantity give replies without any difficulty.

Automatic Forgetting

… when we developed "Something you wouldn’t mind remembering," "Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting," in one of the clinical units of the summer of 1954. Immediately a great many limitations on Straight Wire were swept away and Straight Wire became a much more important process because it was getting much better results. Here for the first time we had entered into the idea that forgettingness was an actual attribute. In other words, it was a skill. A person forgot things so that he could have things. And, realizing that this was a skill and that it was on full automatic we, of course, had the reason why people were not able to remember. They were so anxious to forget.

In the spring of 1955, in the tenth clinical unit, we discovered that "something you wouldn’t mind forgetting" was far, far more important than "something you wouldn’t mind remembering," and made several tests which demonstrated a considerable rise in tone as a result of using this single command: "Something you wouldn’t mind forgetting." However, because many more interesting things were showing up and occurring we did not give this really the attention it deserved, and actually to this moment the process is not as thoroughly tried as it might be. It might very well occur that this process would succeed many other processes as something which would produce a long-continued and stable result.

… that the greatest automaticity in which anyone was engaged was remembering and forgetting. Thus, exercises on remembering and forgetting were, of course, very, very important.

It should be understood, then, that no amount of engram running or present time processes would handle this highly specialized thing, automatic remembering and automatic forgetting. And in view of the role remembering and forgetting play in everyday living we couldn’t consider the person very thoroughly processed unless we had taken his memory into account. Thus, whatever other processes are run on the individual, something should be done in order to bring this automatic memory factor under control.

We have rather suspected of recent months that it is not necessary to have a great versatility of subject in remembering in order to restore memory. The mere act of remembering something is enough to take over the automaticity. In other words, there isn’t an automaticity for every subject you can remember; there is simply an automaticity on the subject of memory. Similarly on forgetting. One might think there was a forgetting automaticity on every type and subject known, but there is only one mechanism behind all of this and that is simply an automaticity of forgetting.

Now, if you were to stabilize a preclear in present time and do all sorts of other things with him and yet neglect exercising his memory in any degree it is probable that you would have left the sphere of recall untouched to his detriment and would have left him with this automaticity. And the automaticity of remembering and the automaticity of forgetting could, of course, push him on down again. So, we should say that any preclear who becomes stable should have had exercises in remembering and forgetting.

L. Ron Hubbard