Have you ever noticed that sometimes questions about shared memory or history may be answered with “I’m not sure if I remember correctly.”? Ponder this. Is it possible that when someone declares that their memory has faded when asked to clarify details of the past, chances are that the original story they told yesterday or 20 years ago was fabricated and constructed for a specific purpose? Like a Broadway show, it was created and produced to inspire a certain emotional response in a targeted audience. We all do this. Ever watched children fight in the backyard and then recall the “event” to their mother? Ever facilitated staff in the “He said She said” game? Ever watched the six o’clock news? 
Dr John F Demartini says “Memory and imagination is a lie.” Harsh and confronting perhaps, however John is not alone in his assessment of these functional mental tools of humanity. Napoleon, a master of the twist and sell, volunteered much about the nature of his own campaigns when he declared. “History is a myth that men agree to believe.”
In Maslow’s “Safety” zone, when we perceive pain in an experience, we subsequently slap a label of shame, guilt or blame on the story and its characters. The selling of a skewed “story” to a particular audience becomes a necessary survival strategy.
I’ve recently been asking my parents to shed light on information they shared with me as a child and am noticing a distinct “loss of memory” pattern in both of them when I press for specifics. The endlessly inquisitive serious minded Capricorn child had obsessively catalogued stories as her own means of survival repeating and retelling as primitive tribes pass down and preserve mythology. I was the child patiently going through the family photo albums researching investigating questioning and interviewing grandparents and family collating notating and collecting the family stories. As a young adult I joined genealogical societies and conducted family history research hunting and gathering seeds and fruits to preserve the family story like sweet jam in large glass jars each containing characters, plots, twists and turns of each episodic fantastic tale – my hi-story.
So imagine my surprise when I finally find the courage to face my parents and ask the tough questions about whats been fermenting in my glass jars only to discover that perhaps the original mythology sold to me as a three year old was about as real as the latest Harry Potter movie and probably just as expensive to produce!
Did my parents all of a sudden lose their memory or was mi- story (or my-stery) – far more important for me to hold onto in my sweet sticky jars of memories?
How many of us have based our life beliefs on the tales we have accumulated from our childhood experience, and thus constructed a reality in accordance with these stories, crafted our own mythology about what is “good” or “bad” and established benchmarks to measure experience accordingly? What happens when we determine that these fables were engineered with an agenda in mind by the author of the story? What then of the certainty we have safely underpinning the structure of our own reality?
Voltaire declared that “History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.”
So let’s see just how imaginative we really are and test his assertion. Try this exercise. Declare your rules for life. Dig deep into the well of memory and list your benchmarks for relationships, finances, business and work, fitness and health, beauty, good and bad, family and friendships, influence, power, right and wrong.
So let’s see just how imaginative we really are and test his assertion. Try this exercise. Declare your rules for life. Dig deep into the well of memory and list your benchmarks for relationships, finances, business and work, fitness and health, beauty, good and bad, family and friendships, influence, power, right and wrong.
Once you make this list, note the corresponding story at the foundation of each rule.
Note the patterns in your own childhood classification of each memory in accordance with your perceptions of reality at the time.
Note the patterns in your own childhood classification of each memory in accordance with your perceptions of reality at the time.
How does that look now? How does that feel? It’s an interesting exercise isn’t it? Oscar Wilde however needs the final word and believe me when I tell you that he is absolutely correct in his identification of the power of our memory. “Any fool can make history but it takes a genius to write it.”
