Learn To Forget And We May Remember

Humanity appears to have trouble remembering, and therefore trouble seeing, and therefore trouble realizing that we just keep repeating the same behavior expecting all our dreams to come true.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” apparently coined by the writer and philosopher George Santayana.
The very fact that this gentlemen made this statement many decades ago means he saw it occurring in his day, and it still applies today incidentally indicating repetition.
With this observation I really find a great irony in human behavior.
We see that we-humans continue to repeat the same diabolic, nefarious, hostile, brutal, and savagely violent behavior over our many centuries on this planet.
We continue to engage in the same motions, the same patterns of behavior where the specifics my differ, the names, etc., but the overall grand pattern is another repetition of what has come before. This phenomena also lending itself to the generation of predictability.

So in our collective behavior we appear to exhibit a type of “amnesia” in our forgetting of history, however on the granular cultural, societal, social, and finally individual levels all we seem to do is remember.
We seem to constantly be engaged in remembering “who we are” along with “who everybody else is.”
That is, our “background”, heritage, ethnicity, race, religion, nationality, personal history, and on and on all wrapped up in a mental structure we refer to as the ‘psyche’, ‘identity’, or the “me.”

Indeed, it seems our entire civilization is based and built upon nothing but remembering the past. Everything that happens in the present appears to always be measured by and according to what happened similarly in the past.
Our language is built upon, and based in repetition and the past.
We’re constantly engaged in recording, collecting, and storing ‘past’ and so we are constantly repeating ‘past.’

And so this brings us to the main focal point and thrust of this article…
That for all our ‘remembering’ all we seem to do is ‘forget.’
It’s almost as if we’re completely ‘blind’ even though all we do is try to ‘see.’
We try to ‘see’ by gathering information/knowledge which is based in time, experience, and the past and we call this “intelligence.”
But is this REALLY seeing?
What does it mean to ‘see?’