August 10. Before sunrise.
Outside, the sky still holds that subtle, ashen-blue hue of night in which the world seems assembled from silence, and the air smells of damp earth and unwritten words. I sit in the quiet of the room, listening to my slow, steady breathing, and once again feel that familiar, almost soundless distance opening up in my chest - between what I had understood last night and what I feel this morning. There is a strange, quiet tragedy in human existence: our knack for forgetting our most sacred insights. How is it possible to stand beneath the fullness of grace one moment, seeing with the crystalline clarity of your soul how everything is connected and how every pain is merely an unfinished gesture of love, only to wake up the next morning afraid once more, withdrawn, forgetting, caught in the snare of daily survival?
Why does this spiritual amnesia set in? Why does the soul build its most beautiful cathedrals of light, only to allow the fog to erase them in a matter of hours?
Psychoanalysis would call this an ego defense, a mechanism of self-preservation against excess. When the light of insight is too intense, it threatens to dissolve the fragile boundaries of our personality, burning away the illusion of control with which we navigate the world. Our psyche has its own natural threshold of tolerance for the absolute. Just as the eye constricts before direct sunlight, our innate psychological apparatus closes itself against excessive spiritual fullness to protect our human functionality. Sigmund Freud spoke of repression as a way of dealing with that which is too threatening for our closed system, but perhaps on a deeper level we repress not only trauma, but holiness itself. Because remembering the truth means changing forever, letting go of familiar structures of suffering; and the human ego, paradoxically, harbors a profound, almost unconscious fear of its own healing.
Yet if I look beyond psychological defense, through the window of the spirit, why does God - or the very mechanism of existence - allow this seemingly endless cycle of forgetting and remembering?
Perhaps because forgetting is not merely a defect of memory, but the necessary shadow without which light cannot be experienced as form and movement. If we lived in constant, uninterrupted light, it would turn into static background noise, a given that loses its life-giving force. Spiritual amnesia is that night which restores our thirst for the morning. It is the sacred distance that creates longing, and longing is the sole fuel that impels the soul toward its unfolding. In a psychoanalytic sense, the loss of the object opens up the space for its symbolic pursuit; in a spiritual sense, the loss of the feeling of the divine compels us to seek the source once more.
And here comes the quiet, shattering realization about stepping back.
How many times have I felt crushed by the fact that we fall back into the same old fears, that we doubt again, that we find ourselves back in the exact place we thought we had left forever. But perhaps this going back is not an abyss, but a springboard and a buildup of momentum. When an athlete prepares for their greatest jump, they do not start at the takeoff line. They take several steps back. They move away from the goal to gather kinetic energy, to tighten their muscles, to feel gravity with their whole body, and to transform that stepping away into thrust.
Perhaps our spiritual amnesia is precisely this psychological and spiritual "stepping back," without which we cannot overcome the next height of consciousness. Every time we forget who we are and sink back into the darkness of our human vulnerability, we touch the very bottom of our flesh, our dust, our need for salvation. And precisely from that bottom, from that deep psychoanalytic bending point, a new momentum is born. Forgetting forces us to choose faith once more, but this time from a deeper place. Not as the naive joy of initial insight, but as a conscious, mature choice forged through the pain of absence.
I watch the first ray of sunlight touch the rim of the teacup on the table. A small, golden dot expanding slowly, unhurriedly. Sometimes it seems to me that our entire life is a rhythmic ebb and flow between presence and absence. Carl Jung wrote of the spiral path of self-discovery - we always return to the same questions, to the same inner conflicts, appearing as if in a circle, yet in truth every return is on a new, slightly higher tier of the spiral. Spiritual amnesia causes us to go through the same trials, but with a little more mercy toward ourselves, with a little less judgment.
Why do we forget? Because we are flesh and breath at the same time. Because we are creatures on the threshold - too large for purely animal existence, yet too fragile for pure eternity. Forgetting is our human coat against the cold of the absolute, but it is also our greatest grace, for it offers us the possibility of rediscovery. What tenderness lies in discovering love anew after believing you had lost it forever! What a relief it is to forgive once more after believing your heart had turned to stone!
In the quiet morning breath, I feel the tension of wanting to remember everything - to be constantly awake, constantly enlightened - simply dissolve. Perhaps maturity on the spiritual path does not mean never forgetting again, but stopping the fear of forgetting. To know that even when you fall into the fog, even when the divine silence seems complete and merciless, it is merely the sacred pausing of the breath. An exhalation before the next deep inhalation. A step back into the darkness of gaining momentum, so that the leap of faith may carry us across the next abyss.
The memory of the body is short, but the memory of the spirit is inscribed within the very structure of our longing. And even when my mind is completely empty and my heart is weary and afraid, the very longing for light is proof that the light exists. Amnesia is merely the temporary night of the psyche, in which the soul rests so that in the morning it can once again be surprised by the sunrise.
I take a breath. The air is cool, clean, and full of promise. I sip my tea. Light has already filled the room. I do not need to clutch the truth with clenched fists. It is enough simply to let the step back become my next leap.
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