Part VI: The Subconscious and Forgiveness of Sins
FOR THE PAST one hundred years, using more and more sophisticated tools, research has been conducted into the process of remembering, but almost nothing has been done in the way of research into the process of forgetting. In current textbooks on psychology one is virtually certain to find in the subject index many pages or even whole chapters devoted to the faculty of memory. The Handbook of Experimental Psychology, edited by Stevens, is a case in point. It refers to only two pages on the subject of forgetting. A History of Experimental Psychology written by Boring follows the same pattern. The process of forgetting is itself almost forgotten, as though it were an area not worthy of research. Since this paper was first issued, a single report has appeared in Science dealing with this very subject under the title. "Forgetting: Trace Erosion or Retrieval Failure?" The research was done by Richard M. Shiffrin of the Psychology Department in Indiana University. (1)
It might be thought that the subject would be automatically covered by treating adequately the subject of memory. We have a memory, but apparently we do not have a "forgetory"! In school we spend years trying to train the memory, but after we leave school--if the truth were known--we probably spend even more time trying to forget, not trying to forget what we have learned in school but trying to forget the increasing burden of painful memories, of unkind thoughts, foolish utterances, selfish acts, ignominious defeats, and sheer wickedness which increasingly spoil the idealistic image of ourselves and our potential with which we started out after graduation.
We find ourselves in need of a forgetory, not a memory. Our only recourse is to resort to an occupation which is euphemistically termed "recreation," taking this word to include all forms of entertainment. A great deal of our time, perhaps far more than we are normally aware of, is spent in mild and not so mild forms of escapism. After an unpleasant event or experience we deliberately try to displace the recollection of it. Indeed, the poignancy of life is bound up, all too often, in things which we have no difficulty whatever in remembering, things which we wish we could forget. The act of memorizing something is a deliberate attempt to imprint it on the mind indelibly and recoverably. And on this process we have a great deal of experimental data. But the act of forgetting is entirely different, because any attempt to erase the message only reinforces the memory of it still further.
Failing any technique for erasing memory comparable to the techniques we use for imprinting it, we turn to diversion as the only escape: to sleep, to food, to drugs, to displacement stimuli such as noise, the excitement of sports, or the distraction of novels or movies--or even cocktail parties. We are not erasing: we are merely drowning out. And experience shows that these are not effective techniques, for in the long run these escapes still leave an unwanted residue, as Hamlet said: "To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ah, there's the rub."
Some countries, for historical reasons, seem to attempt deliberately to take the edge off painful memory by self-flagellation in various forms. The things that a man would like to forget--more often than not the things for which he blames himself--he seeks to erase by self-punishment. There is evidence that the Russian "national character," even in modern times, still reflects this method of dealing with a basic problem of human experience, in much the same way that the characters in the novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoi did. The Russian feels he can best obliterate the past by punishing himself for it.
The erasure of memory, the assurance that things will be forgotten, is a fundamental component of the principle of Divine forgiveness. It is written large in the Old and New Testament: indeed, it is the fundamental difference between the sacrificial systems of these two Covenants. The Old Testament sacrificial system, as Hebrews 10:3 shows very clearly, was bound up by the concept of remembrance: "But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins every year." By contrast Hebrews 8:10-12 says: "For this is the covenant I will make...I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more." That this Old Testament principle was to be superseded by a New Testament principle is reflected in the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah. For example, Isaiah 43:25 reads: "I, even I, am He that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins." And Jeremiah 31:34 reads, "And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
Now it seems to me to be self-evident that the kind of Divine forgiveness that is spoken of here is quite different from human forgiveness, no matter how complete and sincere human forgiveness may be: for in the very nature of the case we may forgive, but we cannot, by a similar act of will forget. But if God is going to forgive it must follow inevitably that He will forget. And if He will forget, it follows that we too shall forget, for if we were ever to remember our sins--were it but for a moment--it could not help but bring them to the Lord's memory also, since He knows our thoughts afar off and nothing is hid from Him.
God's forgiveness includes a "blotting out," a total and entire expunging from the record. But what is the nature of this record? Experiments are tending to show increasingly that everything of which we have had conscious awareness is somehow filed away where it may become inaccessible to voluntary recall, but is apparently indelibly recorded nevertheless. Is it possible that these indelible records constitute the books which are to be opened in the time of Judgment as revealed in Revelation 20:12? Is it possible that the Judgment is essentially a process of complete recall, of being exposed to, faced with, and called upon to evaluate in the light of the life of Jesus Christ all the innermost thoughts and schemes and selfish choices of our whole life? Would not this constitute a judgment utterly and completely fair? As we shall see, Penfield's experiments indicate the strange fact that even now segments of memory can be recovered so completely that the experience is relived in full. Moreover, while this is going on, the individual can stand aside objectively and talk about it. Such, then, is the potential of memory.
But what about forgetting? Perhaps this is where the uniqueness of God's forgiving as opposed to man's forgiving, enters into the picture: for it may be that when God forgives, the greater part of the pages of these books are entirely removed, obliterated, rendered as though they had never been, placed absolutely beyond recall either by ourselves or by God.
Sometimes I wonder whether there is more going on in our subconscious than even Freud or Jung were aware of. One almost has the impression, upon occasion, that the determination to reduce life to the terms of physics and chemistry, so that mind comes to be equated with brain, and thought with chemical reaction, is a desperate attempt of the subconscious in man to persuade himself that with the destruction of his body will go also the destruction of mind--and with it the filing cabinet of memory which might be opened to judge him. It is a kind of psychological suicide justified on rational grounds. The plea is that the process of thought, the experience of consciousness, the faculty of memory--in short, mind--is nothing more than a physicochemical something in which electric currents produce a series of stimuli in highly complex ways, which can somehow repeat themselves so long as the organ, the brain, functions. Destroy the brain and you destroy the mind. This is "forgetting" carried to perfection. This is escaping any possibility of a Judgment to come by the simple process of annihilation.
It is quite clear from Scripture that no escape by such a means is possible. It is important to say "by such a means," for there is a way of escape; but it is the way of God's method of forgiveness, a forgiveness which somehow reaches down into the area which we have been pleased to a large extent to ignore, the area of what is out of reach of our conscious minds but "filed away" in our subconscious. We can, therapeutically, by various means recall some of that which we had thought was totally forgotten, and in some cases the recalling enables us now and then to undertake some corrective measures. But we have not blotted it out. Indeed, in the long run, we do precisely the opposite; we remember more clearly than ever.
What follows is an attempt to explore some of the scientific evidence which, it seems to me, is accumulating daily to show that mind cannot be equated with brain; that Brain is essential for the genesis of the mind, but that thereafter (once generated) mind may somehow have an independent existence in its own right. What we do not have at the present time is the same kind of data to guide us on ways of forgetting, on means whereby mind can be purged of unwanted memories. All we can do at present is to note how extraordinarily persistent memory is, even in animals, and how little it seems to be affected by the destruction or mutilation of the brain with which it is supposed to be equated. It may be that some reader with psychological training and insight will initiate a program of research to throw light on the mechanism whereby God, through forgiveness, can somehow expunge from this filing cabinet so very strangely related to the organ of brain, those records and only those records which tell of thoughts or deeds that we have come to equate with an evil conscience. It is clear from Scripture that He does not simply wipe the mind clean (like a slate), but operates upon it selectively, so that we are able to forget those things in which we have offended, but do not fail to remember the multitude of His mercies (Ps. 106:7).
IN WHAT IS probably his best known work, Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson had a beautiful description of mind as a housing for memory: (2)
Memory is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty. For a faculty works intermittently when it will and when it can, while the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation.
In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought, and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or can further the action now being prepared--in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares.
Since Bergson wrote, a great deal of exploratory work has been carried out upon animals by neurophysiologists and upon people by neurosurgeons. In connection with human beings the work of Wilder Penfield is of particular importance. He has shown that if certain areas of the brain are exposed and gently stimulated by an electrode, the subject may suddenly be transported in a fully conscious state into some past experience which is recalled with such vividness that he does not seem to himself to be merely remembering but rather to be experiencing all over again the original occasion. The relived experience thus produced stops mid-stream, as it were, shortly after the electrode is withdrawn. (3)
The curious thing is that if the electrode is again contacted near the original site the experience is often re-lived all over again as a kind of rerun. There is not a continuation where the last scene finished off, but a repeat performance. In one subject this occurred 62 successive times! (4) This seems to indicate a rather precise localization within the cortex, like setting the needle down in the same spot on a record. Disconcertingly, however, it is often quite otherwise. One subject, stimulated in the same area, had four apparently unrelated experiential responses. First he heard "footsteps"; secondly, "a company of people in the room"; thirdly, "like being in a gymnasium," and finally "a lady talking to a child at the seashore." (5) But in the case of repetitious recall, nothing has been lost, nor has anything been added. Penfield said, "Events are not a bit fancifully elaborated as dreams are apt to be when recalled." (6) Nothing whatever is added provided the episode is the same one. And again, elsewhere, Penfield wrote: (7)
The vividness or wealth of detail and the sense of immediacy that goes with its evoked responses serves to set them apart from the ordinary process of recollection, which rarely displays such qualities. Thus with stimulation at Point No. 11 in Subject J. V. (Case No. 15) the patient said "There they go--yelling at me. Stop them!"
Each patient, upon stimulation in this way, relives his own experience and it seems reasonable to assume on the basis of present evidence that in man at least, a sufficiently sophisticated experimental procedure would allow, perhaps, the reliving of a whole life up to that moment. As Bergson says, it is indeed all somehow tucked away, and if God who made man's brain wished to have an individual judge his own life, there is no question that the record has been preserved in full so that he could review it.
The curious thing is that in some of Penfield's experiments indeed in many of them, the individual was able consciously to identify the meaning of the relived experience, not as a kind of hallucination but as something as real as life, from which he nevertheless stood apart. A woman listening to an orchestra under Penfield's stimulating electrode, hummed the tune she heard, verse and chorus, thus accompanying by an act of conscious effort the very music which was somehow being recalled from the subconscious so vividly. Furthermore, such recallings were entirely involuntary. They are not memories voluntarily brought to the surface. They are more detailed and more vivid than such memories ever are. Penfield reported the experience of one patient who re-experienced an occasion upon which she was sitting in a room and listening to the children playing outside. The sounds of motor traffic and all the other noises of urban living provided the "natural" background. She discussed all this with Dr. Penfield while it was happening, and so real was the experience that it took some time to convince her afterward that he had not actually arranged the whole thing, including the noises outside at the time. Needless to say, he had not done so: it was entirely a vividly relived experience complete with all sound effects. (8)
Sometimes the relived experience is so complex that the patient has to explain the background of it later. One twenty-three-year-old woman relived what she called a "fabulous" event, when she smashed a plate at dinner time with her elbow and tremendously enjoyed the experience. (9) She wanted to explain why she so enjoyed it. Another patient suddenly found herself sitting on the right hand rear seat of a car, with the window slightly down, waiting at a level crossing for a train to pass. She could even count the carriages as they went by, and all the characteristic sounds and noises were there, complete. After the train had passed and they crossed the tracks into town, even the old familiar smells were experienced. Penfield says this was the only case of a re-experienced smell that he came across in over a thousand patients whose brain surface was exposed in this way, in an effort to locate the cause of epileptic attacks. (10)
Penfield from the evidence believed that the memory record continues intact in the person's mind even after his ability to recall it has disappeared. More than this, he found that if the cortical area which had been the site of stimulation for the reliving of some experience was subsequently operatively removed (when it was believed to be for the benefit of the epileptic patient), the patient could still voluntarily recall the experience afterwards. Evidently, therefore, the memory itself was not stored at this point, but in some area to which the site was connected. Severing connections to the area made it impossible to obtain recall by electrical stimulation, but it did not eradicate the memory itself, which could therefore still be recalled voluntarily. When experience is recalled by this technique, the individual is not aware of any process of recall. Only afterwards, at the conclusion of the experiment, is it recognized as a vivid memory from the past.
The process of recall is in no sense disorderly as it may be in a dream. As Penfield put it, "It is a little like the performance of a wire recorder or a strip of cinematographic film on which are registered all those things of which the individual was once aware...Time's strip of films runs forward, never backward." (11) In psychiatry, seemingly forgotten memories can be recalled by means of free association. Drugs and hypnosis can also somehow open up these connecting pathways from the conscious to the subconscious. And there is some reason to believe that individuals who have established for themselves a reputation of having a prodigious memory, like Lord Macaulay, did not have in fact a memory any better than anyone else, but only some faculty of getting at the filed-away portions: to most of us, the records in the subconscious filing cabinet are just out of reach.
In exceptional individuals the faculty of recall can in fact be so acute that it becomes a positive embarrassment. Recently a book was reviewed in Science entitled, The Mind of a Mnemonist. (12) The author, a Russian named A. R. Luria, for many years collected experimental data from a so-called "professional mnemonist," i.e., a man who made his living by entertaining with his powers of recall. It is interesting to note that the man is described not as a genius, but only as "reasonably intelligent." He had in fact been a misfit in many tasks because of his very capacity to remember details rather than meanings. The reviewer points out that while with many people the problem is how to remember, this subject's problem was how to forget. In other words, his conscious mind was cluttered up with unwanted recollections which had to be somehow pushed to one side, a situation which is precisely the reverse of what most of us have to do. Probably the Lord knew what He was doing when He so designed man's mind as to provide him with the filing cabinet he has, which can be "closed for the day" but nevertheless preserves everything in proper order!
At the present moment it is not clear whether all forms of provoked relived experience occupy the same amount of time that the original experiences did, though this seems to be the case with electrode stimulation of the cortex. If in the Judgment each man's case occupied, as it were, a full lifetime, even if all men under judgment were being reviewed simultaneously, it might be supposed that at least nine hundred years would be required for the film to run itself through in the case of those who had lived before the Flood. This figure would, of course, be reduced presumably by all the time spent in sleep: but even so, it is a little difficult to think of the Judgment at the Great White Throne as occupying "time" in this sense at all. And probably it is quite unnecessary to make such an assumption. In an experiment conducted a few years ago, one subject under hypnosis was able to count 862 objects in a period of time which was measured as only three seconds. As the report rightly points out it is impossible in a normal waking state to count 862 of anything in three seconds. (13) So presumably the process could be accelerated until time was not really involved at all. If it can be reduced to seconds, why not to milliseconds? And if to a millisecond, why not to being instantaneous?
The acceleration of time seems to be involved in the mental processes of some of the "prodigious calculators," whose mental arithmetic has been a constant source of amazement. Such individuals may be asked to multiply a ten-figure number by itself or by some other ten-figure number, and they can come up with the answer within a second or two. (14) This suggests that, in the subconscious, information can be fed in and treated at an unbelievable rate, which it would be quite impossible for the same individual to handle at such a speed in the conscious part of his memory. Thus the question of time may not actually enter into the processes of retrieval in this life time filing cabinet. In short periods of great emergency people may relive in rapid succession and in great detail large segments of their past life in a moment. A few of those who have nearly drowned have apparently experienced this, and because they were rescued were able to tell about it. In a car accident, on the contrary, experience may suddenly slow up in a remarkable way, so that what happened in a few seconds seems at the time to occupy minutes. Everything seems to be occurring very slowly.
Some evidence that the subconscious memory is a vastly "superior" mechanism to the conscious memory seems to be borne out by the fact that under hypnosis, as Dr. Ralph Gerard put it, "Men remember and recall innumerable details never consciously perceived." Elsewhere Gerard remarks: (15)
Anyone asked to recall what he had just seen in a room or in a picture does a less complete job than a subject under hypnosis even years later. I have been told of a bricklayer who, under hypnosis, described correctly every bump and grain on the top surface of a brick which he had laid in a wall twenty years before.
One wonders what "idle words" which we have spoken may yet be brought to light (Matt. 12:36) in the Judgment unless there is some way in which the record can be erased. It is the erasing of the record that is so crucial to the whole question of forgiveness in the biblical sense: which brings us to the second aspect of the subject, namely, How much, if anything, can be expunged by experimental techniques; and by what method? And is there some other means available to man by which he can rid himself of painful memories of evil deeds and wicked thoughts, which he unfailingly carries as a burden, conscious or unconscious throughout his life? Can these memories be so completely removed that in the Judgment, when a man's life is reviewed, they will somehow prove to have been absolutely obliterated from the film, as though they had never been?
References:
1. See Science, 168 (1970):1601-1603.
2. Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, tr. Arthur Mitchell, Modern Library, New York, 1944, p. 7.
3. Penfield, Wilder, and Phanor Perot, The Brain's Record of Auditory and Visual Experience: a Final Summary and Discussion, Macmillan, London, 1963, repr. from Brain 86, Pt. iv (1963):595-696.
4. Ibid., p. 685.
5. Ibid., p. 682.
6. Penfield, Wilder, "Epilepsy, Neurophysiology and Some Brain Mechanisms Related Consciousness," in Basic Mechanisms of the Epilepsies, ed. Jasper, Ward, and Pope, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1969, p. 796.
7. Ibid., p. 679.
8. Ibid., pp. 645-46.
9. Ibid., p. 643.
10. Ibid., pp. 648-49.
11. Penfield, Wilder, "Mnemonic Mystery," MD Canada, 10 (Nov., 1969):154.
12. Luria, A. R., "The Mind of a Mnemonist," tr. from the Russian by L. Solotaroff, Basic Books, N.Y., 1968, reviewed by Gardner Murphy in Science, 161 (1968):349-50.
13. Cooper, L. F., reported in Sci. Nevus Letter, May 15, 1948.
14. Hadamar, Jacques, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, Dover Pub., N.Y., 1954, p. 58.
15. Gerard, Ralph, "What is Memory," Sci. Amer., Sept.,
1953, p. 118.
Corrections, August 14, 1997.
To Part VI Chapter Two
Back to Table of Contents
Return to Custance Library Home Page