My Spotless Mind: Resetting Life

I lost my memory for 24 hrs...

I wake up in a room that looks vaguely familiar.

I’m soaked in sweat, bundled up in a bunch of wool blankets.

Next to me is a lit candle and a hand-written letter. It reads,

You were knocked out sparring in the gym this morning.

You got up and said you felt fine. You walked back to the office where Francis was [my friend with whom I share my studio].

You said, “I don’t mean to scare you, but I have no idea who you are.”

He called me and we spent the day in the hospital. Every five minutes you ask me the same questions.

The doctors don’t understand why you have no memory. You couldn’t answer what you did for work or what country you were in.

Your daughter turned one last weekend. We had a small party. You bought her a swing.

Today has been hard but you’ve been your usual good-natured self. You haven’t lost you sense of humor.

I love you,

Nalaya (your wife)

I read and re-read the letter over and over.

“This can’t be real,” I thought. “But if it is, it’s pretty cool— movies where memory and identity are distorted are my favorite.”

But then I thought, “Wait, but who am I?”

In trying to figure that out, I discovered a few things about the mind¹…

Memory is organized by emotion before chronology.

I had no memories at all from the past two months. And the ones I did have were all out of order:

• My daughter’s birth felt more recent than her first birthday

• Thailand felt more recent than Mexico (where I now am)

• Intimate moments, breakups, every fights, certain moments of laughter all felt like they happened last week

So basically, instead of my memory being a line, it was more like a “word cloud” weighted by emotional significance.

This is probably why hearing a certain song or smelling a certain smell can bring back a flood of memories. This also probably why it’s hard to remember new people’s names unless you deem them significant.

The subconscious “orders” things by emotion, not time.

I was eventually able to figure out the correct order of things based on context.

But things got even weirder than that…

Memory doesn’t separate “Me” from “You”

Though I could remember various things from “my” life, none of them felt like mine.

They were more like video clips from the perspective this guy named “Ruwan”.

Funny enough, also mixed into the memory bank were things that didn’t happen to Ruwan…

• I felt guilty for cheating on my wife, Frida Kahlo… then I realized that was from a movie we watched recently.

• I worried that I was a target for assassination by rival Jamaican gangs… then I realized that’s from a book I’m reading.²

• I was proud of my good-humored response to my humiliating knockout in UFC 239… then I remembered I’m not Ben Askren.

Of course, I was able to figure out the difference between “my” memories and things I had watched.— The same way I could figure out Frida Kahlo’s life is different than Ben Askren’s.

But they all felt the same.

Any emotional “scene”— even written in a book— felt as real as my memories.

Any character — real or imagined— that I could identify with, became parallel with this Ruwan fellow.

This is why we find movies, books, and sports entertaining— the mind catalogues it as “memory” alongside our own.

That is, until another part of the mind comes in…

Ego (Identity) organizes all this data

I was in this state about 36 hours, and it was incredibly freeing.

I remembered Ruwan’s problems, but they didn’t feel like mine any more than Bob Marley’s.

Therefore I found it impossible to judge, feel competitive, compare, fear, or worry.

I was just happy to exist.

Gratitude, acceptance, and curiosity were the only emotions I was capable of.

Then about 2 days later, it all changed.

Suddenly the same memories had “weight”, meaning:

1. Anything to do with this Ruwan guy, mattered more than other memories

2. Anything than might harm this Ruwan guy made me afraid, upset, defensive

3. Anything that might benefit this Ruwan got made me feel good— but not as much as #2 made me feel bad.

In short, my ego came back.

And it made life suddenly feel very serious again.— The “games” within my life felt closer to life or death than something I was watching on TV.

Whereas my egoless 36hours were more like an LSD trip without the hallucinations— peace, gratitude, and curiosity about this Ruwan fellow’s life without any real concern of how things turn out. Some spiritual folk call this the “Watcher”.

Now ego is super important— if you go through life as a “tripped out spectator”, then you’re not really “playing” your life. You need some level of seriousness to care how things will play out.

But the ego is one of the last pieces of the mind to form. It’s not the “reallest” part of our consciousness.

It’s the player that we get to be invested in as it plays life.

And when the games of life feel frustrating, we need to remember there’s a whole world beyond the board…

There is something that “knows” things for us that’s separate from the conscious mind.

As I tried writing down all my memories on that “first night of consciousness”, I found that there were certain things I couldn’t really recall until after I wrote them down.

And some things I still didn’t understand even after it was written.

It was like there was some other part of me, or some other being, that I could only access when writing by hand— automatic writing.³

Over and over I wrote a certain list:

CALL THESE PEOPLE TO REMIND YOU WHO YOU ARE

(I wrote the list maybe ten or eleven times because I had forgotten writing in on earlier pages.)

There were a few recurring names on the lists, and some random ones.

But the weird thing was… I didn’t remember who any of these people were.

Of the recurring names, only one was actually a close friend with whom I regularly speak. But later I realized all the people listed were men whose opinions I trusted… back when I remembered who they were.

I have always been fascinated with the idea of the Daemon⁴— The aspect of one’s Self that we don’t have control over. (“Higher Power”, “Spirit Guides”, "Inner Self" whatever.)

But who/whatever was writing things for me, I figured it would behoove me to have a good relationship with such an entity.

Meaning, to have trust in something beyond what my conscious mind can see— be it for ideas, wisdom, or simply how life plays out.

I have since gone back to “normal”, and to be honest, sometimes I wish I didn’t.

But did get a peak into my own subconscious, and solid reference experience to remind me how to “play” life:

1. Emotional Importance matters more than Urgency. (i.e. Spending time with my daughter vs. responding to “time-sensitive” communication.)

2. My ego identity is a character I’m committed to playing well— his perspectives are not the whole game.

3. There’s a greater source of information that I can consciously access. This needs to be explored.

I’ll probably going to go deeper on this topic, especially #3, as a podcast episode. Stay tuned.

1. All of these assumptions are of course based on my mind.

2. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James is one of my favorite novels of recent. It’s a fictional telling of the real assassination attempt on Bob Marley (among other other semi-historical events in Jamaica).

3. While I don’t necessarily think of it it this way, I can see how people like Esther Hicks can believe they are being guided by a discarnate spirit because the experience of writing stuff you don’t know is pretty trippy. But since I was writing things I used to know, I’ll assume it was just “my” subconscious.

4. Daemon is the Greek word for a lesser deity or spirit that guides a person in the background. I like Anthony Peake’s take on it.