Very often, I find myself knowing something I don't remember learning.
I'm not talking about intuition.
I'm talking about that feeling when a thought emerges completely naturally, and then you pause and ask yourself:
Where did I read this? Who told me?
And you find no answer.
This happens to me most when I write.
I don't think much before writing. On the contrary, many of my poems I understand only after reading them days later. There are times when a poem leaves me with such a big question that I start studying solely because of it.
"Memory without recollection" was one of them.
The more I read, the more I realized I wasn't the first to ask this question.
Plato spoke of anamnesis, the idea that learning could be a form of recollection.
Henri Bergson believed that memories don't disappear, they simply become inaccessible.
Neuroscience speaks of implicit memory, information that influences our behavior even when we can't consciously recall it.
But the idea I always return to is that of Carl Jung.
The collective unconscious.
Perhaps because for the first time, I encountered a theory that came close to something I had felt for a long time.
I like to think that when we go deep enough within ourselves, we don't find only ourselves.
We find traces. Of the people before us. Of stories that have been told thousands of times. Of symbols that continue to repeat in cultures that have never met.
Perhaps that's why I've always needed to hear stories.
Maybe I wasn't looking for a new story. Maybe I was looking for a memory.
I have another thought that continues to follow me.
What if consciousness is not creating life in real time?
What if life has already been lived, and what we call experience is merely the process of remembering it?
I don't know.
Maybe I'll never know.
But the more I read, the more it seems that study doesn't give me new thoughts. It only gives me the words to translate something I've felt for a long time.
And at this point, I continue to oscillate between a question that won't leave me alone and an idea that keeps following me.
Perhaps I'm not learning. Perhaps I'm only remembering.