Course I - Teaching 15: The Gift of Oblivion

At certain point of the Path, the Disciple is amazed before the new aphorism: “Like a drop of water in an immense sea, the soul must sink in the sea of the oblivion in order to live the eternal life”.
But two imperative questions come to our mind: Perchance should not we remember the past to enliven our mind, to beautify our memory, and to know ourselves? And perchance, through continuous backward exercises, did not we learn how to look for our own past and to try to find the lost thread of previous existences?
Yes. But this Teaching speaks of an Oblivion which has nothing to do with the vivid memory of past events.
The gift of Oblivion is granted to the soul as the spontaneous grace of detachment from past things and feelings that founded an experience that now is useless.
According to the Teaching, memory belongs to the mind; and oblivion to the heart.
Only a heart that forgot and extinguished the volcano of passion is able to remember with serenity. When carbon is not under ashes, oblivion has been achieved.
With what a wise prevision the Eternal Law covers the past of man with the cloak of oblivion. And why does it so but to cut feelings of the past, partly to break fundamental chains of the cause-and-effect law?
To remember past moments of life with mental clarity is to analyze events and to use them as means of good for the future; but to feel past events is to be tied to them, is to suffer again what we have suffered, is to love what we have loved, to wish what we have wished, and to live what is dead.
Just a person who is detached from things of yesterday can say that he has forgotten; he lives the happiness of the present time, of the Eternal Time.
Thousands of phantoms, created by affections and thoughts, are at the back of a man, not as clear ideas but as vague reminiscences which continuously drive him to live the past.
The gift of oblivion consists in killing these larvae; if our mind knows them, our heart knows how to ban them.
A Master says that when the soul has forgotten all the past, the bond of Karma is broken at once, and he is able to sink at once in the ocean of the Undifferentiated Divinity.
Student, stop weeping for your past, stop your reproaches for your actions and omissions, stop remembering troubles and obstacles in your way, because only one thing is worth: “To have your heart clean, and a clean heart is like the smile of a child that ignores which thing causes him to smile”.
Disciple, leave the heavy burden of the bread bag of the poor, and transform yourself into a new being, flesh of your own flesh, and blood of your own blood, expression of the Eternal Source, which is timelessness in the space and present moment in the soul of being.
Clear memories of the past have nothing to do with certain being because these memories belong to the Cosmic Store, to the free instructor of life, to the past that is not ours but of all beings.
Only in this way the disciple has a right to remember. But the past of oneself –a past bringing out emotive and passionate memories– must be eradicated from the heart.
How wonderful, great, and absorbing is this hour unveiling this great truth to the heart of the Adept!