Episode 480 - A Reminiscence Bump vs. the Eternal Youth Within

Welcome to the Living Myth Podcast with Michael Mead, where the shifting, changing world

is looked at from a mythic perspective.

This episode begins with the contemporary psychological theory of a reminiscence bump,

which attempts to explain why we remember certain songs and events from our youth while

forgetting most other things.

The theory includes the idea that our sense of identity comes from an internalized story

that we construct to make sense of our life.

Mead contrasts this kind of mainstream psychology with the ancient idea that youth is not simply

a stage or phase in life, but more of a meaningful symbolic condition connected to something

eternal and enduring in our souls.

I love Proverbs, and I have collected them for many years, for to me they are like vitamins

or supplements for the soul.

To read one and then you hold on to it for a while, and it begins to release little

bits of insight and wisdom, and that can be extremely helpful when the world around

us is fallen apart.

Sometimes I carry Proverbs in my pocket as reminders that people have survived worldwide

upheaval before and can do so again.

Like the Australian Aboriginal proverb that says, those who lose dreaming are truly lost.

It's a very old statement, and it's completely pertinent now that the world feels a lot

like a nightmare.

There's another old proverbial statement that says that each person is a dream that is

deposited in a soul around which then the body forms.

That brings to mind another proverbial statement, which says that threads of genius and purpose

are present in everyone, but may only become visible when something creative is attempted.

It is also true that some Proverbs that people accept are essentially wrong-headed, and

thus they state the opposite of genuine wisdom.

For example, there's a proverb that states that youth comes but wants in a lifetime.

The core idea there is based upon the dominance of literal linear time, while the mention

of youth involves and implies things that are timeless.

A wiser perspective on the meaning of youth appears in a different maxim that states

it takes a long time to become young.

And that brings up another proverbial statement that puts it this way, enjoy your youth

for you will never be younger than you are at this very moment.

Those are the kind of thoughts I was having after reading reports about what mainstream psychology

now calls the reminiscent's bump.

The idea there is that, generally speaking, human memory works better for recent events.

For instance, we are more likely to remember what we did yesterday than what we did on

the same day a year ago.

And while that is true, the notion about a reminiscent's bump breaks this rule.

It describes how we tend to have a particularly good memory for events that occurred during

our youth and our early adulthood compared to recent times.

The theories about this reminiscent's bump include the notion that we have so many

of our formative experiences in our teens and our 20s and early 30s that they become entwined

with our developing sense of who we are, thus making them highly memorable.

And as truth in that, for instance, there are a lot of first time experiences that happen

when we are young, from our first kiss or our first concert or our first sporting event.

The novelty of these experiences makes them deeply memorable.

Another theory of the reminiscent's bump involves the sense that our mental fitness

and memory capabilities reach their peak in the second and third decades of life so

that we wind up with a better recall of things that happened during those periods.

One of the studies on the reminiscent's bump states that it is not simply about nostalgia,

but more a fundamental aspect of how we construct our personal life stories.

The study goes on to say that events from this period of youth loom so large because

that is when people are most preoccupied with forming an identity.

And this is kind of crucial because identity is defined as an internalized life story that

helps make sense of one's life.

I have a number of problems with these theories about a reminiscent's bump.

And one of them arises from this supposedly psychological claim that our identity comes

from an internalized life story that we are creating to make sense of our life.

To me, that's a case of losing the dream and becoming truly lost.

Just as if this kind of self-psychology cannot imagine what all ancient cultures understood

which is that each soul born enters the world both gifted and aimed enters the world with

a story that is already seeded in the soul that typically tries to awaken and unfold into

life during our youth.

I can only imagine that those promoting the idea of a reminiscent's bump have fallen

somehow into the trap that is so common in modern life which used to be known as tabula

rasa or the blank slate theory.

Under that theory, each soul enters the world empty with no inner dream, with no essential

gifts, with no specific potentials, and therefore with no genuine calling or purpose in life.

The opposite idea which was known to all cultures before modern mass societies states that

each soul born is unique and arrives in the world with seeds of genius and purpose that

specifically try to become conscious when childhood comes to an end and the soul enters

a period which is intended to involve an awakening of an inner spirit for life and the beginning

of a unique adventure that can only be lived by that soul.

In a sense, something is being revealed by the term that was chosen in these studies

of youth that is to say the reminiscent's bump.

It's as if the aspect of diminishing the importance of the individual human spirit and

soul has been announced by the smallness of the word bump.

And this kind of systemic reductionism has become, in a sense, the core of what people

now think of as mainstream psychology.

Psychology is widely considered to be both a science and an art.

It is considered a science because it uses empirical research, statistical analysis,

and the scientific method to study human behavior.

This is also considered an art because in practice, psychology requires intuition, sympathy,

empathy, and careful judgment when it comes to treating the life issues of individual

people.

The word psychology can be simply translated as the study of psyche.

However, the Greek word psyche has many meanings, some of which lead far beyond the halls

of science and down to the roots of the creative imagination that produces all of the arts.

Psychie has often been translated as the animating spirit of life, or simply as the mind.

Yet psyche also translates as the soul, and it can mean butterfly, or it can refer to

the immortal wife of Eros, the God of Love.

So spirit or mind, soul or butterfly, or divine figure, the study of psyche involves much

more than the distinctions between science and art.

The term reminiscence also derives from deep roots, which reach all the way back to the

old Greek goddess Nemesine from whose name we get, all notions of memory and recollection.

Nemesine was also referred to as great memory, that is to say the kind of memory that knows

the past as well as the present and even the future.

In other words, memory being a way of connecting not just to the part or a piece being recalled,

but going through the part to reconnect to the whole of things.

Seen that way, it is no surprise that in mythology, Nemesine was also the mother of the muses

who bring us all the arts, which are intended not simply to entertain us, but to reconnect

us also from the part to the whole.

In this old understanding, memory was understood to work along with imagination to connect

the individual human soul with the living soul of the world.

The modern attempt to capture the radical nature and imaginative dramas of youth as a bump

that we keep recalling indicates a significant loss of psychological awareness, whereas modern

societies consider you to be a stage that young people will naturally outgrow traditional

cultures imagined that the transition out of childhood into youth involved a radical

transformation of the entire individual.

Although coming of age has come to mean being legally recognized as an adult, coming of

age rights traditionally involve experiencing that which is truly ageless, that which is

timeless and enduring in all of human life.

The idea was not simply leaving childhood behind to become a responsible adult and somehow

fit into society, but rather it was the opening of a path that leads to a psychological and

spiritual rebirth.

For traditional cultures imagined that the transition from childhood involves each young

person in direct experiences and deep connections to the powers of nature and to the touch of

things eternal.

In youth, sudden growth, sexual maturity and hormones indicate that great changes are

underway, yet just as childhood involves more than a growing body, coming of age involves

more than biological maturation.

When childhood comes to an end, life is supposed to become more open to ended so that a genuine

expansion of identity can occur.

Seen that way, from the beginning of time to the present moment, coming of age means

coming in contact with big dreams that can reveal the inner truths and the enduring passions

of a person's entire life.

Of a specific age or phase, the gift of youth involves being in a deeply internal condition

while also being exposed to the radical presence of nature and the inspiration of spirit.

Seen in that old, insightful way, youth is not a time of life that is more of a state

of mind and when seen that way, youth has no age.

Here in life, people can long for the time of youth that is long past.

And yet, psychologically speaking, the past is anything but past.

The past travels with us as does the inner sense of an eternal, youthful connection

to the dream of life and to the soul of the world.

The longing to awaken further, to grow psychologically and spiritually, that can be seen as a core

part of youth is something that can be tapped into at all stages and phases of life.

We are fascinated with youth partially because of the fact that the natural transition from

childhood to the next stage of life involves this surprising connection to things that are

timeless and eternal.

Forset within each soul born is not just a fleeting image or a vague pattern, but rather

a unique inner story waiting to be cracked open, to be unfolded and then lived all the way

out.

So rather than the question of which kind of career to choose or the dilemma of what kind

of person to become, the true issue in coming of age becomes how to give birth to the

life seed that is already set within the soul.

And such a dramatic awakening of an inner life requires an outside drama that can match

the intensity trying to awaken in the soul of each young person.

So the point cannot simply be which songs became so memorable when we were young, but rather

that songs and dances became the spontaneous immediate forms through which the spirit

of life and one's own unique way of seeing and being could be felt could be found and

be expressed.

The presence of a waking spirit is what makes youth so alluring, but also so vulnerable

that makes young people so animated and yet so easily lost.

Whether we experience it as a formal ride of passage or not, what happens during our

youth marks each of us in ways that remain indelibly inscribed on the walls of our souls.

Modern people often complain that young people think that the world owes them something

and actually it does.

The world of human society owes all young people genuine opportunities to find their natural

gifts and awaken to some meaningful calling in life.

Typically, those adults who remain unsure of their own gifted nature tend to resent the

natural need of young people to be truly seen and really heard, not for who they might

become, but for who they already are inside themselves.

In the same sense that a newborn child needs to be welcomed and be blessed at birth, each

young person needs to be fully invited into life.

When young people are not invited into a conscious right of awakening and transformation, they

will attempt to invent their own methods to fill the void.

And since both life and death are involved in such a major transition, things can go

darkly awry.

If the spiritual essence and value of a young person is not recognized and made more conscious,

then finding a sense of meaning and purpose can be greatly delayed or simply fail to occur.

Lacking a genuine sense of being oriented and welcome in life, young people can remain

disoriented throughout their lives, and increasingly, people can live their entire life without

having a genuine calling or finding a meaningful life purpose.

And yet, all is not simply lost.

Going back to the proverbs at the beginning, we are only truly lost if we have lost the

dreaming, if we have lost the connection to the roots of memory, if we have lost our

instinctive, intuitive relation to imagination.

In reimagining youth not as a certain age group, but more as a meaningful symbolic condition,

we find the connection to what used to be known as the eternal youth in the soul.

In many ancient folk myths and fairy tales, it is the youngest sister or youngest brother,

who although considered to be too slow or dreamy to begin with, turns out to be the only

one able to find a way forward when everyone else has become disheartened and discouraged

and stuck in life.

The youngest sister or brother in stories appears as a temporary orphan or an outcast because

they represent aspects of ourselves that were denied that were rejected and abandoned

early in our lives.

Importantly though, the abandoned parts of ourselves do not simply disappear.

They trail along behind us like a young dreamy sister or hesitant brother.

This youngest part of ourselves remains unadapted to family patterns and to the collective

ways of life and therefore remains a key to becoming conscious of our essential uniqueness

and our true life purpose.

And as many stories indicate, the youngest part of us also carries what the community

has lost and what the culture most needs in order to heal in order to change and in order

to transform.

This eternal youth within each of us tends to be in touch with what is being newly

imagined but also with what has been long forgotten.

It follows the threads of dreams and it sees with visionary eyes and its trusts in unseen

forces.

And in the realms of mythology and depth psychology, this eternal inner youth is the other side

of the archetypal complex that includes the wise old woman or wise old sage that also

exists in each person's heart and soul.

The eternal youth within and the wise old sage in the heart are paired parts of a paradox

in which each is necessary to understand the other.

And truly wise depends upon befriending the eternal youth within us and awakening the

old sage in our hearts.

In many ancient traditions, elders and youth was considered to have a foot in this world

as well as the other world in a way that gives them authenticity and edge of life relevance.

In that sense, youth and elder do not simply represent the extremes of biological life,

but rather serve as awakened outsiders who become the channels through which new ideas,

big dreams, great imagination and wisdom try to enter the common world.

In the midst of the increasing upheaval in the world and amidst the growing uncertainties

about the future of life on earth, something ancient and inspired and deeply knowing is

trying to catch up with us.

If we consider that we are in the midst of a radical right of passage that intends

to transform life at this time, we can imagine that both the eternal dream-making youth

of the soul and the wise old sage of the heart are both trying to get our conscious attention.

For each offers an essential element of the great adventure of life which is intended

to be lived fully, creatively and passionately all the way to the end no matter the conditions

in the outside world.

At the same time, it might become more clear that awakening those deeply held and wisely

tuned powers of the soul can help turn things around so that we find the true dreaming again,

so that we find the seeds of the meaningful story already set within us and trying to unfold

through us.

For ultimately, the thing we are secretly trying to save is our own authentic lives.

For as many ancient stories reveal, finding the true spirit of our life and finding

the joy in a genuine life path is what it means to discover the fountain of youth.

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