Choose Erase Over Delete

Delete and erase are two words that the computer-world had given to me to ponder over. Prima facie they sound the same, but technically and meaningfully they are not. When we were students, we had pencil, rubber and eraser; not pencil, rubber and deleter. Why eraser, not deleter?

I searched in vain for the word: unerase or its synonym on my computer menu. I, however, was easily successful to find undelete button. So computer allows “delete” to have an option to undelete, but “erase” was not given such a chance. In other words, whatever deleted could be brought back to life, but those that were erased were gone forever. These two meaningful words are very much in action in our life.

Painful past, disappointments, let downs, unfulfilled promises, ill-treatment meted out to us, backstabbing done to us and all such debilitating baggage of the past should be subjected to erase, not undelete, for they should never be given an opportunity to come back and disturb our peaceful life. In his best selling book,“The Road Less Traveled,” M. Scott Peck says that our brain is like a computer hard disk which has limited space to store memory-bytes and that if we allow our unwanted past memories to clutter this limited space, there will not be enough space to store new things that you learn in our life. Have you heard about the term: past history? How is it different from history? Past history is that part of our history that we had buried and laid to rest forever with absolutely no chance of them coming back to haunt you. 

How to erase bad memories? It is easier said than done. Let’s go back to computer and see how it erases. It has a software program that enables erasing — permanent, irreversible removal of unwanted stuff — when you click the erase button. And in the same way, you can do it in your personal life. For that you have to take a conscious decision — program your mind — that all those unwanted, bad memories have no place in my life and they are made to leave me forever permanently and irreversibly. If you take such a conscious decision, I repeat conscious decision, it WILL happen.

Our mind has two chambers — conscious mind and subconscious mind. Conscious mind is a thinking mind while subconscious mind is a reactive mind. Subconscious mind can only respond to conscious mind; subconscious mind CANNOT think on its own. It reacts and follows exactly what your conscious mind — thinking mind — asks for. If you keep your conscious mind active with the thought that bad memories have no place in my life and keep that active state for a period of, say, 90 days and tell yourself that thought 3 times a day, your subconscious mind will develop a program that by default erases things which you do not want as and when you give such a command to your subconscious mind. This 90-day technique is the one I learned from the book: “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind” by Joseph Murphy, and he has explained with lots of examples how to have a life without worries if you utilize the power of your subconscious mind. I strongly recommend to all to read this book.

Like a little child who used the eraser to efface all those not-good drawings from your drawing books, you must erase all your not-good histories — convert history to past history — and live a life that will have enough space to learn and internalize new things in order to progress forward.