Yesterday evening I was invited to our neighbours for a dinner. The man of the house told me a very interesting story that once again showed me how fascinating our mind is, and how we know more than we know.
As you know, we have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. In our unconscious mind, we have a lot of information that we are not consciously aware of. It’s like a storage of all that is ‘too much’ to keep in our mind in our daily life. Such as negative experiences that we intentionally attempt to leave behind and forget, or all sorts of events and emotional experiences from our past, all the way from the beginning of our life. Basically, everything we have experienced during our life is still stored in our unconscious. And what makes it interesting is that even if we have no idea about it consciously, those hidden past experiences still are there and they keep on affecting us.
Back to my neighbour. He told he had recently visited his great-grandfather’s house. It was over 6O years since he had been in the house, and he said he has no recall of being there as a little child.
The house had been empty for a long time, and half-collapsed, but the kitchen was surprisingly well-preserved, so my neighbour walked into to take some pictures of what was left.
While he told this story, we were sitting in the kitchen of his current house that he had built about 20 years ago. He showed me pictures of the kitchen of his great-grandfather’s house. And it made me speechless..
As I told you, he said to me he had no memories of that house back from his childhood. Well, it started to show very clearly that at least a part of him does remember. And that those memories are dear.
Without consciously remembering anything from the old house, he had chosen for his own kitchen exactly the same colours, materials and shapes as his great-grandfather had chosen for his kitchen over 100 years ago. The similarity wasn’t modest, it was striking! I was especially amazed about the shade of the blue in the panelling -It was identical. And that shade wasn’t any regular one but a very peculiar shade of blue.
People who are not knowledgeable about how the human mind works would most surely say now ‘What a coincident!’ or ‘Wow, this is magic!’
But when you know, you know it’s quite logical.
Obviously, my neighbour has positive experiences about his great-grandfather stored in his unconscious mind. Something very dear and meaningful has happened in the old house, in the kitchen. So much so that he had wanted to re-create the space when he built his own house.
On the other hand, if the memories had been negative, we could be quite sure his own kitchen would look completely different, maybe even strikingly opposite to the old house’s style.