That’s just how our world works. Our brain accepts input and forms associative thoughts around the memory, and these become linked to our unbreakable perceptions embedded in that recollection.

Our childhood memories often weave an enhanced or fictional tale of time passing. This raises questions about the reliability of memory, the power of associative thinking, and believing assumptions to be reality.

1. Our own fondest or most horrific memories: Recall a memory that resonates strongly with you. Is it a sense of place? Or of a person? Perhaps your child as a baby? A house where you lived? Now, think carefully about what else you associate with that memory. Maybe it’s the smell of fresh-baked bread, a garden full of flowers, the way sunlight from the stained-glass window played on the dark wood staircase, the scent of rotting seaweed, a musical performance, your baby’s first smile, or your dying parent’s blessing. What do memories of births, death, divorce, or grave illness carry with them?

2. Memory and Associative Thinking: In each memory, discernible subconscious processes shape your associative thinking. Subtle forces influence how these memories—and even a place, person, or performance that you hold dear—are never isolated. Instead, they are impacted by many other mind-structure inputs.

The Complexity of Memory

3. Associative thinking is never just a reflection in the mirror: Many authors—fiction and nonfiction writers, filmmakers, even those who produce documentaries—attempt to record memories with the goal of representing reality. However, they often create a mere representation of reality. They may not even be aware of doing so, but they work through a lens of melancholy, longing, happiness, or even historical mistakes and misapprehensions. If you watch a home movie or look at photographs, your reaction, and that of others, is rarely just, “Oh, that’s Jake or Jane… next…” Instead, it’s more like, “Oh, that’s Jake, remember when he…?” Or, “Oh, he never did that, he did this…” or something similar.

4. One mind structure that may be more real, reliable, and solid—a sense of place: A place is real, at least in the physical sense. We can see a place, touch it, taste substances from it, smell its scents, and hear its sounds. But can we carry those senses of place with us across years and great distances? Is place a reliable assumption of memory?

Many authors write about a sense of place. If a writer is a conservationist, their depiction—precise and lovingly detailed, like a petit-point tapestry—may serve a purpose: environmentalism or conservation. If a filmmaker makes a film about their childhood on a remote farm, where their father committed suicide and a brother died, they try to share the truth of their remembered childhood. But inevitably, the film will carry an undercurrent of loss and be marked by sadness.

The truth is that time is never lost in the past, but always carried alive in memory. There, events and emotions burn as brightly as they did in their original manifestation. And we can recall what we genuinely believe to be real. But we still have to ask ourselves: Is that unalloyed reality? Perhaps the truth is only present in each passing moment as it happens.

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Morality has three aspects: moral, immoral, and amoral. To be a moral person one must not only abide by society’s rules. One needs to develop innate feelings of empathy towards all human being and to inculcate compassion for all life. Even if this becomes an indelible mind structure maybe without many opportunities to act on empathy and compassion on a large scale, this is a bedrock understanding of what it is to be a moral human being, to accept moral responsibility for others and non-human life.

To be an immoral person is it disobey societal mores and laws. Immoral people have no regard for moral responsibility to others. Thieving, cheating, killing, and so on, is to act immorally. An immoral person does not understand empathy and compassion. But they do understand right from wrong. For them the rule is “Me First”, even if that compulsion means breaking societal rules and living outside moral norms.

Amoral people and amorality, while they exist, are not so common. An amoral person is generally considered an outcast from society, a pariah, someone with major psychological issues. They do not see a world of right or wrong, and thus have no moral compass or restraints or principles. Unfortunately, many amoral people rise to be leaders. They can as easily have millions of people killed, as kill a fly. We call these people, evil.

1. Moral Dilemmas: We are all, at times, trapped in outer circumstances beyond our control. How we respond to those situations shape or change aspects of our mind structures. In some circumstances, our sense of moral responsibility, reinforced by the actions of others, can impact the collective mind structure of a stratum of society or even an entire nation.
How would any of us act in situations posing exigent moral dilemmas? What does the principle of moral responsibility encompass?

2. Moral Responsibility: Essentially, the idea of moral responsibility presupposes that we are disposed, in varying socio-political and individual circumstances, to show empathy toward our fellow humans and all life on this planet. While the designation “moral responsibility” may carry the solemnity of a universal principle, many facets of this principle exist, as many possibilities as there are humans on earth. All display a multi-faceted array of human empathy. This disposition for empathy is evident in natural crises caused by fire, floods, famine, and so on, as well as those that are manmade, such as political upheavals that affect millions.

3. Acts of Commission and Omission: On the other hand, acts of commission are those we commit, even enthusiastically, when we actively partake in obeying orders to kill, maim, destroy, or forsake any benevolence or empathy for other human beings, our environment, indeed, the biosphere. Acts of commission occur when we engage with the perpetrators to victimize and dehumanize others.
Acts of omission are primarily committed when we remain silent and passive even when we know that evil and mayhem surround us. Acts of omission occur when we are afflicted by moral blindness and turn away from or even fail to acknowledge the victims, although they are often in plain sight. We, by our inaction, may help to situate them further as victims.

4. Acts of Empathy: Acts of bravery, empathy, and humanity counterbalance morally destructive acts of commission and omission, such as when we speak out and risk punishment or even death, follow our beliefs, our credos, and defend others. If there is no counterbalance, a vacuum exists that is readily filled by the apathy and moral blindness of people particularly guilty of acts of omission.

Famed 20th century philosopher and commentator on our culture and society, Hannah Arendt, bore witness at of the trial of Nazi war criminals. She was startingly struck by a statement from one of the Nazi officers at General Eichmann’s trial. His attitude to his murder of hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish (and other) victims was that he was, “Just doing a day’s work.”

As Arendt famously coined the phrase, “the terrifying banality of evil” in his statement haunted her. Her realization that the collective Hitlerian mind structure was steeped so casually in such work-a-day horror was terrifying to her. It portrayed a mindset neither moral nor immoral but of ice-cold amorality.

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