The Forgetting

You are not lazy. You are amnesiac.

Birth, in the text’s telling, erases the memory and the vow; we arrive having forgotten why we came. The most compassionate explanation of human drift ever written: you are not lazy, you are amnesiac, and the text exists to re-mind you.

The Room You Walked Into

You know the experience at its smallest scale. You stand up with a purpose, walk into the next room, and stop: the purpose is gone. You retrace your steps, annoyed, and it returns, usually, at the exact spot where you formed it.

Now scale the experience up as far as it will go. The last lesson left the jiva in the womb, holding a vow formed in total clarity: this time will be different; this time I will live toward freedom. This lesson is about what the text says happens next, and it is the tragedy on which the whole human condition, in this map, turns. We are all standing in the next room.

The Erasure

The text's account of birth is unsentimental to the point of clinical. The passage out is violent and overwhelming; the newborn arrives in shock, revived by the first touch of air. And then, in the text's telling, something more consequential than the birth itself occurs:

ततस्तं वैष्णवी माया समास्कन्दति मोहिनी । तया विमोहितात्मासौ ज्ञानभ्रंशमवाप्नुते ॥

tatas taṃ vaiṣṇavī māyā samāskandati mohinī tayā vimohitātmāsau jñāna-bhraṃśam avāpnute

Then the Lord's deluding power, maya the beguiler, sweeps over the newborn. Overcome by her, the self loses its discernment and falls from knowledge.

Garuda Purana, Preta Khanda 32.69

Jnana-bhramsha: the fall from knowledge. The memory of the past lives, gone. The clear sight of the pattern, gone. And the vow, the resolution formed with the seriousness of a being that had seen everything, gone with the rest. The text continues: in that state of erasure the child grows, childhood to youth to age, and, its knowledge never recovered, dies as before, and is born as before. Then it closes the loop with the most famous image in the passage:

पुनश्च तद्वन्मरणं जन्म प्राप्नोति मानवः । ततः संसारचक्रेऽस्मिन् भ्राम्यते घटयन्त्रवत् ॥

punaś ca tadvan maraṇaṃ janma prāpnoti mānavaḥ tataḥ saṃsāra-cakre'smin bhrāmyate ghaṭa-yantravat

Again one meets death as before, and birth again. Thus on this wheel of existence one is spun, like a pot on the potter's wheel.

Garuda Purana, Preta Khanda 32.71