BoM/TWS Message Forum

The forgetting is not an escape from responsibility. It's the first step toward regret and hence toward responsibility. You don't forget what you've done. But you do, in a sense, forget that stuff led you into evil--the bad motives and psychology--were ever important to you. It leaves you cringing over what you've done, and eager to make amends. It's supposed to leave the sleepers eager to run toward taking responsibility, not shuffling reluctantly toward it, because having unbent the impulses that drove them to do regrettable things, they now want to unbend the regrettable things that they did.

It is an idea that rather depends on the sense that, although people are plastic, there is a "natural shape" for them, and that evil thoughts are a departure from that natural shape. It is no more "brainwashing" to coax them into relaxing and unbending into their natural shape than it is to let the muscles relax in a sauna.