On Forgetting Oneself

 There are good and bad kinds of forgetting. I am thinking about situations where people lose themselves to the mass society, and lose sight of who they are and what they want in their lives. I don't think that this is the kind of 'self-forgetting' that Buddha or any spiritual teaching is trying to convey to people. More so, it's very easy to confuse the self-transcendence of meditation with some diversionary tactics, like getting distracted in the Internet, and how these two very different activities create two different effects on the mind: one being to bring the mind to oneness, while the other is to scatter the mind's abilities, in effect allowing thieves to steal its energies away.
  There is an expression which says, in effect, 'forgive and forget'. But does forgiveness really mean 'forgetting', or is forgiveness more similar to an embracing of the pain and misery in an integrated way? I am talking about the way in which the more we try to forget painful situations, the more likely they will come back to haunt us. To truly forgive is to understand how the situation arises and creates suffering, to embrace that suffering as part of one's growth as a person, and to see beyond the suffering to a new level. I believe that, as with meditative practices, forgiveness requires a full attention to understand the situations that give us suffering: a kind of clear-eyed, unsentimental looking at the pain itself, rather than trying to run away from it or pretend that it doesn't exist.