“Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.” John Locke.
In reality, it is nothing more than a new, not simple, clean slate. Sounds easy right?
Without going into debating or affirming the theories of the aforementioned English philosopher and his empiricism with a clear mechanistic conception of the human being, personally I have always tried to extrapolate the thoughts of other times to our times. In this case, the first thing we have to take into account is that it is not worth erasing, but we must resignify. In other words, for the restart, or new beginning, to be successful, we must resort to what today we call “reverse engineering”. Both on a psychological and epistemological level. This entails an analysis of everything that has led us to the situation we want to change, evaluating what has been of value and usefulness to us, in order to discard everything that has not been and thus be able to start over. Not from scratch since we have the great advantage of knowing what has been of value and what we should avoid in the future.
Only then can we affirm that, by changing experiences, we will change as people.
