The Past

I often meet people that are certain that the past is over and has no effect on the now. One of the most convinced advocates of that theory is my mother. When I started to address how she treated me in the past and how painful that experience was she would shrug it off by saying exactly that.

If the past would have no affected on the now the world would be a different place. We would all jump around with a big smile on our faces, do what we love to do and see life as a great adventure. We would be contend with who we are and happy. But this is not how we feel and this is not the world we live in. Why is that?

We are haunted by impressions of the past. We got hurt so often, pushed around so often, misunderstood so often, judged so often, mistreated so often and now we are scared. We have created an illusionary self that is a collection of all these bad experiences. The illusionary self is what we call the “I” and we believe that this is who we are. A collection of inflicted wounds becomes the person we believe to be. We cannot be who we really are because we are afraid. Afraid to get hurt again, pushed around again and judged again. Based on these bad experiences we also feel to be less then what we really are. Why did all that happen to us? We must have deserved it. My parents had a reason to treat me that way. My ex boyfriend had a reason to hit me. No wonder the other children hated me in school. I am bad and I am ugly.

This is our reality from now on. We talked the last few days about influencing what we call “reality” with our thoughts that we can get from life what we want by asking for it. But what happens if we believe that we are bad and ugly? We attract bad and ugly things into our lives. Experiences in the past created ideas about us that are not true. These ideas keep on creating hell for us in the future since whatever we believe about ourselves becomes our reality.

This is of course passed on from generation to generation. My mother had bad experiences with her parents and her parents with their parents. Ultimately nobody is to blame. But do our parents have to take responsibility for what they did or didn’t do? Absolutely!

Personally I think it is even helpful for them. Any action creates karma. Being not a good parent, programming somebody in a negative way creates bad karma. Karma has to play itself out. It will be addressed sooner or later anyway. Why not give somebody the chance to work things out now? Why not be honest with them and say. “Look that really hurt me.” Then somebody might say, “I am so sorry I just did not know better. How can I change?“

By the way if somebody is wondering why I talk about parents so much it is because we spend a lot of time in our first few years with them. Because of that they have the biggest influence on our programming, on what we believe the world to be and who we think we are.

How can we get to a stage of no past? How can we let go of what haunts us? That is unfortunately not very easy. This is the reason why many people are very reluctant to change. We have to go back to where pain was created where negative programming was happening. We have to look at what happened, understand that it is not true and let it go. The truth will set us free. But as I said before the truth is also very painful. Do we have a choice? Not if we want to be free.  

"The Past" Williamsburg/Brooklyn  03-14-08 at 05:16 PM

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