Changing the past and the future

Only You Can Save the World!

Workshop 5: Changing the past and the future

Saturday 10th May 2014, 10.30 am - 2.30 pm

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. (Henry David Thoreau)

I came across this quotation yesterday in another context (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27186709) and repeat it here, as it so well expresses a main theme of the next workshop. And indeed the process of learning the Course.

You only need to look at your life, and assess your happiness, to see what kind of thoughts you must be thinking over and over. If the path you are treading for yourself into a familiar rut is getting muddy, then, the world tells us, change what you are doing: change your relationship, your job, your location, your diet, your wardrobe, your advisers, your habits, your medication. The Course, however, emphasizes that you can change your experience, and change your view of yourself and of your life, only by changing your mind; if you do not change the way you think, no external changes can do it for you. However novel or exciting the change of view, you can only see as much of it as your same limited vision will allow.

But you can enlarge your vision by removing some of the obstructions. Change, for instance, your attitude to the past, and your attitude to the future will change automatically. You can experience freedom from the tyranny of both past and future as you come to see both as aspects of how you think now. We tend to see our present lives as the product of the past, which means that our future, too, has its roots in the past. Events today appear to be caused by events so long gone that we cannot undo them. Even the personal choices we make today are limited by choices made in the past, by ourselves and by so many other people.

The past only exists in our memory now, and the future only in anticipation now. The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here. To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions (W8).

What if - to contradict all the physical and emotional evidence of memories and lingering wounds - nothing that ever happened in the past actually hurt you? What if no one you ever loved is lost to you? If you are still as innocent (or more so) as when you were a child? There would still be memory, but nothing to regret or be angry or guilty about. Lessons may be learned, but with no sense of failure or punishment. Present choices would be always new and unfettered by the past; as in fact they always can be...With a change of attitude you can change the past, because the past as you see it is only an attitude. It would change the future, too, for if there were no loss or hurt associated with the past, there would be no reason to fear further loss and hurt in the future; no dread of comeuppance, no sense of being compelled by expectation, habit and learned beliefs. What 'might happen' would be, like what 'already happened', just another aspect of a continuous and immense present.

In this next workshop we will look at how these abstract ideas relate to the specific and personal situations of our own lives. We will not be talking blithely about 'living in the now' or 'letting go of the past', but considering whether, and just how exactly, some tinkering with our concepts of past and future can have a practical and helpful effect on our present behaviour, feelings and relationships - can lay down a new path for our thoughts and lives.

Changing the past and the future
Saturday 10th May 2014, 10.30 am - 2.30 pm

Andover, Hampshire UK. Contact anna@unlearningschool.com