Question: why do people say that we should not dwell on the past, that we shouldn’t inside changing the past? How can we improve, grow if we don’t honestly learn from past mistakes?
Answer: I fully symphatize with you passionate question. Out queries relating to the past open very deep questions in themselves, opening Pandora’s Boxes we need to be careful with opening.
1. The initial question related to “changing the past”. So can we change the past, should we change the past? Did we actually have any freedom of choice, decision in the past?
2. I fully agree with you that the “past is there to learn from”, that by analyzing, understanding the past we are better suited for the future. But do we actually learn from the past? Are we capable of making critical self-assessment, accepting our “past mistakes” in order to prevent them in the future?
3. Why does it seem so that neither individuals, nor Humanity as a whole has not learned from the past and we keep repeating the same “mistakes” again and again making our personal lives and Human history a helplessly recurring chain of vicious cycles?
4. We are all born with inherently egocentric, self-serving and self-justifying nature. We se reality very subjectively. It means that whatever happened, whatever “mistakes”, “wrong decisions” we committed, sooner or later – even in the most surreal manner – we justify what we have done, decided. Thus we are ready to repeat the same mistakes, wrong decisions again since we “haven’t done anything wrong”.
5. Our inherent nature makes us like patients suffering from different forms of addiction. We are all addicted to our selfish egos. We are simply incapable of accepting the need for self-change beyond a certain limit. And this prevents us from effectively learning from the past.
6. So what can we still learn from the past? How can we break out of the vicious cycles? What we can, have to learn is not what actions, mistakes we have committed, how we could change what happened to “better”. At this stage we do not even know what “better” is since our inherently egocentric, subjective vision shows a very distorted, limited picture of reality, which serves the survival of the egoistic self.
7. Thus what we need to learn from the past is that while we remain instinctively within the domain of our inherently egocentric, subjective nature we have no choice in improving anything, we are locked in those helplessly recurring vicious cycles.
8. What we need to learn is that first of all we need to change ourselves, our viewpoint, how we relate to others and the world “outside of us”. We need to learn – through the purposeful, practical educational method – how to get out of ourselves, through acquiring the ability to taste, experience the world through the desires of others, seeing everything through their viewpoints.
9. Then through the newly, methodically acquired objective, selfless, transparent point of view we will be able to view the past, present and future without any egoistic, self-serving and self-justifying distortions, fully understanding what happened, is happening and why it has to unfold exactly that way.
10. Then we understand that nothing needs changing. From our refined, selfless and objective point of view we will see that everything is as perfect as it has to be. “Only” we, our viewpoint changed and still everything has changed
Entering The Force-Field 