Do you have a habit of being hard on yourself? Do you replay situations from the past in your head over and over? Do you notice memories turning into compulsive thought patterns that keep you stuck in emotional pain?  In any of these cases, without a relatively calm mind, the capacity to deeply contemplate and learn from these past situations, and as such move on from them, is limited.  Therefore it is helpful to first consider past experiences that may be replaying in your mind in a new light – a light that completes the circuit of thinking rather than leaving it unfinished and endlessly on repeat.  In this article, we will be exploring the way in which what is bothering you… couldn’t have been different.

People often believe they could have done something different than exactly what they did in the moment that they did it.  It may be easy for you to see that this belief, or habit of judgment, has the power to produce deep and long-lasting suffering. A mother who believes she could have done something to prevent her child’s pain, a lover who believes they could have said the “right” thing instead of the “wrong” thing, a friend who believes he could have noticed something he missed…. The potential guilt and shame wrought by this belief make it deserving of our close examination.

When we believe that “things could have been different,” the associated mental pattern is often a replaying of that past scenario over and over, usually until we become exhausted from this mind activity or distracted by something else. Is this common distress necessary?  Or is it resolvable with some reasoning?  Experiment with the following process.

First, you need to be sure about what you want.  At this point in your life, what is the most important thing to you? Self-love? Happiness? Freedom? What are you no longer willing to put up with?  Blaming yourself?  Endlessly criticizing the choices you’ve made? We don’t even need to figure out what to change about the outer circumstances, we just need to be sure of how we want to experience ourselves inwardly.  Is it finally time to find clarity?  To have inner freedom?  To feel more ease and peace?

If yes, then it all comes down to very simply knowing where, in time, you are doing the act of reasoning from… and where, in time, the thing you are reasoning about took place.  Knowing those two points on the timeline is at the core of having the inner experience of peace and clarity that you want. 

Reasoning with a PAST experience from our PRESENT perspective almost certainly includes new information that we did not have access to at the PAST point in time.  This can result in getting stuck in a loop that can quickly become self-abusive. When our minds recognize a discrepancy between what we did and what we think we should have done based on the new information that was obtained since that scenario took place, our minds then have a tendency to judge that past choice through the lens of new information, which we just did not have in the moment the choice was made.

The results of the choice may not have been exactly what you wanted to happen, but due to the factors available at that time, it was THE choice to make – WHICH IS WHY IT WAS MADE.

Let’s imagine that you have completed a math problem.  Then afterward, someone slips an extra number into the equation.  Your answer now appears to be incorrect in light of this added number.  When re-examining your answer, you might feel some distress or at least confusion because you remember it being correct, given the exact numbers in the equation you were working with AT THE TIME it was completed.

Perhaps you have a math problem to solve and you want the answer to be something specific.  In reality, no matter what we might want the numbers in the equation to produce, they can only equal what they equal – despite us wanting a different, specific answer.  This is similar to the replaying of past scenarios, our mind unable to find resolution because, given all the numbers in an equation, AT THAT TIME, it could only have equaled that answer.  Once the mind realizes this, it can begin to settle…

…

But then the mind is likely to say, “What about the things I might want?  If things couldn’t have gone any other way, then how do I create the future I desire?”  As with everything, nothing stays the same.  All of life is in constant motion.  And due to all the little changes that happen, both in ourselves and everyone and everything in our environment, the result (answer to the equation) could very well equal what we want in the future.  And when we are consistent with what we want, the likelihood of that coming about as a specific result in a future present moment is increased.

We all know this to be true in our experiences already – all we have to do is look.  We are just using words here to describe it in a way that’s more obvious in order to support the mind in relaxing. We are revealing to ourselves an inner freedom, instead of following the old mental pattern of constantly imagining how things could have been different, and then suffering the mental, emotional and physical exhaustion that ultimately catches up to us when this pattern is unnoticed for what it is.

. . .

The result of any past experience is based on the totality of conditions at that time, which in life, is actually really hard to accurately re-account for.  You have to completely let go of what you know now – completely put yourself in the shoes of yourself at that past time.  At that time, it was likely reasonable, appropriate and maybe even highly effective to make the choice you made based on your goals, desires, priorities, values, mood, all influencing past experiences based on how you have processed them thus far, and a whole host of present environmental influences (some influences which may not have even been completely conscious) AT THAT TIME.  Unknowingly to the mind of today, we have always made the best choice possible in each past moment – at the time it was made, due to what was available to us – what we had access to – what thoughts came to the mind – AT THAT TIME.

Recall a specific memory of yourself.  Let’s say you were 6 years old in this memory.  To judge yourself for a decision you made back then, from the perspective of all you know on the other side of that decision, is obviously unfair to yourself.  You are now on the other side of that choice. You can not only clearly see the results that decision produced in your life but if you look closely you can see that if anything or anyone involved was different in that situation, or in many other previous situations leading up to that point, then your 6-year-old self would have naturally made a different choice.  You can see how many things led up to influence that moment.  You can see how the equation just equaled what it equaled given all the quantitative influences (other people and all of their past influencing experiences as well) coming together in that moment.  Now simply shrink this time span down from a few decades ago as your 6-year-old self to examine something that happened last month, a week ago, a day, an hour, or even a minute ago – no matter the time span, we are always reasoning with the exact factors that led up to that moment.  Therefore it could be said that we have always made the best choice possible in each moment.  How could anything have been different???

Again, it all comes down to very simply knowing where in time you are doing the act of reasoning from, and where in time the thing you are reasoning about took place – knowing where you are on this timeline.  When we are reasoning with the past from the present, we cannot “mixy, mixy” (mix up these two points on the timeline) and expect our mind and emotions not to become confused about the jumbled information.

The moment we clearly see the mind playing out this pattern, we are changed forever.  All we have to do is see it.  The moment this pattern is recognized for what it is, it will start to change.  The recognition changes not only that pattern, but it has other powerful implications in our lives as well.  If we reasonably conclude that we could not have done anything different at the point in time from which we did it, then naturally we free up an enormous bandwidth of mental possibilities that were closed to us previously.

The reclaimed mind potential that was previously bound to replaying the past, will be uniquely reallocated for each of us.  Experiment with this understanding to see how it can be applied to your experiences and what it produces for you.  There are at least 2 levels of depth that this can be applied at.  It can be applied to a specific moment in your past and it can also be applied to every single present moment – moment by moment.  Both produce the peace, clarity, and freedom that is our innate birthright.

It accelerates our growth to explore these matters with others, so please reach out to us at the School of Metaphysics as you reason out for yourself what is no longer reasonable for you to believe.  In this case… “that things could have been any different.”

Bio:

Brian Hoover has served as a spiritual teacher since 2014, is on the National Board of Directors of the School of Metaphysics and is an Area Director of school branches in Missouri and Oklahoma.  Brian gives lectures, hosts workshops and leads self-transformation retreats throughout the Midwest. He is also a certified Professional Mindfulness-Based Life Coach who specializes in helping clients to connect with who they are at their core essence in order to understand, live and experience the greater fulfillment and freedom we all know is possible, moment to moment.

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