I am indebted to
Dorothy
who contributed material for this conversation.
It's often said (I have often said) that
the past is gone,
the future never comes, and we're always living in the present, the
eternal always NOW. Upon first glance, that seems quite obvious.
There's very little that I can do about
the now gone past.
Also, while it may be
true
in some chronological sense that the future never comes, the fact is
I can invent possibilities for
my life
from the future. That's telling evidence that I do have a say over how
the future will
play
out. So it's trivially obvious I have some say over the present, and
also trivially obvious I have some say over the future. It's the past
over which I seem to have not much say. Indeed, I may have
no say at all over the past. I live
my life,
meandering through it, with my
power
over the present and the future.
When I was in the past (it's OK to say it that way, standing in the
present), I had many
different ideas
about who (and what)people
are, and
why
they do what they do, and
why
they did what they did to me. Without exception, all of my
relationships, each one of them, were driven and directed by
such ideas.
There was never any indication that
those ideas
may be false or inaccurate in any way. To me, they were
"The Truth".
Notice it's not bad nor good that we hold
our ideas
as
"The Truth".
The trouble
arises when we leave no space, no room to entertain
the idea
that it's we who made them up, that there could be other more workable
ways of interpreting the same situations. That's what transformation
brings, which in my past was in dire straits and short supply.
Now, standing in the present, I'm inventing the possibility (the
privilege
actually) of being transformed. Whatever ran my life in the past, is
now no longer running it ie is no longer directing my actions the way it
used to. There's now the possibility of noticing missing
integrity
(both mine and others') in my life back then, and the impact that it
unwittingly had on us. There is also the possibility of noticing
missing
responsibility
(both mine and others') in my life back then, and the impact that it
unwittingly had on us all. Transformation, in reaching back into the
past,
recontextualizes
the past, restores
integrity
and also re-accounts for
responsibility.
Don't fall into
the trap
of asking
how
transformation reaches back into the past. Just let it
happen.
You'll know when it does. It's no different qualitatively than when it
reaches into the present or the future. It's just that we're so blindly
accepting of the notion that
the past is gone,
that the notion of transformation reaching back into the past and
recontextualizing
it, is ordinarily not on the radar ie it's not on our list of what's
possible.
As I stand in the present looking at "the past in the present",
I'm looking at the old through new eyes. It's literally making the old
new again. You can't do that by changing the past and / or
what happened
in the past. That option is unavailable, and nor is there a time
machine to go back in time, and change the past before it
happens.
The path to making the old new again ie the path to transforming /
recontextualizing
the past, is by inventing a new context for the past in the present, a
context where integrity and responsibility are re-instated to
center stage,
even if the facts of
what happened
stay the same.
