The Future Decides the Past…and Forgiveness Heals the Difference

You know, I can totally see how, as Stephen Morgan wrote in an article for Digital Journal this month, “future events determine what happens in the past.” It sounds all confusingly quantum and whatnot, but that concept turned something on for me…

Once you do something, or something occurs, it’s done. You can then only recall and remember (which literally means to “put back together”) it. As such, it would really be the memory connected with any particular event that endures, while the nature and content of our memories is what determines our feelings, ideas, beliefs, and behaviors that sprout forth from those prior experiences and past associations. If I have a good relationship with someone, I’m more prone to project that positive experience onto other relationships as a likely potential. If I have a bad relationship, I’ll be more prone to project that negative experience onto others.

HOWEVER, future experiences can change my past….or at least my associated perspective (or memories) about the past, which is really and truly all that can still remain, since once something passes, its moment of actualization is gone. For example, if I’ve had many bad relationships, but a future relationship offers much joy, I’m more prone to RE-MEMBER those past “bad” relationships in a new light that either plays up their good points and learning experiences, or finds a lighter side to the problems that existed. On the other hands, if I’ve had a lot of good relationships, but a new relationship is quite nasty, I may start to RE-MEMBER other things I didn’t like about past people, finding ways that the good times weren’t that good then or that the bad things were more upsetting than I’d found before. In this way, what happens to us through future events, RE-WRITES our past remembrance through our presently unrolling associations….

--Missing our plane for a big trip goes from being a huge annoyance to a huge blessing when the future unveils that the flight we were supposed to be on had a major problem…
--Winning the lottery goes from being a huge blessing to a huge problem when our family members all fight with us for money…
--Having our offer on a house getting turned down goes from being a problem to a blessing when we later find an even better living situation…
--Always getting our way at home seems like a blessing until we’re out in the world and find we’re ill-equipped for more practical treatment…
--Getting our leg broken seems like a huge misfortune until the future opens for us to work on some artwork in that time…
--Opening our own restaurant seems wonderful until the future shows us that our income is too little for the large price of upkeep…

These and other examples show how situations that seemed or were experienced in one way at a time, remembered with the feeling of association then, later transformed in their nature as future experiences and knowledge put those past experiences into a new perspective. In such a way, the past was transformed for us in each situation. Just for fun, let’s expand the picture beyond our life, beyond our individual experience, but also into other possible, and hypothetical, incarnations:

--Your uncle dies, which is a tragedy, but in his will is left the money for you to return to college for a better degree and job…
--The American Revolution was a bloody war, but in the future we see that it paved the way for our independence…
--We figure out that we have access to more natural gas and energy by fracking, but in the future we see that this causes disastrous environmental effects…
--Rosa Parks is harassed for refusing to give up her seat on the bus, which seems quite negative, but in the future the issue of equality and fairness is positively brought forward as a result…
--We learn how to increase our crop productivity with pesticides and GMOs, but we later learn that these techniques have negative health consequences….
--You’re granted a position of power and authority, which you misuse and cause harm with, and a future incarnation then teaches you humility through a lifetime of servitude…
--You give unconditionally to others throughout your life, sometimes doing without much and creating large hardships on yourself, but in a future incarnation these acts are returned as others provide the assistance you receive to progress…
--You plant a garden of beautiful flowers around your house, but later some of your plants’ berries turn out to be poisonous, killing a small child that happened to eat some…
--Someone kills you in a car crash in this life, but in a future life they are poised to save your life at a pivotal point…
--You go through a life of quiet work doing investigation and research, unknown by all, but in a future life the progress made turns out to be what allows you to shoot into the spotlight through some then open channel…

And on and on….The past looks different whenever the future exposes a new dimension. With most all of these scenarios, future events could continue to occur, going forward in the same new direction, or paradoxically flipping back and forth along a spectrum of “good” or “bad” depending on the extent of perspective.

So if the future can change the past so that it’s re-written and understood in a different context, we’d certainly all aspire to re-write the “bad” parts (that we’re at least aware of as being “bad”) into something we’d find more preferable… Then so why do we often just generate more of whatever we’re already used to? Well, it’s because we REMEMBER it that way….we keep re-formulating it in our mind to fit the mold of our recall about the experience of that nature. Much like how Stephen Morgan’s article discusses how their experiment observed the shifted state of something being either a wave or a particle, we can think of memories we RE-MEMBER (and thus hold together) as being little “particles,” which we then store like phantasmagoric cells in our “memory.” The tighter we hold them, or the more we stay fixed with a certain perspective about them, the more stable, and also less changing, they become. However, when new future experiences occur, our new associations allow these memory “particles” to “wave” into something new that also assimilates our new input as well. However, we have to at least be open to new future possibilities. Otherwise, all we see is our “particle,” and all we’re likely to notice elsewhere will be things that fit with our experience of that “particle” already.

Fortunately, life provides for us all (some more and some less…) experiences that inevitably shift certain “particle” opinions by showing us how something actually works out to be different than it seemed at first, much like some of the various examples provided. These experiences open our mind, expand our boundaries, and invite us to question and explore our beliefs about life. The more one entertains these expanded viewpoints, the more events can be put into broader context, which helps to keep their form more malleable, so that our “particle” memories are still open to be changed by some new, as of yet unknown, information or experience. We expand our horizons of what life is about, why experiences are as they are, and what it all means. Eventually, this expansion may lead one to consider life implications around and beyond death, and then even broader contextual reasoning involving karma, other lives, and ongoing soul growth/evolution can be considered, allowing us to view our life experiences, defeats, failures, successes, and victories in a way that helps ensure we don’t get too polarized about the negativity or positivity of any one, small, microcosmic happening in our life. We can see how cycles play into other cycles, and patterns play into other patterns. It’s also my suspicion that if one were truly able to expand one’s perspective “ALL” the way out, to the “edge” of time, everything would be seen as a tapestry of harmonic perfection, where all events feed into all other events, as life perpetuates itself in perfect equilibrium, using each experience to provide the way for continually refined expressions to come about. All would truly appear “good” and “right” from such a perspective, although a most expanded viewpoint would also be more personally impersonal in favor of larger cycles/patterns of evolution. However, it would also paradoxically include and provide for the continually beneficial progress of each small component as well…

Along this path of pondering, and increasingly coming to realize how what may come in the future can change the role of the past as it pertains to our experience of it, one may reach to more and more pro-actively try to “correct” or “re-member” the past differently in order to move forward more positively. One technique, which is mentioned throughout most spiritual traditions I know of, includes forgiveness. In the broadest context of the connectivity of life, seeing how everything moves together in synchronization, we learn that our faults and failures, as well as those of others, are more likely to be learning experiences and transitionary stages of our becoming, allowing us to be easier on ourselves and others. Therefore, whenever we’re able to forgive ourselves or others for certain shortcomings or transgressions, we free the “particle” memories associated with those experiences to become “waves,” and thus re-write the past in a more empowering manner. We let the other people, or ourselves, go! The tightly held “particle” remembered of who we or them were, what we or them did, and how wrong/bad it was, is allowed to move freer as a more receptive “wave” that can see that past as part of a larger picture that helps pave future growth. Thus, forgiveness is an active practice that changes the past in the present (and moving into the future), and the willingness to engage in such a practice is often precipitated by understanding (by relating through other experiences) how the future often opens up ways that work to use the past as fertilizer for some up-and-coming blessing to bloom later. And again, being more willingly receptive to a blessed future is the first step to allowing, and then reaching towards, such.

I’d like to take this premise a step further to observe an angle of existential dilemma that might also be able to help us embrace our pasts, replete with all its possible pain, while still ensuring that our same old mistakes aren’t recreated or taken too lightly. While we can always forgive the past through an awareness of life truly being a perfectly dynamic, yet harmonic, process of “becoming,” which propels itself towards the heights of expanded greatness from the springboard of its depths of confined despair, we also don’t want to just perpetuate unnecessarily loading up the “trench of unhappiness” in our present, despite any eventually more favorable outcomes that could be upon some future horizon….True, as I’m about to postulate, whatever HAS happened will eventually even itself out, and is thus considered to have been “necessary” for life’s rhythms to now proceed with that experience having occurred, BUT it didn’t HAVE to happen IN THAT MOMENT. Once it happened, it had to have happened, but while it was happenING, there were choices and variables being decided as action took place. As such, we must always presently reach for what we DO want, while not getting caught up in what happened that we DIDN’T want. From there, once we’re open to greater future possibilities, we also have to be disciplined about changing our actions and behavior to activate more experiences in the direction we desire, as opposed to the direction things once took...

Let’s look at a couple examples...Let’s suppose you had a decent job, and then you lost it. This seemed awful, but the future unveiled that this led to an even better opportunity. Thus, it required losing the job for you to open up the space for another opportunity. Once you lost the job, it was done, and so it HAD to happen. It was then a “necessary” component cause of what would come to later be an effect. HOWEVER, around the time of losing the job, choices and variables were at play. Perhaps you could have realized that there were things missing in your job, and you sought another one (maybe or maybe not the one found in the originally hypothetical situation) proactively. Perhaps you got busy with figuring out ways to improve the nature of the existing job, and so came to enjoy it more and stay there. Around this deciding juncture, the future was being shaped. Without other action though, getting fired is what collapsed into form, leading to a new and different job. However, other options COULD have occurred. Once they didn’t though, the paths that would have shot off from those options were no longer (at least along those lines…). Any way things happen, learning occurs. You learn faith and resiliency through losing the job, initiative and assertion through seeking a better job, or innovativeness and adaptation by improving the existing job. (I’d suspect that whatever actually collapses into form would also reflect the type of learning an individual/collective most needs…) Whatever shape it takes is likely to inform how similar situations in the future may unfold, unless the unfoldment held its own problems, or eventually led to other “negative” experiences, in which case you’d be more prompted to change those, and that then becomes the lesson. In the end though, life turns all lemons to lemonade, we just decide how we’re going to drink it…

Here’s one more example from the world stage. Let’s look at Hitler (a good archetypal “evil villain”) and the Holocaust. I realize that some of what I present may be somewhat unpopular, but I’m compelled to present it regardless…The Holocaust was an awful event, and many lives were lost while many people stuck their heads in the sand about what was happening. In the future following this event, we have acknowledged and been more vocal about certain human rights, war practices, government activity, personal power, etc. as a result. I am sure we have learned some lessons through the ordeal, and the future could still show ripples of influence of how this event may have been assimilated and acted as a warning light for humanity in some way. Also, since it all DID happen, it now must be understood to have been “necessary.” As it is what happened, the future now holds the reason for it by way of the lessons brought forth in its wake. However, at the time it was happening, it didn’t have to per se…Other options were possible (different choices could have set other events in motion, potentially stopping it from occurring), but once reality crystalized around our “choice,” or whatever outcome naturally unfolded from what was setup (as a result of forfeiting some choice…), that occurrence must then have been worked into life in such a way where the future will eventually hold the key to showing us how an understanding of that (now necessary) role from the past played out to generate some now and future effect. So while we could have gotten clear about personal rights, dictatorial power, political involvement, or whatever in such a way where the Holocaust was avoided…we didn’t. As such, that “tragedy” occurred to enforce the learning/growth that’s necessary, through what became a necessarily occurring event to facilitate the needed lessons... Still, as awful as it all was, since it HAS happened, and therefore BECAME necessary for what life yielded that we now must move forward from, we are able to forgive the atrocity of the past by realizing the now more liberated future that our repulsion to the past event has helped shape. I’ve heard it said, something to the effect of, that “When you understand that Hitler went to heaven, you will understand the nature of Life.” I suspect that since we, in our past state of cultural evolution, sadly required a mass disaster to adequately gather our attention and focus, this horrible event is likely to have worked in such a way so as to have transfigured individual and group karmas into positions that will allow much repayment and atonement (at-one-ment) to occur in even more perfect ways that serve the whole of life as it continues. But who knows how the future will come….

In closing, I hope that I’ve been able to adequately share a vantage point that illuminates how our conscious attunement to the future is capable of changing, and healing, the past. Every new moment in the present is an invitation to grow further, and when we focus on the negative aspects of past occurrences, we lock into those experiences as we remember them and stunt ourselves from opening to expanded possibilities. It is only when we extend faith in the total harmony of life’s patterns and cycles that we’re able to openly embrace the shadows of our past as guideposts to a better future, which we then more eagerly keep watch for to embrace and receive ;)