“Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of being could not exist.”- Nietzsche
“I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.”- Mark Twain
It is never too late to have had a wonderful childhood.
We don’t know we can change the past, but I bet if you were given the freedom to actually re-create your personal past newly, right now, you wouldn’t reinvent much of what you now think actually happened. Whatever did actually happen is so gone it couldn’t possibly be retrieved. What shows up are the icons we made, the images and interpretations, along with the emotions, that re-present what we think happened. We look at those icons and we feel those feelings. We are still unaware of the power we have to create the past and we are bewitched by our own, still current interpretations, which we experience over and over as the truth.
We have automated our sense of time and thereby frozen the fluid creative energy into solid thought forms, unmindful mental formations. The word ‘automatic’ means self-willed (from autos “self” (see auto-)+ matos=“thinking, animated, willing,” from PIE *mn-to-, from root *men- “to think” (see mind (n.)). We have frozen the infinitely fluid creative power of imagination into stable finite ice-cubes of knowledge, memories and emotional cues. Today everything is known, everything is automated, we are automatons, i.e. extreme examples of self-will-run-riot. We do not like to hear that we do not remember what happened; that we only remember our automated interpretations. Our thoughts are automated, our memories are automated, our sensations and emotions are automated and our futural projections and anticipations are automated. Our relationships are automated. You say something that reminds me of something my father used to say and I create the experience I had when I was seven, or three but I now think you are the cause of my unwanted experience. “We invariably find that at sometime in the past we made decisions, based on self that later placed us in a position to be hurt.” My being hurt reminds you of the way your mother used to make you feel guilty and you get mad at me for spoiling your day. Our relationships are stabilized, institutionalized resentments mirroring the conversations had by the people from whom we were introduced into language.
We are waiting for a better tomorrow that will never come because we lack imagination with respect to time. We think time is real and so whatever happened has to be real and all that is going to happen will of course be real and so we can’t even imagine an unreal future that is here now, and forget about the usefulness of an unreal past that never was: such things cannot make any real difference and so we don’t even imagine them. Given the icy condition of our circumstances and the frozen shapes of our knowledge, how can we imagine a future that is radically different and essentially impossible?
“Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Alice in Wonderland.
Mostly we live in the ruins of the future; which is an extrapolation of the ruins of the past. As if the ice cubes could never melt. Our disease infects our sense of time. Hardly a one of us can get into the day, let alone the moment. And this is so because we underestimate the role of imagination with respect to time. Mostly we are still suffering some imagined event we truly believe happened sometime in the past. We are already lost in an unreal past that never was; trying to avoid an unreal future that never will be. And we don’t even notice that we are automated to invest the energy and time of the present moment to generate all this. Things would go infinitely better if we just did nothing. The Tao tells us that “When ‘nothing’ is done, nothing is left undone.”
We are really going to have to wake up and warm up, in order to be able to do ‘nothing’ and stop the incessant re-sensing of what never actually happened.
A propo of ‘in the realm of spirit, everything is always connected to its opposite.’
freeze (v.) Old English freosan “turn to ice” from Proto-Germanic *freus-, equivalent to PIE root *preus- “to freeze,” also “to burn” (cf. Sanskrit prustah “burnt,” Albanian prus “burning coals,” Latin pruna “a live coal”). (cf etymonline.com put freeze in search line)