How to change the past
What if I told you that everything you have ever done, seen, heard is not immutable. What if I said that dwelling on the past is precisely what human beings were meant to do, not so as to self-immolate into crippling depression but to extract out of lived experience the desperately needed — already paid for in blood and tears — wisdom that can shape a brighter and healthier future?
Life is invariably complex and dangerous; often you stub your toe against the table, make a pass at a girl who tells you, in no uncertain terms, that your genes are not worthy to be propagated beyond yourself, or someone in your family dies and your identity is instantaneously shattered after years of carving it out and perfecting it in the image of the people in your life or your belief that you are irresistibly attractive, or whatever it is that toots your horn. Often, terrible things happen unexpectedly — sweeping you off your feet and landing you squarely on your ass in the underworld. You kick and you scream, curse yourself, the world, and maybe even God for letting all of these decidedly horrible things happen to you, and yet, it is what it is. You seek respite by hopping from pleasure to pleasure, trying all the while to just forget, even for a moment, all of your otherwise pervasive problems — who can blame you?
Imagine, however, that your memory is not meant for your torment, although it often seems that way. Imagine that your memory is a clever survival mechanism your brain uses to make you stronger. In a way that is analogous to ingested food, information, often obtained by those same painful lived experiences, serves to nourish your mind and furnish you with a better understanding of the way in which the world manifests itself so that the next time something similar happens, you are all the less naïve and all the more prepared to face it with wise carefulness and composure. Imagine that your experiences, especially the most painful to recall, are not decidedly horrible.
It is often said that the way in which to orient yourself in the world is to straddle the line between chaos and order with courage. This is to say, in simpler terms, one must carefully show respect for the institutions that give routine, certainty and safety( broadly culture) and simultaneously keep one foot dangled in the underworld, at the frontier of one’s conscious knowledge, in just enough discomfort to allow your knowledge to be increased without destroying the structures around which your life revolves- whether that’s your career, spouse or children. But why? Why is this the way put forward in the Tao Te Ching as early as the 6th century?
It was Nietzsche who, using his abnormally capable neurons, declared:
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it — all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary — but love it.”
The sage here simply meant that a truly wise man is he who recognises all of his experiences as not only useful and integral to who one eventually becomes but also loves them for exactly that. Nietzsche so wrote as a relatively young man of 44 who’s career had prematurely ended because of chronic illness — it says a lot about accepting your experiences. Idealism( in this case the tendency to seek only and to appreciate only positive emotion) is untruthfulness — the indispensable Nietzsche goes on. It is a dishonesty to oneself to rue or wish away(repress) the so called ‘negative experiences’. This is exactly what the the Ching is — the ability to appreciate and incorporate the supposedly ‘bad’ into your being.
Granted, this is a dark perspective but it’s all the more empowering because of that(you see). The masterful transcendence of simplistic dichotomies, like good and evil; positive and negative emotion, gives you vision and a certain wisdom, that enables you to appreciate the good as it comes and most importantly, to bear the seemingly unbearable with courage and nobility of spirit. The case can be made that this act of acceptance is in itself a positive experience capable of buoying you through the bitterest of trials — that is true at least according to Viktor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor.
Anyway, the key takeaways, from Nietzsche here(at least for our specific purposes) are that
1) the past changes with the way you view it,
and 2) the past is inseparable from the present. It is instantiated not only in the way the world manifests itself to you but also embedded in your very psyche. It is part and parcel of the present, and therefore the future, and you and your mentality, habits, and strengths — the past pervades through the totality of your being across the entire expanse of your space and time.
The trick is in how you engage with that reality
Changing the past
With that background, we can arrive more effectively at the business of trying to change the past. To change the past is not to alter previous manifestations of Being, or lived experience as such in an objective sense(because obviously it’s impossible). It is rather to change the subjective experience of the past — to change the past to you personally; to alter what it means to you. It’s a sort of revaluation.
The world invariably reveals itself to you through the template of your values. Fortunately, you have a lot of control over what values you hold in high regard and hopefully live by. Hopefully you have good values but I digress. If at once you are able to change your value system, the world immediately becomes a different place and the psychological research is pretty clear on this. As our biology has it, we see the world not as a collection of objects but as a collection of tools and obstacles. You see the barrister in the morning not as another person going about his business as his own person but as the thing that can produce coffee for you on demand etc.(Obviously we are over simplifying for economy) In the same way, your past can be comprised of hellish experiences(obstacles) you wish never happened and try by all means to forget or you can view them as bitter medicine(tools) responsible for your wisdom, courage, knowledge, skills and strengths.
The purpose of memory, and of therapy as a consequence, is to revisit the past and draw from it the lessons that we forgot to learn in a misguided but understandable attempt to ‘be happy’ or ‘to forget’ or ‘put it behind you’. Recurring memories, and sometimes recurring dreams, carry in them wisdom that your wise old body is trying to force you to revisit so that you learn.
There is a pernicious trend in our society today of demonising all negative emotion. Negative experiences, precisely negative emotions, are nothing more than signals that there is something wrong with the way you view the world. It is the sign that you are learning something new that you didn’t otherwise know whether it’s the fact that the person you are infatuated with is actually not a good fit for you or that the job you want is beneath you(or above you). It’s the signal that you have either too much order or too much chaos — that you have failed to straddle the line. It’s the world, a brutal teacher, figuring out exactly where you should be, who you should and it’s in your best interest to not only accept but appreciate all of this as it is literally the process by which you came to be, with whatever capacities and skills you might possess.
So the next time you ruminate, don’t self-immolate; instead take it on the chin with courage and mindful preparation for the next stage of your life — which for its part, is bound to be as scary and unpredictable as exactly the past you seek to run away from.
