Changing the past

[sean83]

I've been reading the nature of personal reality, and it says you can change the present by changing past events in your mind, for example if you had an illness you would replay in your mind the past as thoe you were never ill.

Has anyone successfully applied this before?

[supertom]

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change"

You cant remove it but you can change its meaning, so now its no longer a illness, what is it now ?? its up to you??

[Angela]

Right. As Supertom says, just as you can change the way the present occurs for you with deliberate thought, you can also change the way the past, and the future for that matter, occurs for you as well. That is changing reality.

Have I successfully done that? Yes, often. In the past five years or so, especially, I've transformed my past completely.

[Holistic Star]

Ok - I'll give you a very personal example from dealing with my own illness. I'll also add that if anyone had told me this a couple of years ago I would have thought it was a load of baloney - see what a few years of PD does to you!

Btw I was working with a very close friend who has been an alternative health practitioner for 30 years. Although I know how to do this stuff, when you are working on your own issues it is easy to ignore things you don't want to look at.

I have trouble accessing my deepest feelings sometimes as I can get stuck 'in my head'. So the first thing we did was put me into a light trance state using a simple relaxation technique. She then asked me to go to the root cause of my problem and asked this happened 'before, during or after birth'. We have tried this technique before without the trance state and I just go blank, however this time I just knew it was 'before birth'. Don't ask me how I knew, it just felt right. She then asked how old I was and I felt that I was at 4 months.

Without going into too much detail, the problem was an argument between my parents and I was feeling scared at all the anger. We did some EFT on feeling scared and then I had the strongest urge to lie down on the sofa (yes foetal style!) and then all I wanted to do was imagine my mum, dad and me surrounded by love. (Most of my childhood memories are of my parents fighting so this is a big turnaround for me).

I spent several minutes imagine us surrounded by love and peace and resolving the argument. I came out of the trance state naturally (didn't need to count back up) and just felt amazing afterwards.

Funnily enough my illness got worse the following week instead of better. Releasing that emotional memory kicked up a bigger related issue. I've now addressed both and suddenly I've seen a big improvement.

I always thought the statement 'it's never too late to have a happy childhood' was schmaltzy rather than useful until after this experience.


With illness, I think it is important to search for the root emotional cause of the problem. Yes I think it would be beneficial to imagine life without the illness. I would also be looking for the core issue, what is the dominant thought or emotion that keeps triggering the illness to re-occur? If you can find and heal that thought / emotion - you're sorted

[ming]

[QUOTE=Angela;163947In the past five years or so, especially, I've transformed my past completely.[/QUOTE]

Could you please share with us? It sounds so entertaining...

[Angela]

Originally Posted by ming

Could you please share with us? It sounds so entertaining...

Wow, so much, where to begin?

Here are just a few of the 'truths' I held in my past, off the top of my head, that I have transformed:

I can't make anyone happy.
I am ugly.
I am worthless.
I am stuck.
I am shy.
There is a veil between me and other people.

Each of these beliefs had real, practical effects on the real world in which I was living. They were reality as I experienced it.

And the transformation comes in seeing that they were nothing but ghosts, thoughts in a little girl's head. They were not real and they were not The Truth. My past could have remained that way until the day I die, and now I have changed that past from a girl who was unable to make people happy, who was ugly, worthless, stuck, shy, and veiled, into a beautiful, brilliant little girl who believed in the decisions she had made about herself when some things happened. I've talked about the specific of some of these transformations in other threads, but I'm glad to talk about any that you're curious about.

[ming]

Thanks for sharing. How did you change the past? Brainwashing yourself otherwise? Erasing memories by hipnotism? I am curious because it is the most powerful and difficult thing to do.

[Angela]

Originally Posted by ming

Thanks for sharing. How did you change the past? Brainwashing yourself otherwise? Erasing memories by hipnotism? I am curious because it is the most powerful and difficult thing to do.

I boldly looked at the specific incident in which I made those decisions about myself, then examined them for truth, made myself really present to the price I had paid for believing them and the price others had paid for me believing those thoughts, and out of that arose a new inspiring possibility for me to believe, that works better in living a life I'm in love with.

The incident itself happened the way it happened, I don't change that the way Superman reverses the direction of the planet. Instead, I change what it meant. And by doing that, I can change my entire relationship with the past. Since the past is not here but my relationship with it is, that works for me.

[dave marshall]

Hi,

the more you read and use the excercises in the seth books you will understand that the 'future' experience is created in the same way the 'past' experiences are. Although we experieince time in a linear fashion, reality beyond the five senses in not a linear experieince but a broadening of identity and events. 'Time' and 'events' and 'experience' are not the same things.

Hope that helps

dave

[nextlevelandbeyond]

Angela, you answered a question that I didn't realize I even had in a simple and straight forward way. I have done the same kind of thing, but took more of the approach that what happened happened move forward. Stop using it as a crutch to not be successful, to not be loved... what ever it was. However, in my efforts, I felt like there was a step missing. You helped fill that gap. Thank you for that wonderful blessing and I hope to pass your wisdom on to someone else that can benefit from it.

[Acting Like Godot]

One way to understand this is to see that time is basically an illusion and nothing means anything apart from (a) what we perceive of it, and (b) the meaning we attach to it.

For example, last week there was a large mass of subatomic particles blinking in and out of existence, right in front of me. It also seemed to be continuously emanating powerful waves of sound energy.

Upon further perception and interpretation, it occurred to me that my mother was standing in front of me and talking loudly & continuously about my father.

Now, in the same way, the past does not exist, apart from your perception (which is inherently subjective) and mental interpretation (which is also inherently subjective) and mental reconstruction (which is also inherently subjective).

So reconstruct it any way you please.

[MagicalRealist]

I've done the same thing Angela did--took my past and re-framed it in a positive way. I did so (and continue to do so) through a series of exercises in gratitude.

I had already started by looking at my present circumstances--how much abundance was already in my life? What good things and pleasant circumstances had I already managed to manifest without even knowing what I was doing? I meditated on those, and allowed myself to feel gratitude for them. And as I did so, I started to recall how I'd manifested some things I didn't want--but as I continued with the gratitude exercises, I found good reasons to be grateful for many of those, too.

And as I looked at my present, I naturally began to look at my past. At first it was big events--relationships that ended badly, being homeless, moving to another city, ending up broke, finishing a college degree, quitting grad school, etc. And as I remembered those big events, I saw how I had learned valuable lessons from them, or discovered new strengths, or received something wonderful. I realized that I could, in fact, feel grateful for "bad" experiences, or at least certain aspects of them, and they no longer seemed so bad. Some of them even transformed into positive experiences.

For example, I was able to see, for the first time, just how generous and supportive my family has really been of me and my desire to pursue a creative career. For most of my adult life, I lived with the reality that they thought I was a failure--immature, undisciplined, lazy, excuse-making--and not worthy of respect. I believed they didn't take me seriously and were just waiting for the day when I would finally settle down and get a grown-up job and quit playing artist (and perpetual student, as well).

But as I started looking for things I could be grateful for in those relationships--what I could easily acknowledge they had given me, I began to realize that everything I'd been thinking--the reality I'd been living in--was nothing more than my negative, limited interpretation of events. I'd been going through life with the identity of "Misunderstood artist who rejects her family and their materialistic values, and is in turn rejected by them." I'd made that my reality. I saw plenty of evidence for it, too.

When I stopped and turned it around, deciding that my identity was now "Artist whose family has been supportive and generous," I suddenly saw, for the first time, just how true that was. All of a sudden it was my reality. And I saw plenty of evidence for that, far more than I'd ever anticipated.

I realized that at no time has anyone in my family ever told me, or even suggested, that I shouldn't be an artist, or that I should give up my dreams of being one in favor of a "grown up" job. I realized that at no point did any of them ask me, "So, when are you finally going to get your act together and make money with your art?" I realized that all of the times when my dad asked me about the business aspects of making art, he was trying to be helpful because while he doesn't know anything about art he knows all about running a business, and that was his way of being helpful. I remembered so many occasions when, in casual conversation, someone would say, "You're so talented. I wish I could draw and paint like you do," or offer a few words of encouragement.

I realized that yes, they really do believe in me, and always have. All of the negative ideas about me that I was so sure they had? They existed only in my head. They were my own fears, which I projected onto my reality. So now that I'm looking at that entire set of relationships through the lens of gratitude, acknowledging everything they've done for me, I have a completely different story about my place within my family, and my life as an artist. I can't go back and tell the same old stories about my past anymore, because I can now see they aren't true--or at least that there is a truth that serves me (and them, and my art) much better than the old one did.