Changing the past by changing the present

[Carl]

That's pretty much what I meant (although I didn't make it clear enough). I meant that by reviewing our past experiences (memories) from a perspective of truth seeking and "the Work", we may come to view our past (and memories) very differently and in a different context as you say, which would, as I understand, require some "rewiring" that would essentially change the way we see the past and therefore literally change the past because the only 'reality' that particular past (as we have known it) has, is in our memory of it which is basically a bunch of physical neuronal connections. There may even be added "power" to this kind of reality reshaping if our reinterpretation of the past event makes it more in line with what ACTUALLY happened (including all the variables and grey areas that we prefer not to consider).

Is the reality not only in our memory, but also other people's memories? So if by rewiring and seeing past events more objectively, and understanding the broader context and the lines of force which caused a particular event to happen, we change our version of the past, what of another person's memories? And by changing the circumstances of a particular event, you'd also change every subsequent event in some way, and therefore end up some'where' different in the here and now.
This subject is difficult to approach without wiseacring, so forgive me if I come across that way.

 

[mada85]

Perceval, thanks for starting this thread. If I remember rightly, the quote comes from the Cs. It's something like: 'changing the present to change the past and prepare the future'. The implications are really profound.

The past contains for each of you some moments of joy, strength, creativity and splendor, as well as episodes of unhappiness, despair perhaps, turmoil and cruelty. Your present convictions will act like a magnet, activating all such past issues, happy or sad. You will choose from your previous ex- perience all of those events that reinforce your conscious beliefs, and so ignore those that do not; the latter may even seem to be nonexistent.

After reading the first two posts this morning, I immediately wrote a list of my conscious beliefs - those that circulate in my mind and to which I often don't give much attention. The list was long! I focused specifically on negative beliefs. I'm very interested in how childhood experiences shape beliefs that influence adult life. The interesting question is: if one cannot remember one's childhood as a lived experience, how does one access those beliefs in order to effect positive change?

Well, in my experience it is a long slow process of work. For example, a belief might be: I must not be successful. Without conscious attention to this belief it would remain in the mind, influencing daily life.

Yeah, I'm wondering if it's a process of actually "reinterpreting" past experiences and their influences in the sense of "un-distorting" them: both in terms of originally distorted perceptions and any additional distortions added through time to the memories.

I think this is exactly right, SeekingTruth. Distortions are added over time as one reiterates these beliefs to oneself, adding bits here and there - reasons, causes, interpretations generated by the sleeping mind - and as Seth says, one selects from past memories those that reinforce the belief in the present. There must be other memories that do not reinforce those beliefs, yet we don't give them the same energy.

As one gains knowledge one comes to understand past experiences in a completely different light. An example would be negative beliefs rooted in a narcissistic childhood that are taken to be a part of one's being. But with new knowledge one realises that they are not in fact a part of one's being at all, but rather an imposition from the environment. This then leads to re-framing the memories - 'reinterpreting', as you put it - which can of course lead to compassion and understanding towards, and a more objective view of, the child one once was. Now, whether that can really change the actual past events is open to question, but certainly the memories and their associations in the mind are changed and become more integrated within the personality.

From the article linked to in Zadius Sky's post:

Paradoxically, whether events happened in the past may not be determined until sometime in your future -- and may even depend on actions that you haven't taken yet.

I find this statement to be pregnant with the most extraordinary possibilities. Is it possible to take actions of some kind later in life which would cause the quantum collapse of events in the past to change? Does it mean that by focusing on the outcomes of the past as they affect our present, and writing for ourselves a story - a chain of causality - that leads like a linear arrow to where we are now, we are in effect causing, by this type of observation, the quantum collapse of past events into the things that we experienced at the time? What might happen if we could stop this process? What would that look like in one's inner world? Is this what is hinted at when many of the old spiritual disciplines insisted on bringing one's awareness into the present moment?

Another quote from the article previously linked:

More recently (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus, and showed that what they did could retroactively change something that had already happened. As the photons passed a fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave like particles or waves when they hit a beam splitter. Later on - well after the photons passed the fork - the experimenter could randomly switch a second beam splitter on and off. It turns out that what the observer decided at that point, determined what the particle actually did at the fork in the past. At that moment, the experimenter chose his history.

Well, this experiment was conducted on the scale of photons, but is it scalable? Perhaps what we are looking at is a relative scale of speed. It's generally accepted that photons move at the speed of light. The human being is much larger than a photon and therefore moves more slowly.

The photon – the quantum of light or other electromagnetic radiation – is normally considered to have zero mass. But some theories allow photons to have a small rest mass and one consequence of that would be that photons could then decay into lighter elementary particles. So if such a decay were possible, what are the limits on the lifetime of a photon? That is the question asked by a physicist in Germany, who has calculated the lower limit for the lifetime of the photon to be three years in the photon's frame of reference. This translates to about one billion billion (1018) years in our frame of reference.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2013/jul/24/what-is-the-lifetime-of-a-photon

So I think the inference would be that 'changing the present to change the past' would be a lifetime's work for a human, until one has enough awareness (or being) to change the quantum collapse in the present in a way that might affect past events in a literal way.

I hope this wasn't too rambling. As Carlisle points out, it is a subject that can give rise to wisacring, but is nevertheless fascinating.

 

[Joe]

So for an example, I was in a different reality when I first joined this forum, and in said reality I had a terrible past of trauma and wasted years and depression. But now after working to change the present, I ended up also changing the past, and I'm now in a reality where things aren't and weren't as bad, but I never noticed the change at all.

Using your example, which I think is shared to one extent or another by many here; Before joining this forum, I lived my whole life believing that I was hard done by, got dealt a bum deal by life etc. But after joining and gaining a different perspective on things, I might now see my life experiences as valuable and try to learn from them things I didn't (or couldn't) learn at the time. So my understanding of those experiences changes, perhaps radically. Apparently that involves physical changes in the make up and "wiring" of our brains. Is that a "new reality"?

If we all live in our own personal realities that are the product of our awareness (since subjectivity reigns supreme here on 3D planet earth) then I pretty much have changed my reality from the point of view of my perspective, in the only *real* way that is possible. Note that changing this area of our reality is often far more difficult than changing our external physical conditions, living conditions for example. Although, having said that, very often, once you change the perspective area, the external physical conditions change also. So the foundation of all aspects of our personal reality seems to be based in our perception.

 

[Joe]

Is the reality not only in our memory, but also other people's memories? So if by rewiring and seeing past events more objectively, and understanding the broader context and the lines of force which caused a particular event to happen, we change our version of the past, what of another person's memories?

I think that's where 'branching' comes in. That shared belief system (in the sense that all beliefs are distorted) is what holds us all down in the gutter so to speak, because all beliefs are based on illusion to some extent. This makes it pretty obvious why someone who begins this process of 'branching' off or breaking away from that shared belief system inevitably loses former friends for example.

 

[Joe]

The interesting question is: if one cannot remember one's childhood as a lived experience, how does one access those beliefs in order to effect positive change?

I don't think it's necessary to remember childhood experiences because we can assume that issues we have as adults often relate back to childhood experiences and we can paint a picture from there. Another aspect to this is that this process of reshaping the past in our minds to change the present can be done by changing our present attitudes or issues. For example, I am angry, or controlling or narcissistic or afraid or whatever. Such issues are almost always based on either an illusory belief or a belief that is no longer relevant to us as adults. By recognising these aspects of our character or personality and making efforts to change them we are ridding ourselves of the illusions and redefining the old memories/experiences on which they are based.

 

[foofighter]

The interesting question is: if one cannot remember one's childhood as a lived experience, how does one access those beliefs in order to effect positive change?

I don't think it's necessary to remember childhood experiences because we can assume that issues we have as adults often relate back to childhood experiences and we can paint a picture from there. Another aspect to this is that this process of reshaping the past in our minds to change the present can be done by changing our present attitudes or issues. For example, I am angry, or controlling or narcissistic or afraid or whatever. Such issues are almost always based on either an illusory belief or a belief that is no longer relevant to us as adults. By recognising these aspects of our character or personality and making efforts to change them we are ridding ourselves of the illusions and redefining the old memories/experiences on which they are based.

Yeah, as previously noted, the 5PATH hypnotherapy system is based on this idea. It helps clients find the trigger events for whatever issues they want to deal with, and those could either be "real" memories, or just what the client thinks he/she remembers. From the point of view of therapy it makes no difference. The therapist can then help the client gain a new perspective on this, and this new understanding then sort of "ripples" back to the present, where the subconscious now has a new and more positive view. Check out Cal's website _http://www.5-path.com/ for details.

 

[SeekinTruth]

Yes, this is DEFINITELY a fascinating subject. Putting it another way is that you learn later the lessons that were missed earlier by having distorted too much the experiences/perceptions. So in a sense, successfully working out such negative influences by "taking out the distortions" and expanding the context, reaching a deeper, fuller, and more balanced understanding is like completing the lessons of the past AND the present.

By the way, just for the record, the saying "Use the present to repair the past and prepare the future" is from Gurdjieff, but I'm not certain from what book right now. There WERE references by the C's that if any past, present, or future is changed, they all change simultaneously, whether by higher density STS technological manipulation methods or whatever. It seems each "timeline" in the "many worlds framework" changes instantly if any part of the timeline is changed?

 

[obyvatel]

I am thinking in particular of how, when a parent changes and learns from his or her mistakes, the children learn to forgive the past wounds inflicted on them by that parent. It happens very rarely, unfortunately. But when we do something, could it be "resetting the clock" on some events?

This agrees with my experience to some extent. I think the way it works is tied to the chain of associations based on past experiences that are set off by an event in the present. Suppose I have reacted inappropriately to some action of my son in the past. Realizing this and explaining it to him after the fact has limited effect in neutralizing the emotional charge associated with the incident. When an unrelated event happens in the present, the associative machinery would activate this memory for him and it would be mixed up with the present stimulus and lead to a certain response on his part. If I am able to realize what is happening in the moment and able to act appropriately this time, a new memory is formed which conflicts with the previous memory. Repeated a few times, the old memory loses its charge and ceases to be activated through association. The old memory could be reinterpreted as well. My son sometimes takes me by surprise by suddenly recounting an incident that happened long back by presenting it as if it happened yesterday. When I think about it, sometimes I can find the correlation between some present incident which would have triggered his memory. It is almost scary to get even a glimpse of how impressionable a young mind is and how the associative process works in the formative period.

Anyway, this is my understanding of "resetting the clock" and there is the potential of changing the past of others through our actions in the present. It is easier with children as they have less associative material accumulated.

[quote author=Chu]
Just a few thoughts, but I have no idea how this might work in the "tangible" reality. Maybe that is part of the problem, trying to understand it while still thinking of the concept of time as we know it.
[/quote]

Based on what Gurdjieff and cognitive psychology has described, it would be safe to state that we have at least two states of consciousness - our ordinary "waking" consciousness and the subconscious or adaptive unconscious. The perception of time is likely different in these two. For the subconscious, it is possible that everything looks like the present. When an event happens in the present, the associative machinery evokes memories and the sum total of the resulting internal state is represented physiologically as a pattern of neuronal firing, endocrine function and receptor-ligand binding. We can represent this state as an image which is composite and exists in the present moment but is comprised of components from inherited material as well as past experiences, the present stimulus and future expectations. For the subconscious, it is this image that is real and though it may change and be refined as the internal state of the body changes, each image defines the present moment. It is the reflective waking consciousness which has a sense of past, presence and future.

Hypnotic techniques work by accessing the subconscious and attempting to provide input that alters the present image through the active intervention of the hypnotist's waking consciousness while the person's waking consciousness is deactivated. Gurdjieff made a comment in Beelzebub's Tales that we tend to realize hypnosis only when there is an "accelerated concentrated result" obtained from the process. I think that children who are developing a reflective consciousness which is still relatively weak, have their subconscious as the dominant component of their psyche. They are very suggestible and are most likely operating under milder form of hypnosis - osit. A similar situation could be true for adults as well when we are not making conscious efforts towards active mentation. The reflective consciousness is present but it does not work independently and takes as real the image of reality that the subconscious produces. The effective and wholesome way of changing the past is through the process where the reflective waking consciousness is independently active observing and modifying the image of reality present-ed by the subconscious.

My 2 cents

 

[Deleted member 4320]

Based on what Gurdjieff and cognitive psychology has described, it would be safe to state that we have at least two states of consciousness - our ordinary "waking" consciousness and the subconscious or adaptive unconscious. The perception of time is likely different in these two. For the subconscious, it is possible that everything looks like the present. When an event happens in the present, the associative machinery evokes memories and the sum total of the resulting internal state is represented physiologically as a pattern of neuronal firing, endocrine function and receptor-ligand binding. We can represent this state as an image which is composite and exists in the present moment but is comprised of components from inherited material as well as past experiences, the present stimulus and future expectations. For the subconscious, it is this image that is real and though it may change and be refined as the internal state of the body changes, each image defines the present moment. It is the reflective waking consciousness which has a sense of past, presence and future.

Thanks obyvatel for this description. It also represent my own understanding.

I would like add some words yet.

G said that we don't remember self. So if man-machine is unable to even remember-self in real time, so to speak, then what it will be from perspective of the future? The conscious man could tell that he remember past, but man machine don't remember but, in principle, he just create imagination about past.

So, if the memory we consider as our imagination, this is something what is located only in our mind and nowhere else. And therefore we have every right to do want we want to with content of our own heads.

Let me give an example with using of visualisation:

Think about unpleasant experience from the "past", some taumatic expierience. Think about how you felt bad and what went wrong. Where is the imagination which you imagine? Maybe a bit on the right and quite close? All what we imagine is located somewhere in space. Now, grab it and throw far before you and over you. Start thinking about it as something what occur in the future. Move it from the area called "the past" to the area called "the future." Now, if this is something what will happen in the future you may decide how you will behave, everything is in your hands. Create your ideal version of situation, imagine how perfectly you deal with your emotions, imagine how you act effectively and going out of trouble.

The most important is to start thinking about your memories as that something what only occur.

Generally, don't do the technique. I just add this short description of one of techniques which I support myself and I want to inspired you to find matched to you or design your own visualization if you want.


BTW: I remember descriptions from the Levine's book. About boy named "Marius" attacked by bear. He was hurt. The father was angry at him. Etc. This resulted in trauma.

The work which was made by the therapist was targeting him to creating imagination or scenario how he kill the animal, how he is strong, how good he feel as the great hunter. And play it. As the nervous system does not distinguish between what is strongly imagined from what is really happening. This ultimately led to the development of appropriate physiological responses and release the trauma.

 

[Esote]

... So the foundation of all aspects of our personal reality seems to be based in our perception.

Hence, the foundation of all aspects of our reality seems to be based in our collective perception...

The perspective could be : changing the past by changing the future !

What if the present doesn't really exist in our 3D reality ? It's all relative, in between; the present is more or less passed and the future is already present. Our projections of futures might well be what brings changes, depending on our free-will or lack of it.

Changing our perception- perspective- projection... past and future : a lot of Work at present !

There is no time in an absolute present. Past and future are our present, as a gift of life...

fwiw