“The past is not dead. It’s not even past” — William Faulkner
Most of us, most of the time live in and through the past. The past isn’t what happened back then. It’s the neural networks we groove into our brains about what happened to us. The past we live in is the meaning we attributed to those events.
It’s the story we generate about what’s happening to us now, along with our thoughts, feelings, and actions — which are present day brain events, but they belong to the past.
Unfortunately, the more painful the original events, the more charged the emotions, and the darker the thoughts the deeper is the groove. And every time we repeat the past, we deepen the groove.
Different partner, same ending. You get it.
It’s why we reenact trauma. The world that was created by a traumatic event (failures of love, death, accidents, illnesses) in childhood is pretty much the world we get in adulthood.
Sobering.
Freud called in repetition compulsion.
We actively participate in recreating the world, (our relationships, our work life, the feeling milieu, and the thoughts) as a copy of the past.
Fortunately, we are not our brains. We have a brain, but we are not our brains.
Brains, amazing as they are, nevertheless, are physical material. And physics does not determine our future.
What we call “ego” is the identity that was forged in response to, yes, good stuff from the past, but mostly from how we responded to the bad stuff. We get attached to this identity, along with certain images and thoughts we have about ourselves.
I mean, really attached.
As in, we defend it against all attempts from within or without ( your therapist, for example) to change it, refine it, or update it. And then we conclude “my therapist is just like all the rest of them”.
The ego was not constructed consciously. It is essentially a reaction to how the world (including our parents) treated us.
It “got” formed externally, passively. And that formation became us. We became it.
You could say that this ego has a “mind” of its own.
It’s the brain’s mind though. It’s main job is to reconfirm, re-legitimize, and repeat everything that was done to you in the past, and then reconfirm that it’s happening in the present.
I suspect that’s the basis of William Faulkner’s remark that opened this reflection.
The past is not dead. It’s not even past.
This is what led Krishnamurti to conclude that thoughts are matter. What he meant is that most thoughts are generated by the brain mind / ego mind and therefore are matter in the form of thoughts.
When the future is engineered by ego it is nothing more than a new exterior look to the same past.
There is, however, another mind. This mind, call it Source Mind, or Clear Mind.
This mind takes life as it and not as interpreted by our ego. It’s oriented in the present. For this mind, life just is. No stories. No interpretation. No conclusions. No attachments to identities or images of self.
This mind doesn’t generate narratives based in past (negative) experiences.
It is phenomenological. Zen mind if you like.
The “good ” life can’t happen until we make the shift from egoic / brain mind to Clear Mind. I also call the “self” that comes into being around this orientation the Heart Self.
This is the the mind that can re-program your brain. ‘
To call in the “programmer” is too cold, however.
This mind, connected to Source, is creative (a new future is finally possible).
It is grateful (“Lifted from the no of all nothing”).
It is compassionate (able to contain suffering without drawing negative conclusions about reality).
It is able to see others as others (and stop recruiting them to cause me suffering and prove my case that life is cruel).
It is able to self-validate (knowing that to be oneself is to express one’s purpose) – having given up the historic project of having to prove oneself to others.
It knows itself to be the localized presence of the Big Mystery that is living us—and therefore orients in life through surrender and trust).
It is you.
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