What if you could change the past? A movie I watched recently, About Time, is the story of a man who happens to have the ability to travel back in time by imagining some situation from the past. He is then able to re-live the situation, changing the parts that didn’t go well, recreating his life the way he wants. He uses his power to help others as well as himself. As his life progresses, though, he finds there are certain undesirable consequences resulting from the changes he makes. When one event is altered, it affects everything else that follows; and with his limited vision of life, he can’t foresee what these consequences will be. Life becomes complicated as the changes he makes create the need for more changes, and so on. He sees that playing God for himself and others has its drawbacks.
In the end, he learns that he doesn’t need to change anything from the past to be happy. After many ventures back in time, he realizes that even seemingly devastating events have their purpose. He begins to approach his life as if he had already gone back and changed it to his liking, as if he had purposely chosen each situation. It was as if he had already lived each day once and then re-designed it to be just as he wanted it. Negative things still happened and he did his best to deal with them, but with no need to internally resist life, he finds an inner sense of contentment.
What if we could live our lives like that? What if we saw our lives as perfect just as they are? What if we saw that we chose every situation? Of course, we would act to improve an external situation if that were possible, but would we internally fight against what life presents? The spiritual masters say our lives are designed perfectly for our evolution, for our highest good. And they say that, on some level, we designed the blueprint of our lives. Through our karma, or actions, our lives take shape. It seems absurd for us to internally resist what we chose for ourselves. Considering this, doesn’t it make sense to approach life with an attitude of acceptance, while doing our best to deal with whatever happens?
What if you believed you are living each day for the second time? This time you have the opportunity to approach it from a new angle. You have a choice to live with an internal acceptance, taking action when appropriate. How would your life be different? It takes energy to resist, to believe things could and should be different. The spiritual masters say that when the reality of no control dawns on us, we are liberated.
They tell us we are like the stone statues carved into the pillars of the temple believing they are holding up the temple. Or like the man on the train who believes he must hold his suitcase throughout the trip, or it will be left behind. It’s a relief to put down the burden of false control. Let the train carry your bags—it is anyway. Let go of holding up the temple and see that you were never actually holding it up. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should we should sit around doing nothing. We are compelled to act, but it is the consciousness from which we act that is important.
We think we want to change things in our lives, but do we really? Like the time-traveler in the movie, from our narrow view of life, we can’t see how everything fits together. From the bird’s eye view we can see the bigger picture in which we are an intrinsic part of an interconnected, interdependent system guided by natural law. When we recognize the inherent perfection of what is, our actions flow from that realization.
The more self-awareness we have, the more we are able step out of our conditioning and see things as they are. As the time-traveler realized, what happens outside is not what’s important; it’s how we respond to what happens that makes a difference in our life. He was able to experience everything fresh and respond in new and different ways rather than reacting from his programming. Of course, we don’t have the opportunity to actually re-visit the past in order to learn these lessons, but we can choose to follow a spiritual path that brings us to the realization of the underlying perfection of existence.
Consider This: Are you fully alive in the life you’re living now?
