Nothing in Your Life has Been Caused by Your Past

There is a gigantic, colossal misperception among the citizens of the world of time and space that our past determines our future.

It doesn’t.

Nothing that happened in the past is capable of determining the future. The past is dissolved. It is nothing. It doesn’t mean anything about us or about anyone else.

As Jesus teaches us in A Course in Miracles teaches,

“The past is over. It can touch me not.”
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I see the belief that the past creates the future all the time in my coaching and psychotherapy practices.

People come to me to experience transformation, and the first thing I ask about is what change they want to make and what has kept them from doing so up to now.

The answer almost always has to do with something that happened to them that has held them back from having the life, relationships, love, abundance, fun, joy, experiences, possessions, adventures, careers and whatEVER that they desire.

That’s the first erroneous thought that needs to be corrected. NOTHING that happened in the past is causing us to experience anything. Only our thoughts about it and the meaning we are making of it are able to do that.

The ego mind’s biggest lie is that someone or something that happened previously was the cause of something that happened later.
This began with the mother of all lies – the belief that we separated from God.

On the macrocosm or collective level of the mind is the ego’s “story” that we willfully rejected our Creator, and because of that we are guilty, small, alone, unlovable, unworthy and deserving of suffering. And so many of us actually believe that that’s true – but it’s not because of anything based in fact – because the fact is that we never separated from God, nor is that even possible.

It was and is only our erroneous belief that we did so that made up a world of time and space that seems separate from God. It’s only the thoughts that we continue to think – loveless thoughts of resentment, blame, victimhood, etc that continue to keep recreating this so-called reality, causing us to feel that life sucks in some way and that God is not with us.

This is how the microcosm level works in our worldly lives. Something happened to us at some point – and we believe it caused us to have this or that problem in our lives. But the only power it has to cause us any difficulty, pain, or suffering is the one we’re giving it by believing in it. We perpetuate it by feeding it with our thought energy.

So the only way that anything that transpired in the past causes anything to be true in present – thus creating our future – is by our investing it with the power to make it true.

As we change our thoughts and withdraw our beliefs we actually create a new present and a different future.

I like to think of this as the “reframe to reclaim”. We reframe the negative thought to one that is positive, the victim thought to one that is victorious, the thought that we were mistreated or abused to one that focuses on how we can use that experience to be more compassionate or treat others in a loving way.

In doing so we reclaim our peace, our joy, our love, our gratitude – and we continue to create more of that in our lives.

This is empowerment. We get to decide what is true for us.