“I didn’t understand … I couldn’t put to words what I was going through (I just felt it)… so how could I expect my friends to understand what even I couldn't?”
One of the chief characteristics of the material mind is to hold on tenaciously to the past. But the spiritual mind, the real self, the spirit, cares relatively little for its past. It courts change. It expects to be a different individual in thought a year hence from that it is today. It is willing a thousand years hence to forget who and what it is today, for it knows that this intense desire to remember itself for what it has been retards its advance toward greater power and greater pleasure. What care you for what you were a thousand or five thousand years ago? Yet then you were something, and something far less than what you are today. It is like the bird that should insist on carrying around the shell from which it was hatched. Look forward.
Every regret, every mournful thought, takes so much out of your life. When we are ever going back in memory to the past and living in it preference to the present we are bringing back on ourselves the old moods of mind and mental conditions belonging to that past. Look forward.
There may be for a period a certain use for us in going back to our more recent lives, and for a time living in them. Sometime we are pushed back temporarily into some old condition of the mind, some old experience in order to make us more alive than ever to the rags and tatters of errors in belief still clinging to us. We may become for a time absorbed and swallowed up in the old life. But after a little the new mind, the new self into which we have grown during the absence, antagonizes the old. It feels aversion and disgust for the narrow life, the false beliefs and the dull, monotonous purposeless lives about it. It (the spirit) refuses to have anything to do with the old.
The new me. Going Home. (in someone else’s words)
When you live several years in any certain house or town or locality, you make a spiritual self-belonging to that locality. Every house, tree, road, or other object you have long been in habit of seeing there, has a part of that self in thought attached to it. Every person who knows you there has in his or her mind the self you make there, and puts that self out when they meet you or talk to you.
If you had years before in that place, the reputation of being weak, or vacillating, or impractical, or intemperate, and you returned to the people who knew you as such, although you may have changed for the better, you are very liable in their thought and recollection of you to have this old self pushed back on you, and as a result, you may for a period feel much like your former self.
The old you, the old former self of former years will rise from every familiar object to meet you. It will come out of houses formerly inhabited by your friends, though now tenanted by strangers; you will find it in the village church, the old school house, the very rails and fence posts familiar to you long years before. More than all it will come out of the recollection of the people who only knew you for what you were, say twenty years before, a year before; every such person strengthens with you this image of your former self. You talk with them on the plane of that previous life or self, and repress the new. For the time being you ignore yourself as it now thinks and believes; you put aside your newer self, not wishing to obtrude on your friends opinion, which to them may be unpleasant, or seem wild and visionary; you meet perhaps twenty-five or thirty people who know you only as your former self, and with all these you act the old self, and repress the new, This for a time makes the old dead self very strong, but you cannot keep this up; you cannot warm the old corpse of yourself to into life. If you try to- if you try to be and live your former life, you will become depressed mentally, and very likely sick physically; you may find yourself going into moods of mind peculiar to your former life which you thought had gone forever. Going back into your past life draws on to you the old mental conditions- the old mind- the old self of that period. But since that time you have grown a new mind- a new self, which thought and believed very differently from the old.
Cont-
