Well, in Bewildered, which is the podcast I make with Ro, my partner, we recently got a question that Ro said, “This would be a good one for The Gathering Room.” And it matched my feelings. And it said, I quote, “I have feelings of sadness and regret for the opportunities of joy I missed out on when I struggled with anxiety and low self-worth.” This person says, “I’m 48 years old and after years of self-reflection, therapy, understanding the impact of trauma, I feel like a different person and it’s wonderful and I’m proud of myself for breaking a lot of negative patterns, but still it’s such a drag to see everything that was possible that I just couldn’t see before.”

So I read this and I thought that when I have feelings of sadness and regret, I believe them, but your feelings of sadness and regret, I do not believe. And I will tell you for why—a number of things. First of all, as you all know—or if you are shocked to hear this, I don’t know what you’ve been doing—I believe we are spiritual beings, having a human experience. And in this experience, the only thing that matters is whether or not we’re undergoing something new. 

In other words, we’re learning by doing. This is a school, Earth school, and it’s a very hard school, and it seems to be that we chose this school because it is hard. As they say, we did not go to space because we thought it was … I’m sorry, I just messed that up. “We did not go to space because it is easy. We went to space because we thought it would be easy.” That was a misquote. Anyway, when I look at the experiences that we’ve gained from going through things like trauma and misunderstanding and negative patterns, those are the things that knocked us around enough to seriously change us and to give us epiphanies, awakenings, openings that are much bigger than anything we would experience if we just went through a jolly jolly time and never had one bad day and we could look back and say, “Well, every single day was good.” That’s not what we seem to be here for.

Okay, so that right there is the first thing. But the other thing, the thing I really want to focus on today is that I think we can change the past. I thought this about five or six years ago. I thought, “Huh, my past is changing.” It felt as if even looking back through memory, there was meaning starting to suffuse experiences that seemed pointless at the time. I’m in my 60s now, and it took until then. It’s taken six decades to get to the point where I go back, I remember something, and I can feel that it has shifted because of what I later came to understand, just like this beautiful person doing the trauma recovery and the therapy and everything. I don’t think it’s just making us more capable in the present.

So if you’re in therapy or self-examination or whatever, just play with this idea. You don’t have to believe it. Play with the idea that we can heal things backward in time. I have a bit of a sciencey bit to go with this, and that is an experiment called Wheeler’s Delayed Choice Phenomenon, okay? So in this experiment, a photon was sent through a system of detectors and then later researchers decided how to measure that. But here’s the deal. The later measurement affected the photon’s past state. In other words, it appeared that cause came after the effect. So a particle would change its state in the past when experimenters altered conditions in the future, which they called “retrocausality.”

Now it is not as if the little electrons ran back and changed something that had been set in stone. Retrocausality, physicists say, isn’t actually happening the way it sounds. It’s not like, “Okay, now I’m going to change this and yesterday morning I will not… I had oatmeal for breakfast yesterday morning, but I’m going to change something in the past. I’m going to intend to eat eggs instead and that will change the fact that I ate oatmeal.” No, that does not happen. What does happen is that quantum particles exist in a state of undefined multiple possibilities until a measurement is made even when the measurement is made later. So the future choice doesn’t travel back in time to change history, but it finalizes a reality that wasn’t yet defined.

Okay, now people are going to yell at me for conflating things at the quantum level with things in macro systems, and I hear that argument, I know it, but I actually think that things in general are going to follow the same principles in subtle ways, from the very minute to the very enormous. So to me, this gives me a kind of physics basis for my feeling that the meaning of my experiences is changing as I decide what the meaning of them is to me now. They had a meaning when they were happening and the meaning was, “This sucks. Life is a bitch and then you die and I hate everything.” That was my meaning. 

Looking back, I could say, “Oh, all right. It was that experience that set—that bad experience that set me up for that good experience. It was that bad experience that cracked open my heart and allowed me to love like this. It was that bad experience that gave me a familiarity with suffering that allowed me to connect with people.”

It’s funny, I was typing this out thinking about it and I said, “You can heal your timeline.” Only my little fingies went to ING instead of INE. So it said, “You can heal your timeling.” And I thought, “Oh, timeling. That’s what we are, these little meat selves.” You can call it the monkey suit, whatever you want to call our physical selves. They’re existing in an apparently unidirectional, linear flow of time. It looks to us like the past goes by and never comes again, and the future goes forward and we can only be in the now, but we can’t really look forward. We can only look back, right?

That is somebody who’s caught in time, which I am now going to call a “timeling.” So, little timelings out there, know that you can change the past by assigning it a different meaning, by seeing the advantages that came from it, by knowing that if you now use the past experience as a ground of healing, you don’t just create normalcy. You create higher-than-normal levels of functionality, ability to experience joy, ability to connect with other people. You are turning this terrible thing into a truly wonderful thing. And if you don’t make the choice to shift the meaning, then what you had in the past—the meaningless, pointless, miserable experience—will not shift.

If you change the meaning now, that thing, which was the destroyer, becomes the creator. And we do it retroactively. So after a lifetime of self-coaching and self-help writing and reading voraciously and spiritual practice and everything, I am here to tell you, I can look back over things that used to really, really bum me out, like bad stuff that happened to me, and I can think that moment, that supposedly awful experience was totally suffused with goodness, with amazing opportunities to create levels of joy that I never would have experienced otherwise. I mean, it was amazing.

Those of you who’ve been around me lately know that I’ve started watching near-death experience stories online. Some of them I sometimes think, “Maybe you made that up a little bit?” But most of them, the vast majority not only seem to be in very good conscience, people have checked various truth claims, like when they were out of their bodies, when they had been declared dead, they went into the waiting room and saw what their families were reading in there and could tell them accurately later.

I’ve met people like Anita Moorjani who had an extended near-death experience that was documented medically up one side and down the other, came out of dying of really, really severe cancer that riddled her body, and nine days later after years of fighting the cancer and almost dying from it, nine days later she was cancer free. So people are experiencing these near-death states. And they also resonate with an experience I had once where I encountered this light that filled me with joy and beauty and felt like my real self.

So one of these that I was listening to was a gentleman who had become a drug addict as a middle-aged man. He finally got caught and sent to prison after going through rehab and flunking out of it a million times trying to get sober, failing. He ended up in prison, ended up in the psych ward of the prison and he’d been horribly—he fell down and received no medical attention. He was horribly bruised. He was stark naked. He had nothing but a metal bed in this freezing cold room with no blanket except a piece of canvas and he was absolutely, I mean, talk about rock bottom and as he was in there, he’d had a heart attack. 

So he had this experience where he saw his father who had predeceased him, and his father at first just expressed this immeasurable love and the guy said, “Why is this happening to me?” And his father said, “Your mother and I had to work so hard to get you here.” Which doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to say, but they went on to say, “We tried absolutely everything else. We’d never want you to suffer. It’s the last thing we want, but if you’d kept going the way you were going, you would suffer greatly and so would many other people. This was your best chance at actually hitting rock bottom to the point where you would bounce.”

So looking back as a guy the age I am now at this horrible experience, he’s like, “That was the foundation of the joy of my life.” Even that he could look back on with gratitude and appreciation rather than regret. That horrifying experience had been flooded with meaning and positive states of being because of the shift of meaning that was then in the future. So it’s a little bit of a mind warp to think of yourself filling your past with positive vibes, healing every bit of it, filling it with joy and light, but I believe this is a reality.

I think it’s one of the more magical things that we can get to when we do start to self-examine and start to heal trauma. Even the worst things can become the best things and all of this life can be not just well used, because even if you don’t do self-examination, it’s all good. You’re just here to have experiences. You can’t get it wrong, but it can be this amazing feast of ways to experience greater joy, compassion, connection, exhilaration, everything good.

So with that, I am going to do the Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation that I have not shared with y’all in weeks and weeks, and then I’ll take some questions. All right, let’s do the curious question that starts off the meditation. First of all, shake out any tension, relax. If you want to lie down, lie down. If you want to sit, make sure you’re comfortable, take a deep breath and let out a long exhale telling your nervous system it’s fine to go into rest and restore instead of fight or flight. 

And then ask yourself the curious question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? You are not looking for an answer. You are looking to rest your brain in the question. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

We move on. Can I imagine the distance between the bottom of my jaw and my collarbone? Can I imagine the distance between my left shoulder and my right shoulder? Can I imagine the distance between my shoulders and my hips?

Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my heart? Can I imagine the empty space that makes up most of this body? Can I imagine the space between my body and the others on this call connected, literally connected right now?

Can I imagine the stillness beneath all the action that is happening in the world everywhere in the universe now? Can I imagine the silence beneath every sound that I can hear and every sound that exists?

Can I imagine that the stillness, space, and silence is conscious and brimming with love? Can I imagine that it knows me and adores me more than I can imagine?

So we imagine to reach something that is more than we can imagine, and that is our meditation. And it’s wonderful to be back here in that energy with you.

So some questions. “Is there a tipping point in shifting perceptions or perspectives, and what helps us reach it?”

Yeah, I think the tipping point is what Asian societies or what Asian religions know as enlightenment because they talk about “continuous ripening.” If you do spiritual practice, you ripen and ripen, the fruit ripens, and then one day it falls off the tree, and that’s an irreversible effect that’s quite different from the slow maturation. Another metaphor we use in [Wayfinder] Coach Training is a caterpillar grows until it’s full fed, and then it decides to shift its being into butterfly mode by dissolving in a cocoon, and that’s irreversible and singular.

I do believe that there is a sort of critical mass that one reaches. I think it’s when you experience a connection with the divine that is undeniable within you. This is why I listen to near-death stories because that happened to me once. And it only need to happen once. I can’t un-know that. I can’t un-ring that bell. Having felt an experience of absolute love and absolute indescribable compassion, beauty, home, that I can’t go back from that.

I used to think that if I had an experience like that, it would mean I was done, I was cooked, I was ready. Now I think it just means I have no choice but to continue trying to awaken or as Pema Chödrön  says, “I am awake in my essence.” She says, “I am awake. I will spend this lifetime taking my armor off.”

So I think we are awake when we experience that, “Oh… this.” And that’s what people who have these near-death experiences report. They leave their bodies and then suddenly they’re in this absolute acceptance, absolute non-judgmental embrace, love beyond love beyond love. And when they come back, they go through some really difficult times trying to adjust to this world. That’s what happened to me after my white light experience. It took about a year before I wasn’t actively in pain from not being able to be there anymore, and I sort of have been taking my armor off ever since. That was a long time ago, but I think it was a tipping point that meant I could never go back. And it’s still pushing me, not pushing me—it’s still like a boulder rolling downhill. I do keep rolling toward it. It’s not even volitional.

Question: “Can we ever do any wrong?”

Depends on your level of—your unit of analysis. If you’re in a human frame of mind, and I believe that that is valid for us, then sure, anything you do deliberately to cause harm or suffering I think is wrong. Stealing, hurting, fighting, murdering people, those are all ethically wrong. From the soul’s perspective, it’s an interesting thing when people have deep spiritual experiences or people who are spiritual masters report being one with all beings, which means that anything harmful they did to anyone else they did to themselves and whatever pain they caused another, they felt themselves. And that is an opportunity for growth as well, no matter how heinous it is. If you fully experience the pain of the victims you created, you wake up more because of understanding what you did to those people or those animals or the earth itself or whatever it is.

So from the soul’s perspective, I believe this is just “experience school” and we can’t get it wrong. But when people, again, with the near-death experiences, they have life reviews, and if they had a life where they hurt people, they’re like, “Ooh, could I go back and get it right? Because I really, really, really want to do that differently.” So yeah, I don’t think we should deliberately cause pain, and I think that’s ethically wrong, but if you’ve done something like that, and we all have to some degree, just know that there is a universal love that understands that, and it makes something wonderful even of that.

Okay: “So how can we make decisions in a way that we don’t make big mistakes again?”

I would say allow the full impact of the big mistake to land in your consciousness. Don’t turn away. This is where integrity comes in. Don’t turn away from it. Don’t try to numb it with behaviors or substances. I mean, you may have to for a while, like get anti-anxiety pills or whatever it is, but sit with it and tell everything that you really, really feel about that big mistake, every bit of knowledge that you have about how you messed up, let it all in with absolute humility and say, “That was a mistake. I did something wrong.”

Again, in [Wayfinder] Coach Training, one of the first things I teach people is to say to other people, “This is what my hypothesis is about you. This is what I’m thinking. Tell me where I’m wrong.” Because saying those five words—”tell me where I’m wrong”—is so painful for the ego. The ego does not like to say that, does not like to be wrong. So just by saying that, you’re divesting yourself of some ego. And when someone tells you what you did wrong or what you got wrong, and you let it sit there and you don’t capitulate to shame or trying to be placated or anything, you just sit there and go, “Okay, that was wrong. What can I learn from it? ” Then you don’t make the same mistakes again. But if you push it away, if you say, “No, no, I was in the right for whatever reason,” you’ll do it again until it really lands. It’s all education.

Question: “Do you notice that feeling the difficult emotions of these past-meaning stories causes the shift in timelines?”

It’s a little bit complex. I think it does have to do with consciousness and its ability to shift physical experience through the interpretation of meaning. I do think it’s like this kind of interesting technical issue, but yeah, feeling the emotional depth of it is actually a deeper form of wisdom than knowing it conceptually with the mind. And we now know, for example, that people make decisions not based on logic but based on our emotional connection to the circumstances surrounding the decision. And if they take people who have lost their ability because of brain injury have lost the ability to access emotion, they can’t make any decisions at all. They just spin endlessly in different scenarios of what is cost benefit? 

But once you get the emotional part back, even if you lose some kind of logical function, you can still make decisions. And I think that’s also true of making meaning of the past stories. The difficult emotions? Sit with them. Gosh, I hate that. I hate sitting with anger while it just boils away injustice inside me. I hate sitting with embarrassment until it tells me what I could have done that would have helped other people feel at ease. I don’t like the negative emotions, but I know that if I fight them or refuse to feel them, they get worse and the past stays icky. But when I feel them and allow them to transmute the way I’ve come at the world, they become retroactively suffused with goodness. So yeah, emotions are the whole thing.

Question: “What do you do when you feel stuck on survival strategies like isolation when another part of you longs to break through?”

What a great question for someone who’s a fan—that would be me—of parts psychology. I just had the privilege of doing an interview along with Richard Schwartz, who is the creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy, and he really had this breakthrough when he realized that we all have different parts of ourselves. Everybody knows that. “Part of me wants to go there, but part of me doesn’t want to go,” for example. But when he started treating each part as if it has a history and logic all its own—so, give it a name, picture what it looks like inside you, the part that’s stuck on survival strategies and the part that is longing to break free. Imagine them as two full humans who are having an argument inside you, and see if you can look at them both with compassion at the same time.

And what that does is I used this exercise a long time ago called “The Wild Child, the Dictator and the Compassionate Witness.” You imagine both these parts of yourself and if you can love them both at once—in this case, the part that’s stuck on survival strategies and the part that longs to break free—if you can love them both at once, you are not either one of them. And then you are what Dick Schwartz calls Self with a capital S, and you can start to mediate the differences between them and meet their needs. 

So meet the needs of the one who is afraid and wants to stay in survival strategies. Meet the needs of the one who’s longing to break free. And you’ll find that from the position of Self or the Compassionate Witness, their needs are always compatible. They can always both be served. So that’s a whole different level of changing your past to make, because those parts emerge when we have trauma and when we heal them, it goes backward and helps us resolve the trauma.

So there are other questions, but we’ve come to the end of our time, and I just wanted to remind everybody who’s in Wilder, my online community with Ro, that we’re doing a meditation right after this. So haul on over there and everybody, everybody, thank you so much for coming to The Gathering Room. Remember that the past is not fixed and that finding meaning in our whole lives means that our whole lives are beautiful, no matter what has happened to us.

I love you all. I am so grateful to be here and I’ll see you next week—yay!—on The Gathering Room. Bye.