Who you really are—your immortal Self—doesn’t live in the past, and therefore cannot be punished by anything that happened there. If anything, the repeated pain of reliving whatever the problems may have been should show us that we’ve arrived in the wrong place, led there by misguided parts of us.
Imagine sleepwalking into a rundown, dangerous neighborhood and suddenly awakening to your situation. There’s no doubt as to your next action: you would get out of that place as fast as you could. Wisdom, if not pure instinct, prevails, and the same intelligence should hold true for us when it comes to our spiritual lives. What “once was” lives on only in an unconscious “neighborhood” in ourselves—one where we no longer belong. This in-the-dark level of consciousness is populated with the shadows of former painful experiences, both real and imagined. But their power over us runs only as deep as we are identified with that dream world into which we have fallen. We walk out of there by waking up, or by bringing our attention back into the presence of the living moment, where it belongs.
No one can teach us to leave the world of what was or to abandon those unconscious parts of us that actually need to relive their pain in order to live on; they cannot see themselves for what they are, nor do they want to.
We must see them, their world, and the pain of their reality as being something we no longer wish to walk with or through. Nothing can delay our departure from this lower level of self, any more than the ground floor of a skyscraper can keep you from taking its elevator all the way up to the observation deck.
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