4 Ways to Change the Past
By: Alan Lew
Tags: Consciousness, Spirituality, Time, Past, Timeline

“The past is never where you think you left it.”

― Katherine Anne Porter

The 4 Ways We Change Our Past

When asked, most would say that we cannot change our past. Some, however, say that we are always changing your past, usually by selecting which parts we want to remember in the present, and which we want to forget.

There are essentially four was that we are always changing past events or accumulations of events that have occurred in our personal and collective lives.

1 — We Deny the Past

We pretend that an event or person did not exist, trying to erase it or them from our personal and collective minds. We also created new, imagined and fictional pasts to replace one that we are denying, which is the same thing.

I consider this the weakest approach because, despite our denials, we know that it is not true. The “true” past is forever locked in the deepest corners of our private and collective minds, and as such, it will resurface again when we least expect it.

2 — We Ignore the Past

Rather than intentionally denying that a certain past ever existed, we can simply try to live our life by ignoring it. This is probably more common than we realize, because modern life can get us so busy as to leave no time to contemplate the past.

In spiritual communities this could take the form of spiritual bypassing — using the concept of “Be Here Now”, for example, to leave no space for considerations of the past. This is slightly better than intentionally denying the past, but similarly, the past will likely arise at some point when one least expects it — such as in a dark night of the soul spiritual experience.

Denying and Ignoring the past may be done intentionally, but most of the time it is not. In fact, we are constantly changing the past in these ways without realizing that we are doing so.

From a social science perspective, the historical geographer, David Lowenthal, in one of my favorite books, “The Past is a Foreign Country”, argued that we only see the past through the distorted lens of our present individual and societal values and beliefs.

Because of that, every time we recognize (or name) something as a historical or past event or object, we change it in some way. It can never be what is originally was. A farming tool that is on display in a museum, for example, will never be seen, understood, valued, or used in the same way that was when it was considered a normal tool used by a farmer.

At a more physical science level, as YG noted in his comment to this article, psychology tells us that we are constantly modifying our memories of the past, totally unbeknownst to us. For example:

3 — We Forgive the Past

Forgiving the past means to change one’s interpretation or relationship to a past event or series of events. This most commonly entails changing your interpretation of a past event from bad to good, usually because you can see it in a larger perspective with 20–20 hindsight.

“Good” of course, can be defined in different ways. The main goal is to be able to accept a bad past in such as way that it does not interfere with your present experience. Psychologically, This is considered the healthiest way to change the past, though of course it does not really change the events of the past.

4 — We Create a New Past

This is actually what I want to focus on. Can we really create a new, different past that completely erases an existing past?

I say that we not only can, but we do it all the time. We do not know that we do this because the new past completely erases the old past from our memory — at least most of the time.

“Every action changes every other action. … Therefore every action in the present affects those actions which you call the past. Ripples from a thrown stone go out in all directions.” — Seth (Jane Roberts) ‘The Early Sessions, Book 5’, Session 224, January 17, 1966

From a larger spiritual perspective, the present moment is all that ever exists!

You create your past, present and future simultaneously in each new moment point of time. You can (and do) change your past in the moment point, by changing the energetic vibration that you put out in the present moment.

At as simple level, if you are happy in the moment point, the past that you remember will be happy; if you are sad in the moment point, the past that you remember will be sad. If this simple level example only effects memory and does not actually change a past event, then it is a version of Denying, Ignoring and Forgiving the past.

However, if one’s emotional feelings it actually do change the facts of a past event, then it is, of course, something on an entirely different level. At a more complex level of understanding, you create the entire universe that you experience in the present moment point. That universe has a story (a past), which you also create in each present moment.

This is one of my favorite quotes from Seth (Jane Roberts) on a more appropriate way to understand the past in the way that I describe above: