THE PAST
When you think about an event (time) or a period of connective events (also time) that occurred in the past, there is a perception that time is fixed. It can't be changed. The reasons for such a perception are easily understood.
Setting the subject of reincarnation aside for the moment (this will be addressed in a later chapter), and looking only at conscious awareness and memory, we all enter reality as a nearly clean slate. At the moment of our birth we have no past, other than what we've been able to process during our development in the womb.
Beginning with our moment of conception, we systematically begin to collect a past, which we store in memory. After physical birth, the information we collect, or come to believe, is then heavily moderated or controlled, first by our senses—what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel—then by outside influences, initially our parents, then our siblings, peers, teachers, church, government, and environment. These are the influential and educational methods or facilities that have been created consciously and unconsciously, to teach us what is supposed to be fact, what is real, what is known versus unknown. These formal and informal establishments go to a great deal of trouble to deliver their information to us and we pretty much assume the information is accurate. Eventually we even come to call the information "knowledge," which implies "knowing," as opposed to "believing." So we generally accept the knowledge as truth, and delegate our beliefs to a category we might call "less than adequate."
Why is belief on the bottom of the pile? It's because we are human, curious, and constantly thinking a great deal about almost everything. As a result, we store more than we will ever need. As our memories build, larger and larger files fill with knowledge. We have to maintain some degree of control over all this information or go crazy, so we become more and more selective about what we are willing to hang on to. Eventually we have to begin chucking some of it out. We hang on to those things we have labeled "known," and pitch the stuff labeled "believe." Over time, our world becomes more and more fixed.
Eventually, our willingness to accept new facts narrows to such a point that it literally takes an "in-your-face situation" or what I call "a penetrating and life-core shock to the system" to produce change.
Such determined and resolute narrow-mindedness can't possibly be automatic. It must also be driven by some inner need.
I believe it is a major defense mechanism. It's there because of our natural desire for security, a safe and protected space.
Within us resides the known. Outside of us resides the dark, the unknown, that which we inherently fear. By inventing and understanding the past and how it might relate to us as individuals, we make ourselves comfortable and secure.
But this can only work if the past is unchanging and fixed, providing us with a clear understanding of who and what we are within the context of time/reality. An unchanging past supports our current actions. If we compare our current actions with the past and view them as new or different, it even implies progress. It gives us a sense of security and demonstrates an ability to grow. It will always make us better and more competent than our forefathers. They did a pretty good job, but we do better.
By demonstrating that we are able to improve on the past, we are being responsible, wise, and judicious. We are making things better. We are in control.
Science is very supportive of this "knowing." Archaeology, anthropology, and theology create intricate histories that come into play, representing "observational" records that now go back millennia. However, unless we are a trained researcher or historian, and have focused on some specific or narrow aspect of history, we ourselves can't know. We can only accept what has been written or taught as fact. And we usually do this simply because someone says it is so. But is it?
During the months I spent working on this book, many of my perceptions of the past changed. I have observed that the experts have proven that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, then cold-blooded again. Science determined that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon man lived in caves, side by side, but they did not mate. Then someone said they mated and then not mated again. Some believe that life does not exist on other planets, then it does, then it doesn't again.
Not surprisingly, there is even evidence that the past wasn't really as fixed in the past as the past is today. At one point we were absolutely assured the Sun revolved around the Earth, then just as mysteriously it no longer did.
Of course the point I am trying to make is that the past (history) is not as fixed as we would like it to be. It is probably more of a "variable." The degree of variability is determined based on just how far back we might be going from what we perceive as now, where we are currently standing from a religious, social, or political viewpoint, and what our perception is as regards time.
Let's make it more personal.
Imagine your past as beginning with the last great moment or event you experienced. For sake of argument, let's assume the event was an accident that produced some kind of pain.
One can argue that this event or moment will be pretty much fixed in time, and it probably is, at least in the way a single individual (the one experiencing the event) might perceive it. Since it is a more personalized experience, an observation that belongs only to you (the observer), it is burned into your consciousness. There it will remain, more or less fixed. At least until one departs from reality.
Does this make it any more real for the rest of us? Probably not.
Even if you wrote down your experience, there would always be someone who would argue with you about what you meant at the time you wrote it. And if you die, that really complicates matters, since you are no longer here to defend what you wrote.
A prime example of this might be the quatrains of Nostradamus. While there seems to be general agreement that he was probably making predictions, the specifics of those predictions are, and always have been, completely open to interpretation. Some people take them literally, while others read a great deal into them. Is one person right and one person wrong? It's hard to say. Proof of what he meant is usually a post hoc analysis of a specific event after it has happened. Our perceptions of these events will change over time. They change as time cooks away the individual feelings surrounding them, and replaces them with what is then considered to be "a really true or more historically accurate" understanding. Of course those truths change over time as well, as they, too, are revisited and further "cooked" beyond all recognition.
What about significant events that occurred or that were actually observed by a single person?
Most scientists believe that singular observations are useless. However, what about the person who observes an event that alters his or her life forever. Good examples would be experiencing a vision at the fountain at Lourdes, perhaps healing cancer with the laying on of hands, or yes . . . being abducted from one's bed by small gray entities at four in the morning. I think you get my drift. Why do these events always have to have less meaning than when someone has been hit by a Mack truck? Don't they have just as much impact?
What about historical observations that have been made by thousands? We are left with a perception that somehow they are more valid because so many people were present. Unfortunately, those events become even more bogged down within history. Since they do affect so many of us and we are all personally connected in some way to a specific political, social, and theological agenda, such observations become quickly enmeshed or connected with these ideals. As our political, social, or theological agendas change, so do the constructs that, for a time, drove our beliefs.
History has a way of changing right along with our idealized beliefs, or vice versa. In some cases, this history making almost seems to take on a life of its own. The point is that the past, and events within it, are constantly modifying themselves to bring support to whatever the current political, social, or religious agenda might dictate.
One has only to look at almost any war, change in tribal or country boundary, or any significant movement within a culture or theology to see where an alteration of history or the record has taken place. Everyone is familiar with the phrase "History is always written by the winners."
The further we move away from the present and into the past, the more likely changes in that history have taken place, the more likely what we think we are seeing as real, isn't. On a scale of reality, it might look something like the graphic on the next page.
In my humble opinion, the past is a chameleon that always wears a tint of the "now." It fools us into thinking it is, or always was, an absolute, when, in fact, it has never been that way.
Someone once asked me, "What about the bones we dig up? Aren't they real?" Yes they are. But what defines the past is not so much the bones, but our perception of them, the context in which we display them.