(This is the third in a series of commentaries on Happiness, and How To Find It.)
In our last commentary here we pointed to the fact that life gives all of us the opportunity to heal an old injury, to close an old wound, to alter an old pattern, to shift an old reality, to release an old story, to change an old idea, and to create a new experience of Self. In other words, to be transformed. And thus, to be happy in and with our lives. Finally. And not just for a moment here or there, but until the end of our days.
Okay. That’s saying a lot. And you might now ask, “How is all this possible? How can all that healing and change occur?”
To see this clearly you must observe, with Gratitude. Life’s most wonderful gift: Reliable Repetition
To explain: You can depend on Life to be repetitious. Very few events or situations arising in your life will be much of a surprise to you anymore. Not in the sense of your never having experienced anything like them before. How you are going to react, then, can actually be anticipated by you, and you can reject your prior decisions about such events or situations if you wish.
And that is Life’s great secret. The greatest secret is not the Law of Attraction, but the Law of RE-traction.
This is a tool used to retract old decisions and make new ones, instantly. That is what true creation is all about.
When you bear witness to your responses to Life’s current events and immediately retract what you decided in the past about similar events, you give yourself almost unimaginable power—including the power to end struggle and suffering forever.
Buddha demonstrated this precisely, and taught it.
It is Gratitude that gives you this power. Gratitude gives you a Fresh Start. It is like being born again, and having the Mind re-set to zero. It wipes the slate clean of all prior negative judgments that you may have held about any person, event, circumstance or situation.
At the risk of a little Repetition right here, let’s review from a slightly different angle how the whole Process of Life works, so that you can see all of this even more clearly:
Within an astonishingly short period of time following your birth, you came into contact with—then analyzed, assembled, and stored—a monumental amount of data about your exterior world. You did this so efficiently that after only a few years on this planet, it became almost impossible for you to encounter any new experiences. New events, yes. New experiences, no.
This is by design.
You are not supposed to encounter new experiences. You are supposed to encounter the same experiences over and over again.
The experiences you are encountering repeatedly are inside of you, not outside of you. All experience is interior. It is events that are exterior. But events have nothing to do with your experience. The proof of this is the fact that two people can have distinctly different experiences of the exact same event.
So we see that you can encounter any number of new exterior events, but one can have virtually no truly new experiences. And the older you become, the more this will be obvious to you. Indeed, this truth will evidence itself exponentially as each year goes by.
You have already experienced this.
You have already experienced love, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced animosity, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced commitment, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced betrayal, and you will no doubt experience it again.
You have already experienced disappointment and excitement, agony and ecstasy, frustration and exhilaration, exasperation and exaltation, anger and joy, agitation and peace, loss and gain, fear and fearlessness, cowardice and courage, ignorance and wisdom, blah’s and bliss, confusion and clarity, and just about every other emotional polarity that one could describe or imagine.
The reason it was said that all experience is interior is that emotion is the sponsor of your experience, and all emotions are created within. Events are simply outer physical occurrences. It is the emotion you hold about a particular event that creates your experience of it. And there are no new emotions for you to experience at this stage of your life. There is an endless number of unique events which can and will be physically presented to you by Life, but the emotion generated by the event, and the interior experience that this emotion produces, will be one which you have encountered before. In most cases, many times before.
The Mind remembers its experiences. Every one of them.
Every.
Single.
One.
Of.
Them.
And now we see the reason for this.
Your Mind has been designed to hold in memory literally millions of experiences in order for you to notice that you are encountering conditions and events in your exterior world that are the same or nearly the same in their emotional content as you have encountered before.
The noticing of this is, in turn, intended to offer you repeated chances—literally millions of chances—to respond differently to conditions and events (both past and present) should you choose to, thereby recreating yourself anew in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.
We see, then, that a single Life offers in miniature what reincarnation offers in “maximature”: limitless opportunities to evolve.
This is the Process of Life in all its forms.
Scientists tell us that even the Universe is evolving. Do you imagine that you are not?
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