I’m going to answer a question Viviane posted a couple of days ago. She wrote:
I just did my first trial of exercise #15, revising my memories, and instead of reaching any connection between past and present that could make them intaract more, I felt a strange feeling that my linear past is too much in my present. Not as a reference and construction of present but as a constrain of freedom to be. It is like a persistent line of ideas grasping my moves/ideas/opinions… even when I am trying to make different, to be fresh, this conceptual line of perspective is there in some forceful way.
And it reminded me of a situation that happened to me some months ago, when I was meditating… Without any reason I remembered a situation I had lived many years ago, which was too strong for me. But the scene came different from the one I have being repeatedly had as the memory… It was as another perspective, one I had never thought about, as filming from another direction the same situation, with the same actors…and it was quite clear to me I could access different views and feelings related to that situation seeing it from this diverse angle.
My question is: Could I had opened the “filter” of my memory of this situation when it came to me from another point of view I had never thought about, although I had talked much about this situation, even in terapy? Would it be a way to experience my past moment, free of some ideas, memories and pre-concepts attached to the memory of the moment? Or would it be another construction of memory?
It sounds to me as though perhaps you did Exercise 13 instead of Exercise 15. But as to this sense of “the linear past being too much present,” I wonder what that felt like for you. In my practice of being aware of the past, it has a certain weight to it. Was it something like that?
Yes, I think you could experience a past moment from a new perspective. But to do this, time can’t be linear. It has to have many dimensions. Look at the diagram in LOK Ex. 16 to get a sense of this.
More than that, to gain a new perspective that is not just another construction, you have to live the experience and then re-live it. In other words, the new perspective has to be a lived story and not just a told story.
Jack
Dear Jack,
Thank you very much for the reply! I am afraid I can not attend next online class today, and I will check the exercise 13.
But I’d like to correct what I think I did not communicate right: when I said I felt my linear past as present, I mean that it was like the sequence of events of this situation I dated in the past I started to feel as happening in the present, like realities in a dream. And it was not remembering the situation as told, but bringing strong feelings…this new perspective I could see it now, led me to feel things I was not aware of before, may be because it was too strong to face it by that time…and it took me some time to digest the sensations and conditions I contact by this new perspective…This experience has certainly changed something inside me, as including contact with feelings from this situation that, probably, I could not deal with by that time I was very young.