I've heard you say.. If I could live my life again knowing what I know now, things would be much different. You probably think, your life would be better. 😏
Why this attitude? What about the present life? Is living over?
No! But you wonder that things would be better if you knew what you know now?
If there is such possibility to live life again, 6 of 10 people will not change anything at all. They are, at this very moment, the sum of all their experiences, good and bad.
To change the past would be to alter their current situation, therefore altering who they are... so they don't want that. The other 4, will change things. The list of changes is endless but mostly predictable - like marriages, schools, grades, jobs...
What do you really know now?
My mother died in the palliative care in January 2015. I was with her a month earlier and I spend considerable time in that hospital department. The palliative care is the place for dying... I read an article about the last words of the patients there.
Those patients in their last days has revealed the most common regrets they have at the end of their lives and they come in this order:
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I had let myself be happier.
Growing up old does not mean growing up by understanding
The truth is simple... but terrifying. You live with the mistaken identity. You create your own reality, but you lack the energy to understand that. You're too busy thinking how wonderful you are, how sensitive, how unique. I have a news for you... You are not unique!
One my friend said to me I made mistake saying "we are not unique". She said, each of us is unique but not special. But that the same thing.
What is "unique" in people when fear posses them to such an extent that they play with their mood, wishes and desires? Every person is a subject to such variation. Can there be any serious attitude toward anything? People are not "special", they are rather uninteresting example of automated machines.
From the background of mind you select separate thoughts with attempt to connect them into a whole and pass them off as a valuable and as your own.
You speak about everything imaginable, judge, discuss, define, evaluate but you omit to speak about your real self, about who you really are, about your real value, for you are convinced that if there is anything lacking in you, you can acquire it. The truth is far from it.
I remember, I sat by my mother’s bedside as she lay dying of liver cancer. It was a late day in the end of November 2014. The rain was knocking into the hospital window. She was restless and agitated, frustrated by being confined to the bed. I asked her if she wanted to get up and she nodded but she was incapable to do so even with my help.The question "if you could live your life again" and all these regrets dying people had are lies.
We sat in silence, side by side, for a few moments and then I began to ask her questions, just to fill the silence. “Are you hungry?” No answer. “Are you cold?" No answer. “What are you thinking about?”, she answered me - "Nothing. I don't think about anything." Quietness.
In that moment I realized, she, as a person, never existed. There is no such thing as a person. There are only hopes and regrets. The sum total of these two defines the person. It is all imagination, the person merely appears to be but it has no existence.
Cease imagining yourself to be "unique", "special", "particular". Personality comes and goes and what comes and goes has no being - existence. Get rid of wrong ideas, that is all.
Fuck the right ideas, that also will take you nowhere. Just stop imagination. Don't try to understand! Understand what? Enough if you do not misunderstand.
