New Understanding to Outgrow Your Regrets
Talk summary: In this powerful podcast, Guy Finley points the way to a completely new understanding about your own mind that can forever free you from the painful sting of past regrets.
Talk notes: The purpose of true spiritual study is to begin a very slow and steady process by which the human mind that is willing to be educated is brought into the presence of new understanding. This new understanding is not something that you can give to yourself, but it must start with certain ideas that are intended to come between you and your present suffering. Presently our suffering feeds on itself, fuels itself, and then starts itself again. It leads nowhere except through the same old cycle through which we become more and more convinced that this suffering is necessary and inevitable.
We must begin to invite in and act from a new understanding that comes between ourselves and the certainty that our present suffering is valid. And one common form of suffering that we are convinced is necessary is regret. Almost all of us have regrets of one kind or another. But can you have a regret about something that is taking place in the present moment? All forms of regret are intimately connected to something that took place in the past that was (and is) not wanted. A regret forms when the mind revisits something that took place in the past and at that very same instant that same mind rejects what it has revisited.
The sleeping, spiritually unconscious mind loves to revisit and embrace images and past experiences that it then says it does not want. When it comes to regret, as with all negative states, "the feel is real, but the why is a lie." The real pain of regret is not over the event that the mind revisits. The real pain of regret is in the divided mind resisting itself without knowing that it is doing so. The pain of regret gets greater the more that you don't want what happened to you. The pain is produced by the sleeping mind that is revisiting and rejecting its own imagined state. If you're finally tired enough of being the servant of your own mind, the then bring your attention back into the present moment in which you can see the very nature that is producing the negativity. Bring yourself back into the present over and over again. You cannot act against yourself when you see what is actually taking place within yourself.
