Have you ever noticed that you get rid of one person in your life, and you get somebody just like it? But you didn't get somebody just like it. You got you again! That's the lesson, isn't it? You should be so tired of pointing your finger at other people.
So, then what happens? Here I am, fighting with my past, revisiting and revisiting how I was abused, or somebody broke my heart -- trying to get over what happened. And I fight, and I fight, and I fight to get the condition to go right until, at some point, I realize I'm fighting with the wrong thing. I'm trying to make, in my own heart and mind, a reconciliation from a set of conditions that I believed I was apart from.
Then (by grace), I realize, "Ah, no wonder I can't get the condition to go right! I am the condition, and I've refused to accept it. I've refused to see how I am entwined in all of the things that trouble me the way they do." Suddenly I see that what needs to happen here is that I don't need to fix this. I need to be another kind of human being -- one who doesn't carry forward the thing that attracted the situation to me and then brings it back again and again. I understand now that what I resist reincarnates.
Believe it or not, there is a part of us that loves resisting because it confirms some order of ourselves that exists to continue that cycle of recalling what we hate or regret. Which means, to make sure you keep getting what you don't want -- just resist it. It's all you have to do! It's guaranteed.
Our work as an aspirant is to see through the nature that produces the cycle of recurrence by becoming aware that the reason we're in some dark place psychologically is because we are asleep in our own consciousness. And if we could just become aware of the whole of ourselves in that moment, we would not be made the suffering subject of a mind that has divided itself between where it is and whatever darkness it's going through.
So, when I come out of the darkness having learned the lesson because a light showed me the whole of the situation -- that I was inextricably woven into whatever my woe was -- then do I not exit that moment a new order of man or woman? Something is integrated in me. Formerly, something was certain that you, this, or them was the problem. But now I can see that wherever I go, there's the problem!
When we do come awake in such a moment, we actually have not changed the situation that pained us, but we have changed the way in which we see the situation because we have a new understanding about ourselves. Finally, we know that our insistence to keep reliving some pain doesn't change anything. Instead, it makes concrete out of the situation.
So, when you feel pain because you're thinking about someone who hurt you, understand that you are hurting yourself. Your mind is using the object of the image of that person to validate victimizing you. This is the moment it can dawn on us that, "I just spent 40 years on a dark road, fighting with somebody who's not even alive anymore, and I didn't have to do it!" We see, by another order of understanding, our former understanding.