MODIFYING THE PAST

Modern psychology has demonstrated the existence of a great undercurrent of mental and emotional life, transcending the individual’s conscious experience, in which the most complex processes are carried on without the individual’s conscious participation.  The clearest symbol by which this fact may be figured to the imagination is the one already presented:  the comparison of the subjective field to a plane, in which the conscious experience of the individual is represented by a single line.  In sleep and trance we have an augmented freedom of movement and so are able to travel here and there, backward and forward, not only among our own “disassociated memories” but in that greater and more mysterious demesne which comprehends what we call the future, as well as the present and the past.

The profound significance of the disassociation and sublimation of memory by hypnotism, or by whatever other means the train of personal experience and recollection can be thrown off the track, appears to have been ignored on its theoretical side—­that is, as establishing the return of time.  It has cleverly been turned to practical account, however, in the treatment of disease.  By a series of painstaking and brilliant experiments, the demonstration of the role played by “disassociated memories” in causing certain functional nervous and mental troubles has been achieved.  It has been shown that severe emotional shocks, frights, griefs, worries, may be—­and frequently are—­completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious.  It has been shown that thence they may, and frequently do, exercise a baleful effect upon the whole organism, giving rise to disease symptoms, the particular type of which were determined by the victim’s self-suggestion.  As a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure to such disorders, it is necessary to get at these disassociated memories and drag them back into the full light of conscious recollection.  To get at them, medical psychologists make use of hypnotism, automatic writing, crystal-gazing—­in short, of any method which will force an entrance into that higher time-world, whereby the forgotten past may become the present.  This accomplished, and the crucial moment recovered and transfixed, the victim of the aborted opportunity is led to deal with it as one may deal with the fluid, and may not deal with the fixed.  Again his past is plastic to the operation of his intelligence and his will.  Here is glad news for mortals:  the past recoverable and in a manner revocable!

Buddha taught that all sin is ignorance, and this teaching has escaped oblivion because its truth has echoed in so many human hearts.  We find that it is possible to deal with our old ignorances in the light of later knowledge.  What is this but the self-forgiveness of sins?  Subconsciously we may be always at work, mending the past.  Repentance is the conscious recognition of some culmination of this obscure process, when the heart is suffused with the inner gladness of liberation from the payment of old karmic debts.  Christ’s words, “Thy sins are forgiven,” spoken to the woman who washed his feet with her tears, sanctions this idea—­that the past is remediable by knowledge and by love.