The-Touch:-Sample-Chapter-Five
Chapter Five – Our Relationship with the Past
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” ~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
We spend a great deal of our lives working to hold on to the past—even when we say we’ve freed ourselves from its confines. It’s something of an endless American pastime to brag to friends, “I’ve done so much better than my father. He settled for three bedrooms. I’ve got five.” Or, “Mom never got out of high school, yet here I am, a doctoral candidate.”
The boast is a sham, though, a mirage covering over the tight grip the past maintains on us. The illusion that we have escaped our pasts belongs to youth, when we are full of strut, posture, and hormones, launching heat-seeking sex missiles of in all directions. Then, as we start to age, we look at ourselves and begin to realize that we are in fact acting out of our parents’ stuff. One day, usually in our thirties or forties, we look into the mirror or say something and suddenly we realize we’re looking into the face of our father or listening aloud to our mother’s voice. That’s the past popping up from the unconscious to laugh at our ineffectual efforts to be free.
In the course of journeying through my process, I have discovered that the past is nothing more than my attachment to ego. The more attached I am to my past, the more I am centered in my ego. What we call the past is our relationship the way we conceptualize ourselves through childhood wounds. That holds true for all of us. Nobody has ever had a perfect past; not even Jesus or Buddha an ideal home with equally ideal parents and teachers. We all must deal, to one degree or another, with the wounds our upbringing left. But most of us go at it all wrong.
There is an old story about a man who had spent his life searching for the perfect woman yet remained a bachelor. As he lay dying in his seventies, a friend came and said, “What is the one great desire in life you never satisfied?” The dying man answered, “To get married.”
The friend said, “All that searching you did. I’m amazed you couldn’t find the perfect woman.” “Well, I did find her,” the old man said, wistfully. “She was truly perfect.” “So why didn’t you marry her?” the friend asked. The old man sighed. “Because she was looking for the perfect man.”
Like so many of us, the old man was seeking something perfect to compensate for his own feelings of imperfection. He wanted to use the present to balance out the pain of the past. Of course, such perfection can never exist, and as long as we keep looking for it, we are going to be miserable.
A few days ago on my way to work, I had the radio tuned to one of those ubiquitous talk shows. The topic of the day was fat people, or rather a specific kind of obese adult, the one who grew up without adequate care and love and who puts on a tremendous amount of weight later in life. According to the talk show host, scientists researching this pattern are uncertain of the cause, but it strikes me as obvious. The child who was uncared for feels a great lack within, an empty void, that he or he she attempts to fill with food.
In some way or another we all do the same thing. There is a hole in there somewhere we are trying to fill, a wound from the past we struggle to conceal in the present. This is why the past, and our relationship to it, is important to spiritual process. To find the Love of our lives, we need to understand what the past was, what it counts for now, and how we can deal with it. The past counts for much more than what we like or like to think. It goes much deeper than that, and it always comes back to simplicity.
