HJ: We often do not realize that we are caught up in thinking about the past. Until we begin practicing mindfulness regularly and get a handle on our thoughts, we typically operate somewhat unconsciously. Furthermore, we view the past in the context of the beliefs we have about ourselves. For instance, if we believe we are inferior in any way we will unconsciously direct our minds to focus on those past memories which confirm that belief and so we will use the past to reinforce our perceived inadequacy, thereby perpetuating this perception indefinitely until we become conscious of the process I am speaking of here. Consequently, in those areas in which we have expansive, empowering beliefs about ourselves, these will also cause us to recall those memories which support that set of beliefs and perceptions.
In this way, our past can either hold us back or propel us forward. For most people it is some combination of the two. However, for those looking to reach their full potential in life, it is necessary to uncover those areas in which our beliefs and perceptions of the past are still holding us back. This is what is meant by releasing the past. It is a powerful process of catharsis which frees you to access your highest potential and conscious expression of your true self.
This excellent article by Paramahamsa Nithyananda will help you to begin the process and release yourself once and for all from the chains of the past. Always remember: the present moment is the true point of power.
– Truth
Change Your Past to Shape Your Future!
By Paramahamsa Nithyananda | Nithyananda Times
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By nature, God built you with integrity. Your built-in, natural nature is integrity. That is why when you are in integrity, you feel so full, so complete. Life starts with integrity, authenticity, taking responsibility and enriching yourself and others. Integrity is you fulfilling the word and thoughts you give to yourself and to others and experiencing a state of poornatva (completion) with yourself and with life. Authenticity is you being established in the peak of your capability and responding to life from who you perceive yourself to be for your own self (mamakara), who you project yourself to be for others (ahamkara), and what others expect you to be for them (anyakara). Your mamakara, ahamkara and anykara need to be aligned. Responsibility is living and responding to life from the truth that you are the source of, and therefore, you are responsible for all happenings in and around you. Only in the space of responsibility life flowers in you. Enriching means constantly enriching you and others. Enriching is continuously infusing all these three tattvas in your life and others’ life.
When you start being integrated, so much of your inner space is available to you. This naturally brings authenticity in you and makes you take responsibility and continue to enrich yourself and others.
The first sign of non integrity will be that you will feel everything is impossible. Just like for each disease there are symptoms such as knee pain, fainting, headaches, and so on, if you are feeling that everything is impossible in your life, you have a lack of integrity, it is the symptom. You need to sit and complete with yourself.
Change your Past to Change your Future
Before changing your future, change your past. Immediately, the question arises, ‘How can my past be changed? It has already happened.’ Every idea you carry about your past is wrong. You do not remember your past as it happened, you carry an edited version of your past with you. People usually say, ‘Don’t bother about the past, change your future.’ No! I am saying, don’t bother about your future, change your past! The hangover you carry from the past is the disease you are suffering with. You are not going to be out of the disease until you complete with your past. The load of the past will not even allow you to make any decisions, leave alone execution. Making whatever you think as ‘impossible’ as possible is integrity. Why will anything not be possible? The word ‘impossible’ cannot even exist in your conscious constitution.
This sangha (Community) is the biggest miracle I have demonstrated. Built in such a short span of time, inspite of so much beating. If I am possible, nothing is impossible! We just need to carry the past without the load, the inner space of possibility. I am not teaching you positive thinking, that is the biggest negative thinking that can happen to you! All your positive thinking is like a comedian laughing at you, it is not a hero doing great things. When a lion goes into a forest, he doesn’t declare he is the king, everybody knows he is the king. When integrity starts happening in you, you don’t declare you are positive, you just make everyone experience you are positivity. Positivity is nothing but the absence of the load of past negativity. Then you just flow in positivity, you just flow in completion.
There is no such thing as practicality. Practicality is the most impractical thing in the world. The idea of practicality is nothing but suicidal because it is coming from the past. Any human being has authenticity and inauthenticity both. When you live in authenticity, you will bring the response of authenticity from the other person also. Make it very clear to yourself, you are the source. Success or failure is decided by you inside. Continuously listen to your inner being. Continuously do completions with yourself and others. Feeling powerful inside will make everything a success for you. Feeling powerless inside, nothing will be success for you. When you are feeling powerful, failure doesn’t even enter your breathing space.
What do You Really Believe About You?
When you start thinking with integrity, you will know your strong beliefs. One of the biggest problems human beings have – you love to be successful, but you deeply believe you are a failure! This is one of the biggest paradox with which human beings are suffering. It shows the lack of integrity in your thinking. Understand, some of your actions may be failure, some of your decisions or dimensions may be a failure, but YOU are never a failure – because you are still breathing!
When you have not lost the inspiration to take the responsibility for your life, nothing is lost. If you take the responsibility, even death cannot come near you. With integrity and authenticity, when you take responsibility, the consciousness growing in the body starts happening more intensely. Whether it is to do with health, or creativity, or solving relationship problems, creating wealth or achieving the inner fulfillment, let your every decision be out of authenticity and enriching; not out of anything else – not out of fear or greed.
Stop your self-fulfilling negative prophecies! When you start living in integrity, you will diagnose the self-fulfilling negative prophecies you constantly give to yourself. Each one of you is your own negative astrologer. First you give yourself the self-fulfilling negative prophecy – I am a failure. Then you train yourself for that! First you are an astrologer who predicts that you are a failure, then you are a trainer who trains you to be a failure. If it still does not happen, you behave like a judge and declare that you are a failure! When you are about to get into the car itself, you declare you will have an accident. Then when you drive, you will continuously sleep, and even after that when only a small accident happens, you just hit one corner of the road, nothing happens to you or the car, still you say ‘I told you that accident will happen! See what happened?’
Declare your integrity, not your failure. The power of integrity will teach you to diagnose your self-fulfilling negative prophecies. Sometimes you take up failure as the self-sympathy creating mechanism to justify your failure. You think that for success you have to work, but failure happens naturally! How many of you think you have to work hard for success, but failure comes naturally? Bring integrity; you will understand success is the natural flow of your life. For failure you have to work very hard!
You are Programmed to be Successful
Krishna says very beautifully – by their nature, our senses are tuned for the outer world – means, they are tuned to be active, alive and creating. Extrovert does not mean it is negative. Extrovert senses will always be alive, creative, active, contributing. All great creative persons took responsibility for their extrovert senses. Senses are extrovert, they flow naturally. By nature, they flow towards for achieving. You are programmed by nature to be successful! The natural programming of you is to be successful. But lack of integrity allows the poison of self-fulfilling negative prophecies to grow in your system. The first thing a human being needs to do is weed out all the self-fulfilling negative prophecies he carries in him.
Ramakrishna gives a very beautiful example: how much ever water you bring into your paddy field, if there are too many frog holes, rat holes, all the water will go and settle there. You will not have water for growing the paddy. The frog holes, rat holes, snake holes are the negative self-fulfilling prophecies! All the energy you bring, all the Kundalini energy (latent yogic energy) I pour into you, just goes and settles there. Finally – no water. Neither paddy nor Ganga water can flow, because all 24 hours you are weighed, loaded with negative self-fulfilling prophecies. First thing a human being needs to know is how to weed out the negative self-fulfilling prophecies.
Your Integrity Can Remove Your Negativity
Self-fulfilling negative prophecies are the chains tied to your legs; they are the weight on your inner space. Integrity is the only way you can even find those negative self-fulfilling prophecies and weed them out. If you start looking, naturally you will not give your negative self-fulfilling prophecies any more life. Even for ten days, if you look at your negative self-fulfilling prophecies with awareness, they will die. Understand – even if you had negative self-fulfilling prophecies for 1000 years, if you do not encourage them for just ten days, they will die. Even if the tree has grown for 1000 years, it takes just a few minutes to die if you pour acid. Integrity is the acid that can destroy the weeds of negative self-fulfilling prophecies in you.
Just thinking with integrity removes the weeds of negativity. You do not need courage to fight negativity, you just need the awareness to remove negativity. If you think you need courage, you are caught in the wrong fight! If you think you need to fight your negativity, it is like bringing an atom bomb to fight with your own shadow. If you put an atom bomb, who is going to die? You are also going to die. NO! You just need a torch to fight with your shadow! You just need the torch of integrity to remove the negativity.
Completion Removes Negativity
Every time, the moment you have a strong idea or belief that what you are doing is going to be a failure, just remember that your belief is a commitment and word that you are giving to you. When you give a commitment, knowingly or unknowingly you will fulfill it. So, if you give that word, naturally you have to fulfill it! Do you want to fulfill that word? No. Then tell yourself – ‘I am not going to fulfill it. I am going to have the cognition of fulfillment, not failure.’ Consciously disown and complete with it.
If it comes back, do that again. Complete with it again and again. How many times will it come back? Practice it. Even your belief is not required. Your cognizance is only what is required. Even if you have cognized this theoretically, it is enough. Now apply this mechanical process, then come back to me with the result. It is a homework for you. For 48 hours, practice this cognizance.
Completing all the incompletions is the basic step in life. For whatever hurts you are carrying inside, reach out to the person involved and complete with him/her. If you are not able to reach out to that person, atleast sit in front of a mirror, invoke that person’s presence and complete. Unless poornatva (completion) happens, nothing can be done. Life does not start.
Integrity removes the self fulfilling negative prophecies in your life, in your cognizance, in your inner space! When you start something, if you just decide to remove the negative cognizance, suddenly you will have the courage to grasp the whole scene of the action you are going to get into. Integrity will simply remove the negative cognizance from your inner space.
A.J.
June 3, 2013
Hello. I loved this article. I thought it was well written. I have just one issue: I’m still not understanding how to achieve integrity with myself. For me, I constantly look at the areas in which I lack and I don’t know how to stop doing that. The integrity piece sounds awesome, but I just don’t know how to get there.