How do you change the past?   Let’s put it this way.  You cannot change the actual content of the past, but you can change everything else about it, and then that changes everything.

Consider the question, “Who won the Vietnam War?”   In 1976 it was obvious in the eyes of many that the winner of the war was communism because it managed to take over the whole country.   But then when its policies failed in some huge ways, it became one of the poorest countries on the planet. What really was going on was a struggle between a socialist society and a capitalist one.   No one really ever asked the question about what was the best combination of socialism and capitalism.   In the last 1980s Vietnam changed its socialism into a more capitalist state with freer markets and when  Pres. Clinton lifted the embargo, the plight of the country has gradually gotten better.   How could this have happened?

At some point in the mind of the communist leadership, how they looked at the past had to have changed because in the 60s capitalism was the great evil.  Somewhere between then and the late 1980s capitalism was no longer the great evil even though the historical points that lead communist leaders to accept its ideologies had not changed.  Unchecked capitalism is usually characterized by huge discrepancies between the rich and poor, something communism was trying to resolve,  but in the midst of trying to apply communism, the leadership realized leaving out individual initiative was ticket to disaster.    You can say that communists used to believe that you had to eliminate the individual from the economic picture and then you could have equity and justice.   inside the communist mind was big evil individual initiative that had to eliminated.  What happened?

At some point the size of the evil changed.  What individuals did in the name of initiative that was unjust in the past had not changed, but how they were being perceived changed.   The size of their evil changed.  It diminished in size because this is the only way that freer markets could be factored in again to the economic equation.

You can say that when the Vietnamese government changed the size of the negative in the past, it changed its future.  However,  at first it did the opposite.  When it tried to just change the future without changing the perception of the past, it became the poorest country in the world.  At first it was so  attached to individual initiative being evil that it destroyed  its own economy.  In my last post I wrote about the future is God’s business and not our own. You can imagine that if you are a philosophy that doesn’t allow God into the future, that you believe that you can control the future by increasing the size of the evil of a key component to economic success because of your own hurt, then you will drive your future right into the toilet, which is what they did.

The lesson is that you cannot make a more positive future unless and until you can change the way the past is perceived.   Visualizing a positive future without dealing with the perceptions of the past does not work, but when you are going for a new process such as more courage, the future automatically becomes much better when you deal with the way fear is being perceived in the past.

On an individual way, you can release positive energy inside yourself, by identifying the process you need such as being able to finish what you start,  then see the way the past is organized to hold you from finishing what you start.  When you can undo the structure of the past of not being able to finish, then the structure of the future can become apparent.    For instance, most people who don’t finish things well have a certain amount of procrastinating behavior around the fear of things not being really perfect, the fear of making mistakes which is fueled by dosages of constant criticism.    Inside your brain you see pictures of failure that get amplified because you believe that things have to be perfect in order to be finished.  You may also hear people criticizing you which then brings you to a standstill.

Changing the past means diminishing the size of the mistakes and imperfections and criticisms so that they don’t seem so important, which they are not.   When making a mistake is perceived as just a part of learning and criticism is just feedback to be evaluated and used or discarded,  then it is so much easier to finish whatever you start.  You cannot change the negative things people say to you in the past, but you can change how they mess with your brain.  A

When I was let go in one of my jobs a number of years ago,  I felt very hurt and held a lot of negative feelings toward those who let me go.  They were just big and evil inside of me which had a way of generalizing my mind to believing that all leaders were evil.    The effect of the hurt and the perception was that I was held back from working fully with any leaders and this greatly diminished the positive picture in my future.   If I would try to just change the picture of the future to more positive ones, then I just ended up with more bad leaders.

When I changed the structure of the hurt by changing the perception of the size of the evil of the leaders, then the future suddenly became a lot more positive and brighter.    I had seen the leaders as evil and made that evil very large, which then  stopped me from seeing the future in a positive way.  I just saw the world filled with bad leaders.    To diminish the size of the evil I changed my belief in how important the leaders are to an organization and that, in any other position, what their behavior is like, does not have a big effect on me.     Now it helps me see that every human being is essentially the same, they have positive and negative qualities,  and that the more positive that exists in the world, the better everyone is.  So in my future, I can now see that everyone is better and that provides with a huge amount of motivation in the present.