Arguing with a movie that you’ve already finished watching… that’s regret. You can yell at the screen all you want, but the credits are still going to roll. 

When you awaken, you are free from regret, not because you’ve figured out a way to forgive yourself, but because you now fully understand what exactly it is that you are: only presence; you no longer know yourself as a self that exists on a timeline, a self that can be tied to a past that can be condemned or to a self in the future that can be repaired.

You simply know yourself as this timeless moment… and that’s it. What you’ve awakened to is the fact that the only thing that’s actually true about you (and will ever be true about you) is what’s happening right now- what’s showing up right now; what’s walking, talking and breathing right now. This of course, doesn’t excuse the consequences of your actions; the pasta you burned on the stove last night means you’ll still have some shopping to do today. When it comes to ultimate truth however, what you truly are never burned the pasta (unless of course you’re burning pasta right now as we speak).

Awakening takes you back to the moment just before you fell asleep- back to the moment when there was no rule book on how to exist in the world and therefore no need for time; when existing was enough all by itself.

THE ASSUMPTION OF CERTAINTY

So how did regret enter the scene to begin with?

When consciousness (you) first takes on a body, it has no idea who it is other than a body, and unfortunately, it’s more inclined to believe that its innate sense of nobody’ness is wrong- especially when it seems to be surrounded by a world full of somebodies who seem to be so certain of themselves.

In spite of appearances though, nobody is certain of themselves because everybody’s self is made up. You can’t be certain of something that’s not inherently true.

Regret only entered the scene when you unequivocally decided that you were a self, and that there was a correct version of that self; that being somebody was correct and being nobody wasn’t; that there was a right way to be in the world and a wrong way to be in the world.

THE BIRTH OF IDEALS

As soon as you determine that there’s a correct way to live, you start living from of an ideal, and yes, pushing back against that correct way to live is also an ideal.

But life doesn’t listen to your ideals, only to the energy you output in the moment. When you come from an ideal, the echo you get back reflects exactly what you put out; which is that in order to continue being who you are (who you think you are) you’re going to have to work at it, and so life will give you reasons why you have to work at it.

An ideal is a statement to life that says: “give me reasons to regret who I am and my actions so that I can fulfill the need to change into the perfect version I envision for myself.” But notice that the energy you’re putting out is not the idealized state, but the attempt to reach it.

Hence all ideals are statements to life of what you cannot have or be.

BEAUTIFUL FAILURE

Of course, ideals cannot be maintained- eventually, you start to fail, or the ideal itself no longer delivers what it promised.

Eventually, you start to fail at being you. That failure is inevitable because the truth will always want to come back to the surface. Ultimately, this is good news because on the deepest level you know that the truth is the only place where freedom is. You know that freedom is where your self stops and presence begins… where ideals end and ordinary liberated nobody’ness is revealed… again.

What relief to see ideals for what they are…

To finally see that Tom Cruise is just a man that pretends to be other men. That the president is just a man playing a sophisticated game of King of the Castle. That the Pope is just a man who has taken on the role of being more important than you. That your parents are just people who were just as clueless as you were when you first came into the world. That all authority figures in your life have their authority because you gave it to them. That in one fell swoop, in one clear moment of seeing, all personalities everywhere can crumble and that you’re no longer above or below anyone else anymore.

That there is in fact an end to this game; that you do in fact get to be free again.

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