LOOK FORWARD!
The tendency with many people after they are a little ‘advanced in years’ is to look backward and with regret. The ‘looking’ should be the other way – forward. If you want to go backward in every sense, mental and physical, keep on cultivating the mood of living regretfully in your past life.
It is one chief characteristic of the material mind to hold tenaciously to the past. It likes to recall the past and mourn over it. The material mind has a never-ending series of solemn amusement, in recalling past joys, and feeling sad because they are never to come again.
But the real self, the spirit, cares relatively little for its past. it courts change. It expects to be a different individual in thought a year hence from that it is today. It is willing a thousand years hence to forget who or what it is today, for it knows that this intense desire to remember itself for what it has been retards its advance toward greater power and greater pleasure. What care you for what you were a thousand or five thousand years ago? Yet then you were something, and something far less than what you are today. You are curious, you may answer, to know what you were. Yes, but is curiosity worth gratifying, if for such gratification you must pay the price of dragging after you a hundred corpses of your dead selves. Those selves, those existences, have done their work for you. In doing that work they brought you possibly more pain than pleasure. Do you want ever to bear with you the memory and burden of that pain? Especially when such burden brings more pain and deprives you of pleasure. It is like the bird that should insist on carrying with it always the shell from which it was hatched. If you have a sad remembrance, fling it off. If you can’t fling it off, ask humbly of the Supreme Power aid to help you do so, and such aid will come. If you want to grow old, feeble, grey and withered, go at once and live in your past, and regret your youth. Go and revisit places and houses where you lived twenty, thirty, forty years ago; call back the dead; mourn over them; live in remembrance over the joys you had there, and say they are gone and fled and will never come again.
In so doing, you are fastening dead selves all over you. If we came into another physical life with the memory of the last one, we should come into the world physically as miniature, decrepit, grizzled old men and women. Youth physically is fresh and blooming, because
