End Suffering on Regret

by Moe Janosec

     How many times have you heard a song lyric to the effect of “If I had just known what to say”? Or read something similar in a book? Or heard it from other people? I’ve personally experienced this many times. That is regret. And since these impressions often get past our inner spiritual sentry, we believe they are our own thoughts. They then proceed to tyrannize us. Regret is yet another negativity that we must work to banish from our psychic system, despite it seeming to be a perfectly acceptable state in our current society.
     Alternately the thought may arise, “I really wish I wouldn’t have said that!” That’s regret too, of course. The more closely we look at regret, the more we realize it takes us away from being alert and aware in the here and now. Truth is trying to give us a higher nature that is never intimidated or tormented by any exterior circumstance or situation, any memory or expectation for the future. But I must be psychologically “home” to receive the benefits of this new nature.
     Vernon Howard gave a classic example of regretting the fact that we didn’t buy that piece of property when we had the chance way back when. Now it’s worth several times the amount of money it was then, and we could sell it and be on easy street. But unless I work very hard with higher, truthful principles I will remain an undeveloped, pained human being — whether physically living on easy street or sweeping out the barn to earn my daily keep.
     The dictionary tells us that regret is: “sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond one’s control or power to repair.” It says nothing about the possibility of rising above the circumstances. That is exactly what Truth is trying to get each of us to remember and to work toward.
     To be content right now includes not missing or being sorrowful over anything in the past, or anything our mind might conjure up that may happen in the future. Regret is simply a wrong internal move that I’ve given in to and gone along with. To cut it off and to return to being aware right now is striking another blow against wrongness and taking another step upward toward truly taking my own life back.
     Regret and associated dark states are much more common to us than we realize. Not long ago I found myself thinking, “Boy, it’d be nice if I could still get a good steak with all the fixin’s for twenty bucks like I used to!” It’s absurd that a person would bemoan the fact he cannot turn back time twenty years and enjoy the small pleasures that he did then. We’re here now to learn and to grow, and we can experience a life without confinement or limits if we voluntarily let go of these lower, destructive states. It all depends on my daily decisions to go against my lower human nature.
     Society is not constructed or controlled by forces that wish to help us. Higher truth principles are absolute anathema to them. The evidence of this is everywhere. And yet Truth remains ready and willing to give an individual the help he or she needs at any given moment. The more we realize this, the more rightly excited we become. And then Truth itself will help us to know what to say, when to say it, and when to say nothing at all.