Good thoughts are very important things,, and in the talk of this morning, we want to call attention to an old buddhist philosophy. Buddha told his followers most definetly, that this world is a school, not a playground. Also, we come to school to learn, and life is a process of learning. No one expects to stay in school forever, nor do they expect to remain in the same grade of a school for a very long time. Life is growth, unfoldment, and we are born into this world largely because we need growth, we need self unfoldment, we need to learn the virtues and integrities that are essential to the final destiny of all created things. Therefore, the fact that we may have certain shortcomings and make mistakes along the way, as these circuimstances should be accepted for their sole growth powers. They help us to grow. No one in the world can go from the cradle to the grave without making some mistakes, we will always do things that we may regret. We will make mistakes, we will make false decisions, we will come into violent conflicts with other people all the way along through life. Our mistakes are not the problem, is what we do about them that is the real heart and soul of the subject. Therefore, as we look back upon the occurences of a confused existence, we must not permit the mind to become associated too intimatly with regrets, with self-criticism or with any attitude which frustrates further and future growth. If we look back over our lifes, sometimes we almost wish we could have a good attack of amnesia and forget the whole thing; it might make us more comfortable at the moment, but it would leave us faced with problems we have not solved. We must not only solve the problems of our environment, we must solve the problems within ourselves, and this inner problems are sometimes the most painful of all. Let us imagine for a moment that we look back over the years of life and we pick out 3 or 4 conditions for which we were responsible (or for which we think we were responsible) and have gotten into diffuculties that simply cannot be easily erased from the memory. As long as a person has a mind and a memory it will continue to function. We must live with our memories as we live with every other circuimstance of living; therefore the problem is not “how can we forget”? But rather “how we can capitalize on the liabilities in our own past”. We have to find out what these things mean. Once we get the meaning, we then can more or less nullify the exact memory itself. We can look back upon a situation and we say “it was very difficult”, but it has brought about a deeper understanding of life, it has given us values, and these values must also be remembered; if we remember only the mistake, and do nothing to think about our own reactions to these situations, we can come extremely neurotic. There are tragedies which for many persons are greater than they can bear. There seems to be no possible hope of changing patterns that were set many years ago and which have more or less overshadowed our lives from that time on. To work with this we must to a sense atleast become religion-oriented, philosophy-oriented and psychology-oriented. We have to begin the process of untangleing the circuimstances which have hurt and offended us. One of the ways in which some psychologists operate is to make us continuely think about these problems until we can no longer energize them, but this process is sometimes attended by unusual dangers; it is much better to approach our own past in a more or less scientific manner, and try to discovers ways of working through a situation. Going back to when it occurred, for example, we should estimate ourselves: 15, 20, 50 years after we have made the mistake we are no longer the same person. Life has changed us. Life has brought us new enlightenments, new oppurtunities, new relationships, and therefore we are today a new person. The person who made the mistake is no longer alive. The person who made the mistake has gradually been transformed into a better person, if we were not better persons, we would not regret the mistake. Having found that we are now a new person, we can begin to understand what we were when the incident occurred. We must not isolate the circuimstance itself. We must not take the attitude that today we would make the same mistake we would make then. The fact that we regret, that we wish that we could change the situation, proves that we have grown, and from the position of a new growth, we ought to be able to understand the person of long ago who did not have that growth. Thus we have not take our present condition and say that is how we should have acted many years previously. We are new people, we have new insights, we have better understanding, therefore we must consider for a moment the understanding that existed when we made the mistake. we have to realize the circuimstances in our own thinking and our own emotions; very often the mistakes that we regret were made in our younger years. Most of the mistakes that have come to me

for a solution have occurred in lives before they have reached their thirtieth year; perhaps an early broken home, perhaps a failure of moral insentives and directives, way back when we were young. We must judge then the entire problem in a view of what we were when it happened; if we were unexperienced, if we were without proper guidance at that time, if we were brought up in an environment which was adverse to our best interest, we have to realize that these were the factors and circuimstances that made the mistake. We were just not as grown up as we have become since, but we weight the possibility of putting ourselves back to that other time; we must not include the decisions we would make today. We must not expect that we had the ability to make decisions that we can make now after perhaps half a life time of careful thinking and new oppurtunities for learning and self anlysis. So begin by seeing how responsible you were at the time you made the mistake; if at that time you were young, you were without much strenght of background, you were living in a world in which mistakes are the order of the day, and therefore begin to analyze the problems that you faced then in the light of what you were then instead of what you are now. Also, think carefully as to the gradual consequences of the incidents themselves; did this mistake help you to grow up? Were you a stronger person after you made this mistake? Did you learn something you have never forgotten that was useful? Have you dedicated yourself to making no more actions of that kind or quality? Are you now able to sit down and look at yourself as a seperate person from the person who was then in a condition, situation, crisis, emergency, for which you were not equipred? Also, what has the mistake done to you, or what have you done to the mistake? If you have gotten into a difficulty many years ago, you must realize that this difficulty is now no longer a vital reality. In many instances the very circuimstances you regret most, are no longer regretted by anyone else except yourself. The circuimstances in all these lives have changed, and therefore the main regret lies in the memory, in the record in your own nature; a record of guilt, a record of deceit, a record of violence. Anyone of these in many other situations live on only in you. You may however also be faced with another circuimstance; looking back you may realize that the mistake you make damaged innocent people. This is always one of the most difficult things to face, but the damage was done, and you do not know for certain but that those persons so damaged also received an important lesson, for which they years in growing up to. The mistakes that we make, therefore, have to be regarded as part of an unfolding growth pattern.