Can The Past be changed?

Obviously Not!

But is an interesting matter to speculate why it has been claimed so often through history that The Past is not fixed, can be changed. It is presented as a deep, sophisticated, spiritual kind of thing to say.

It is easy to say, to assert, to say the words that The Past can - even should - be changed - and this may itself slip past our error detectors. Partly because it is so outrageous that we assume we are missing-something; partly because there is often a confusion between The Past and our memories; and of course memories can be mistaken, can changed, can disappear.  So (it goes) if memories change, then why not The Past as well?


Then again there may be - perhaps indeed ought to be - powerful negative feelings such as shame or guilt in people about aspects of The Past. It is psychologically understandable that someone would want to escape from these negative feelings by undoing the past acts that led to them. "I wish I had not done that" literalised into "It never happened".

There is also a strain of yearning or manipulation among humans that wants life to be a matter of indifference - that wants to be able to say that neither what we choose, nor what we do, Matters. This 'liberation' strain is currently very powerful - although perhaps it reached its peak of intensity in the late 1960s; with an explicit doctrine of Anything Goes.

The idea was that there were no mistakes, no sins; and everything will always work out for the best - in the end. This is, in its crude way, asserting that the enlightened Man (the Good Man) lives outside of the petty changes of this-life, lives indeed outside of Time; sees past-present-future as one. It - by-the-way - eludes all personal responsibility by asserting that there is no such thing.

So, the idea that The Past can be changed is part of a complex of ideas that - in a nutshell - eliminate the significance of this mortal life: This life.

...Anything and Everything can be changed or eliminated, therefore nothing has any significance - one consequence of which is that 'I' can do whatever I happen to want to do, because 'ultimately' it doesn't matter.


The price of this licence of hedonism/ selfishness/ short-termism is meaninglessness and purposelessness - we can do anything we like, but nothing matters (because nothing matters).

Nothing we ever experience will ever stand. Anything might/ can/ will/ should be eliminated - at some point. We eliminate the weight of mortal life, at the cost of eliminating all possibility of any kind of significant life. 

We eliminate any possibility of decline or corruption, by ensuring that there can be no progression of any kind.

When The Past can be changed, the individual self goes too - since you or I may be fundamentally changed or unmade - we may be made such that we Never Were...

It is indeed a terrible, demonic doctrine - to say that The Past can be changed!