Well, first of all I’d like you to just, you know, close your eyes and try to recollect events in your life. There’s no way of remembering everything, but you will recollect the more traumatic events in your life. And if you can do that in a kind of chronological sequence, of course, it would be best.

And so you will be reliving how you were when you were a child. I can even remember when I was two years old. Or even before that—one year old, actually. And then, just remember the perspective that you had with your parents. And the circumstances. You were just awakening to the world. You went to school and there were tiffs with the school children, and all that.

You remember. All your impressions. You became a teenager, and the problems that arose, and then, oh the whole thing, your first love, your failing of an examination, or the opposite, of course, being successful, and the way that your self-esteem has gone through ups and downs. Your judgement about people, people are mean or people are nice and supportive.

And tacit assumptions like. “This is my fate” or “Why is God so unkind to me?” Or whatever. Somehow one is always putting the blame on God, or one’s destiny and fate. Then moments of rejoicing and celebration, so on. Go through all of that.

So for the moment we’re doing two things. We’re considering the circumstances, trying to recollect the circumstances and also we’re trying to see how we have evolved as a person in our interfacing with the circumstances.

So now, the whole purpose of this practice is now first of all to see the impact the circumstances had on the unfoldment of your being. Like there was an accident and from that time you became more cautious. Or somebody let you down and from that time you were less trusting, more perspicacious. Or somebody humiliated you and your self-esteem was impaired. And you didn’t know how to face the person who kept on demeaning you and oppressing you. And so on.

I’m just quoting a few situations. There are many more in which you see how your personality has been pummelled by the circumstances and also enriched by the circumstances. Defiled by the temptations and inspired by everything in life that was delightful, whether it be music, wonderful people, cathedrals, nature, and so on. Wonderful things. Heros, myths, the marvelous teachers. So that is the impact of the circumstances upon your self.