Now try to see the impact of your self upon the circumstances. How your decisions altered the circumstances, or affected them, determined them. Perhaps you made a mistake, at least now you see that it was a mistake, at the time you didn’t. And it had very bad consequences. Perhaps you damaged someone, damaged yourself, lost an opportunity. And see how one decision could have affected your life irretrievably, irrevocably. And so the ultimate way of formulating this is: “If I had been then what I am now, this would not have happened.”

So you see that when you are considering, when you are meditating, if you are just considering your problems without being aware of the impact of your being on the problems then you are making a false assessment of the problems. And the danger is that you’ll carry this false assessment of the problems throughout your life. Just image that we were so convinced of it and it was a basic mistake. And we based our whole life, planned our whole life upon a false assumption. Very serious.