Sometimes you do things you wish you could take back. But you can’t; your actions have become part of world history. You can apologize for your actions, but you cannot undo them. You can, however, discover what caused you to act the way you did so that you don’t make that same mistake again.
Take Mimi, for example: She is desperately lonely and cannot understand why her intimate relationships always end badly. You will when you see how events unfold from the observer’s perspective:
After an argument, Mimi’s boyfriend attempts to apologize: “I’m sorry; I love you.” Mimi’s hears it as: “I’m sorry I love you,” which causes her to feel brokenhearted and abandoned. She wants him to feel the pain he caused her. She is successful and he leaves.
Mimi’s reaction results from her interpretation rather than from his statement. She is blind to her contribution to the bad outcome, because she has been taken in by the Soul Illusion [the bogus assumption that she sees things as they really are]. If she had access to your observer’s perspective she could better understand the causes of her reaction and how she could bring about better outcomes.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
— Viktor E. Frankl
If there is a domain in your life in which you repeatedly act counter to your own interests, you have a puzzle to solve. Researching the space between stimulus and response gives you the opportunity to become free of the Soul Illusion and understand yourself from both the first-person and the observer’s perspective.