Excerpts - Did I do the right thing?  (from tape #28  other side)

“What about wanting to be right?”

Dr. Bob says, “Ok, how about asking--Am I doing the right thing?”

So there are some questions we torment ourselves and continue to disintegrate the body with as we resist and struggle.  We’ll try them all.

“Did I do the right thing when I ______ ? ”--whatever it is?”

You know you can really torment yourself with that one.

Am I doing the right thing by ______________?

Will I be doing the right thing by _________?

Did I do the right thing when I __________?

Will I be doing the right thing if I do _______?

These are called unanswerable questions.  The human mind is so constructed that once you put a question to it, the mind works with that question until it achieves an answer or sees that the question is improperly put.  You’re trying to make the brain into a fortune teller here. 

The little “pointer”, we’ll call it, goes in there and obeys.  It goes from cell to cell asking, “Did I do that right?”  The cell says,  “I don’t know.”  So he goes to the next one and the next one and the next one—3 hundred billion cells, and each cell says, “Search me, I don’t know.” 

(from the audience someone says, “And one of them says, ‘No, you didn’t do the right thing.’) 

No, the biggest part of them says they don’t know.

(Also we could look back and see how I feel.)

Then we got the feelings or emotions running the show tormenting the present moment you find yourself in.  Sometimes the emotions we experience is why we ask this question, you know.  They’re not quite gratified, so we get off on a tangent to find out “did I do the right thing”.  And this question goes around and around and around and there is no answer to it.  So if you could see that these questions are unanswerable, you wouldn’t ask that kind of question.

So what has already been done is done and what will be, will be. You can’t know whether “what you did” will be right or not. 

So if it’s in front of me to do, let’s do it and then we won’t have all these problems.  Some people will sit for years trying to figure out if they are doing the right thing to please the Lord.  “Will I be doing the things the Lord wants if I do so and so?”  But they don’t get an answer, and so they sit and think and hundred of things go through the mind and none gets done.

(Is that the same as “have I made the right decision?)

Same thing. 

(But time will tell?)

Not necessarily because you would have to know what would have happened if you had made 20 other decisions at that time. 

That’s like knowing, “Did you ever make a mistake?”  Did you ever make a mistake?

(Oh, yes I did.)

What would have happened had you done something different than what you did?

(I’ve often wondered.)

So how, then, do you know it would have been better? or different?  than what did happen?
So did you ever know whether you made a mistake or not? 

(Well some decisions, yes—in a business deal.)

Well, how do you what would have happened had you not made that business transaction.

(Well, I really don’t.)

You might have gone further down the tubes if you had taken another one.   So can you prove that you ever made a mistake? 

So you can lay your Ball Peen hammer back in the tool cabinet and quit beating yourself over the head with it.  Most everybody here has sat with a Ball Peen hammer literally or figuratively and pounded themselves on the head because of the mistakes they think they’ve made, and you can’t even prove it was one. 

(So when things don’t go the way you think they should, you can say, “Well they might have been worse.”)

You don’t know, and all the time you spend going back over it again and again won’t change it.  So you can start here and see that you truly don’t know—just drop it--mark it off and go on.  There’s something else to do.