LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD

Do you haul the corpse of your past around with you? So many people do, you know.

Elmer Rice [pictured left], in his play Dream Girl, says, through the character Clark Redfield, ‘If you can make a dream come to life, grab hold of it. But if it dies on you, roll up your sleeves and give it a decent burial, instead of trying to haul the corpse around with you.’

I often hear someone say in AA meetings, ‘Let the past stay in the past.’ That’s very sound, spiritual advice. I think that is what Jesus really meant when he said, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead’ (Mt 8:22).

Albert Einstein [pictured below right] wrote, ‘We live in a society that forgets the present.’ One of the reasons we forget the present is that we are still haunted by the past, especially our own past. We relive old hurts, failures and other negativities, and for so long as we are obsessing or ruminating about the past, we are not living in the present. We must let go of the past---and let it stay in the past. For better or for worse, the past is over. It no longer exists, except perhaps as a present memory.

There is something odd about all of us. We often cling to our hurts and failures more than we do to the good times. We must forget both---yes, both the ‘bad’ stuff as well as the ‘good’ stuff. Both prevent us from seeing things-as-they-really-are right now. 

In many ways holding on to the so-called ‘good’ stuff is even more dangerous than holding on to the ‘bad,’ for it deludes us into thinking that the best times are in the past and are unlikely to be repeated. We fear ever having that sort of experience again, so we cling to the memory of it lest we forget it. We fear that if the latter happens, there will be no joy, happiness or excitement left in our life. Rubbish! That’s a cop-out. Please see it for what it is.

The good news is that you can be totally free of the past---at any moment. It’s entirely up to you. No one else can do ‘it’ for you. Yes, there can indeed be that ‘total revolution’ (or psychological mutation or transformation) of which J.Krishnamurti constantly spoke. 

Now, I am not talking here about change as a result of intellectual analysis or any form of traditional psychology including psychoanalysis. You---yes, you---can instantaneously liberate yourself from the past and from past conditioning (including beliefs and misbeliefs of all kinds), provided you refuse to analyse or dissect the content of your consciousness and choose to see things as they really are, without judgment or evaluation of any kind. 

So, stop looking back. Remember what happened to Lot’s wife? She looked back, and was turned into a pillar of salt---with no life in her. Don’t let that happen to you.

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