How our past can become part of our wisdom that empowers us
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
say we travel from one country to another come from America to Australia we have a jet lag so our body and our biological cycle perform according to American time whereas we are in Australian time and then our body needs to adjust otherwise we stay biologically in the past while physically we are here it doesn’t work properly so similarly what can happen at a physical level also happens to us at a psychological or emotional level all of us when we go through life’s journey at that time we get certain experiences which cause certain impressions on us and those impressions can be of two kinds one is good or positive and other is bad or negative so we all may get some go through some grief some heartbreak, some loss and this some victimization some injustice and all this impresses itself on our mind and then it becomes like a horror story that keeps replaying normally if we are watching a movie and if we find some scene that is too ghastly too explicit too distasteful for us we just fast forward it but with respect to our mind when it starts displaying some distressing scenes there is practically no button to fast forward it leave alone fast forward it the mind keeps replaying it why did he do like that how could she have spoken like that why did this have to happen and life can victimize us in many different ways so when this past keeps coming back to us, this happened this happened and that can prevent us from moving forward in our life so the negative traumatic experiences from our past can hold us back they prevent us from experiencing life in the present and they prevent us from developing our potential for the future the other aspect is from the past we may get some cravings some experiences which might have been good or enjoyable in superficial way and they keep coming back to us so for example if somebody becomes an addict of something then for them if they become sober still their past keeps coming back to them they keep having that desire again and again Oscar Wilde is ascribed to have said that giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world I have done it over a hundred times laughing so I gave it up but it didn’t give me up so sometimes our past cravings which we now understand are unhealthy they keep coming to us so in this sense our past can haunt us just like some people in some movies are shown to be haunted by a ghost they don’t want but that ghost comes and makes them behave in weird ways makes them go through all kinds of terrible emotions so similarly our past keeps coming back on us and in a sense the further we grow in life the bigger becomes our past and although we always have a life ahead of us but unless we process the past properly the past can either become a burden which crushes us or it can be it can become a part of the wisdom that empowers us in one sense the past is like a resource but if I am carrying a suitcase and if I am travelling and carrying a suitcase and that contains stuff which I just don’t know how to use but I am told to carry it then it will simply be a burden but if that contains stuff which I need and I do use then that is an asset for me so the past is like a psychological baggage that all of us have now we cannot get rid of it but we can process it so that it doesn’t burden us that much so I was at a mental health care hospital in New Jersey I was speaking to the mental health care providers over there and there they were telling me that one of the biggest problems for people who develop mental health care issues is that they feel life has treated them unfairly something terrible happened to them it shouldn’t have happened and they are just not able to process it and because of that they become so traumatized that they can’t move forward and what is required for them to move ahead in life is to discover some purpose for life