Freedom from the Past

Free to be in the present, facing the future

"To finally make peace with your past, you must be building a new life. To finally be able to understand your past and to use it positively and constructively, you must be building a new foundation. To find freedom from the fears and anxieties that haunt you, you must have a new engagement in life."

"The freer your mind is from past-referencing, the more space there will be within you for Grace to fill."

"Allow your mind to be quiet, for in this you are free.... Without your domination, your mind will be free and will experience its own depth in Knowledge."

Letting go of old assumptions

"Along the way, many things will be unlearned, and this frees you from the past. What have you learned but your past? Your past represents your learning--all of your evaluations, your beliefs, your ideals, your fears, your compulsions and your patterns of behavior. However, every moment and every second that your are engaged with Knowledge frees you a little bit more from the shadow of your past and from the binding ideas and constraints of your past.... [I]n almost all case, you misinterpreted the past and used it to reinforce existing ideas. Therefore, your memory of your past is more a memory of your evaluations than an accurate memory of events."

Concluding relationships

"You must be free from your past sufficiently to be able to move forward in a new direction and to establish a new and greater life than the life you had known before. To do this, you cannot take everything with you. You cannot carry all of your memories like a great store of luggage. The vehicle that will take you into the present and future will not accommodate all of this. Likewise, you cannot carry all of your relationships with you--all of your past loves, all of your friendships, all of your family, everyone that you like, everyone that you dislike, all the people and your memories of them that clutter your mind and keep you emotionally frozen in the past. Knowledge will free you, and it will unburden you so that you can be available to it and open to life as it is now."

"You will not travel alone, but you cannot take everyone with you. You will find that you cannot keep all of your friends and past acquaintances because they are part of your past, and the emphasis in those relationships is not what you are experiencing now. Allow them to depart and bless them. Do not condemn them. Do not deny them. Release them."

The great cost of remaining in the past

"People who live in the past cannot experience the present and cannot understand the future. And every new experience they have is simply used to fit into the past, to add to their collection of ideas, beliefs and assumptions, and to fortify them as well. Their lives become relics as a result, museum pieces of their own personal history. There is nothing alive, nothing fresh and nothing vital there. Instead, people only amass recollections. Their pain is entrenched, and their decisions have become hard like concrete."

See also

The Great Waves of Change, chapter 3: Escaping the Past