Do you see how a great deal of your present woe is accumulation of the past? You keep the past in an old trunk in the attic of your mind, and you go up into the attic and you sort and re-sort all sorts of these belongings. They are called belongings, what you have stored in this old trunk, but they are not your belongings. They are old belongings. Old belongings were never really yours either, yet you have kept them in an old trunk in the attic.
You pull old costumes out one by one, or you pull them out by the handfuls. You hold them up and scrutinize them. You rearrange them. They slip through your fingers as does your present life. You are up in the attic, holding the past up to the present as through a window. You just don't want to let go of the past. Beautiful or horrid, you have kept it just the same, and you finger through it.
Nothing can ever make up to you for the past. You are barking up the wrong tree. Nothing can ever return a brilliant past any more than it can return a dark one. Neither a brilliant jewel nor a broken shoelace can materialize for you now, no matter how much you turn thoughts of them over in your mind. You can retrace steps with your fingers on the clouds. No matter how many times you count past memories, no matter how hard you try, you cannot climb the same steps, nor can the steps be mended. Only in your thoughts do you work over the past. Your memories are only thoughts of past thoughts.
You are worth something now. You do not need past glories to light you now, nor do you need past indignities to dampen your light. Whether it is glory or agony, you have to walk away from it. This is the day I have given you. You have already escaped the past. It no longer exists except in the long corridors of your mind. The wind blew the past away like a mist on the moors. Blow it away with your breath now. Blow into the corners. Lift the cover of the old trunk up wide. See the contents flying out of the trunk and disappearing into the vapor. In the distance, they become like ribbons of a sunset in the sky. "Adieu, old thoughts, adieu. I have hung up on you."
Now comes a sunrise, made for you. Get up and welcome it.
What can the past do for you now? What do you expect it to do? The best it can do is go away and leave you alone. Haunting memories haunt. You are to make new ones. You have sucked on the old bones long enough.
You are not even to make new memories now. Let your thoughts of present occurrences be like trains that keep going. There is no end to the chain of trains. They keep going, and so this that you call life speeds along, and more is always coming.
The train right in front of you will be an old train in less than a second.
What is your life now? Is it you sitting before a computer? Is it you getting up? Is it you reliving the past as you get up? How many levels of life are there? How many thoughts can you have at one time?
You live in many dimensions. The past is not one of them. Nor is the future. The so-called present speeds by. And you are alive now, meeting a new train.