Course II - Teaching 5: The Past

We can dispose of many things, but who can dispose of his own past? Moreover, who can dispose of the congenital memory of his past experiences through lives and deaths?
The past is like a plumber cloak over beings, a continuous sorrow, everlasting cross that is so hard to throw away. How many times we hear, “I would wish to be good, but I cannot; my instincts are ever taking me toward what I was!” How many times the past is an obstacle, even for those people wishing to start a spiritual life! And even for those advanced beings on the path of perfection, many times the past appears before them like a frightful enemy who, in the form of impulses, memories, calls and relationships with the old life, hinders to progress as they would wish. Well, but even here Sacrifice is Liberating.
To surrender in the arms of the Eternal Will, to take all from the hands of the Lords of Karma, to set oneself freely in the service of the Four Knights guarding the Grotto of Ras, is to overcome this sorrow, which is fruit of past accumulations.
Not to fear the outcomes of yesterday is to prepare a joyful tomorrow, and to delete a memory that is so harmful for the progress.
It is very wise the law by which a man forgets all when he comes again into being. And the Catholic confession is fundamentally valuable when, according to it, although the absolution does not removes penalties from blames, certainly deletes the sin; in other words, it deletes memory of the past. “To remember is to live the past and to be tied to it”.
Also it is Krishnamurti who says, “To remember is to live the past and to be tied to it”.