Does the past matter? Yes and No.
Yes, because you need to go back to your pasts and extract all the unfortunate experiences face them naked in the face and resolve them with logic, reasoning and common sense.
There are always lessons to be learned from the past. Extract all these lessons, write them down and learn them by hard.
Not only lessons from one's own past experiences but also lessons from others.
That's all that past is useful for.
No, if you think it is still happening. The past is something that will never happen again unless you allow it to by repeating the same mistakes and create the same cause and condition for it to mature and take effect.
The past is important because it has a message and lesson to be learned. The past is unimportant because it will never happen again unless you allow it to.
History (His-story), is merely someone else's narration or story telling. If not spoken or mentioned will you know it ever happened? Remember, how your grandparents tell you things about their younger days? To you it is just a story. It does not matter to you if it is real. The reliability of anything about the past all depends on the memories and accuracy of the story teller. If any detail is missed, it did not happen. Isn't it right?
There are only two things you can take from the past - the lesson and the emotion.
The lesson is the price you had paid for the pain in the past that you need to bring forward to benefit you and others in the future.
The emotion associated with the past is something you should leave behind and never bring it with you. Leave the emotion as it is, as it happened at the same place and same time. The only burden that bad past experiences have on you are the lingering emotions that you grasp. It does not makes sense to hold on to something that will never happen again as if it is still happening.
The danger of holding and anchoring the emotions in you is that you are attracting the same thing to happen to you again. Apart from self-fulfilling prophecy, emotion is an energy that will attract similar energy. Meaning you are likely to attract things in your life that shall inflict in you the same emotion. It is ironical why one should attract things that one detest so much in life.
Being hooked onto emotions of the past exposes you to many kinds of manipulations and control, from con-man, predators to sorcerers. Emotions control your thoughts and hence your actions. Ever experience being sucked deeply into an emotion and you cannot think clearly? This is called an emotional loop thinking, your thoughts will always be control, guided and suggested by the same emotion to strengthen its existence. It is very difficult to think out of an emotional loop unless you have strong mental will power and consciousness. When you are stuck in an emotional loop, stop thinking and start to distract yourself with other activities. You will find that the answer you were seeking appear suddenly in your mind or you might have forgotten that emotional issue, which implies it is unimportant thinking or not thinking about it.
If you are mourning or brooding over someone else's pasts, forget it. It has nothing to do with you especially when you have not met that person. Remember, for you, if it was not told it did not happen. If it was told, it is just a fictional story that really does not matter if it ever happened. The definition of "the moral of the story is...." there is lesson to be learn in every story. But the lesson concerns more with the person who experienced the past. The listener merely needs to be aware that this is a story, it does not matter if it was real.
