“The past has no power over the present moment,” writes Eckhart Tolle, who like many other self-help authors, recognizes how holding on to our past experiences hinders our personal development, and it is these authors who encourage us to focus on the moment. present as a means of self-realization. Despite gaining popularity in recent years with the advent of self-help gurus and mindfulness practice, this concept is not new and was first conceived within Buddhism and philosophy, and is best summarized in the words of Buddha: “do not live in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate your mind on the present moment.”
I personally agree. As humans we need to free ourselves from the chains and prisons of the mind that prevent us from reaching our potential. However, I identify a potential pitfall in the approach followed by most self-help enthusiasts, when most of the time this “cutting ties” with the past comes without deep learning and ends up becoming an illusion.
If we are cutting ties with our past, we must first make a judgment to decide which memories we are eliminating. But this judgment becomes complicated when most of the time we cannot eliminate subjectivity from our analysis, and we end up judging based on today's information/standards, instead of using the context of the time and the learnings produced.
Today, cancel culture has toppled statues, changed the names of buildings, and discredited the achievements of those historical figures who, in today's light, are considered irredeemable by today's standards. Society is more interested in conforming to cultural standards than in transmitting the lessons learned to new generations, applying an additional layer of bias that prevents us from achieving historical objectivity.
Friedrich Nietzsche used to say that “we are attacked by ideas that we conquered a long time ago,” but instead of listening to the voices of history, we fight those ideas again. For example, high levels of migration, the clash of cultures, religions and races are brewing nationalist sentiments around the world. This is not just a symptom of renewed Nazism, because this behavior is an exacerbated tribalism, observed even since ancient times.
We cannot become renewed men and women if we are unable to first recognize and accept who we were in the past and, from there, define who we want to be in the future. Even in business, this is called a “gap” analysis where performance is judged against the previous situation or baseline. So instead of cutting ties with it, we must make peace with the past, both individually and as a society. As it is considered in business, we need to find solutions, not blame. Blaming ourselves or others does not change our present or our future. Prevention is the key here. And to be successful in preventing a situation from arising, we need to become students of the past.
With the recent news of Vladimir Putin recognizing the independence of a pair of Ukrainian states and the previous annexation of Crimea, many experts were crying “wolf” (alluding to the story of Peter and the wolf), since many of the signs had parallels with how World War II and other wars began. So this is the time when we can respond differently. Similarly, in the personal space, we need to be aware of the cues that predict our unwanted behavior.
We need to teach ourselves to investigate the past only as a source of knowledge, as a means of learning, because any other purpose will only distract us from our present. So the point is not to sever ties with our past, but to make the past our ally. An ally that will help us fight our future struggles. Or, rather, to avoid them.
We should not fight about the past but rather discuss it.
Never forget that dialogue and debate is how civilization was born in Athens.
M. Ch. Landa
