How to drop the burden of the Past?

Following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question: Sir, I watch your videos and I feel that I am getting addicted to your videos. Your videos and your talks have lit a fire in me to search for the Truth. But I carry on with the things which I am doing from the past thirty-seven years.

Now I have started feeling that it was better had I never heard anything about the Truth. There is a fight going on within me between my thirty-seven years old journey, and this search for Truth.

Please guide me.

Acharya Prashant: You keep something with yourself only if that thing is of use to you, right? That which is of no use to you is called as ‘waste’. Simple!

What is it that defines ‘usefulness’ to you?

What is it that characterizes ‘usefulness’?

Something is of use to a man, only if it gives him Peace, only if it gives him some Clarity.

See what the entire world is rushing after. People do several kinds of things. Somebody is a sportsman, somebody enters politics, somebody wants to earn money, somebody runs after sensual pleasures.

Ultimately, what is it that all want through their miscellaneous movements?

Peace.

We all want to reach a point where we feel contended.

Have your thirty-seven years given you contentment? If they have, then hold them to your chest. And if they haven’t, then you are like the emotional monkey holding it’s dead baby to it’s chest.

Before you become attached to something, or identified to something, won’t it be prudent to ask, “What is this thing giving me? What has this thing given me so far, thus far?”

But that’s the thing with ‘habit’, it prevents you from asking questions. It has a flow, a momentum of it’s own. In that momentum you just keep flowing. You just don’t even feel the need to enquire.

Are you here to preserve your thirty-seven years, or are you here to lead a Joyful life? What have these thirty-seven years given you? They have given you this body, they have given you memories, they have given you conditioning. They have given you certain…