How to heal the wounds of past?

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

Acharya Prashant (AP): You see, you are a human being. It is neither possible nor advisable for you to just give up on the past. The body is nothing but a flow of the past stretching over time. So you can’t just wish away the past, it won’t happen. If the past is bothering you, why not live in a way that resolves the past? The past is shrieking, calling for attention, demanding completion. Why are you denying it the space, the attention, the completion that it deserves? You have a festering wound on your arm. You are carrying it for two weeks, and it’s deteriorating by the day. What is it calling for? Treatment. But influenced by the neo-spiritual cult of living in the moment, you say that “I don’t want to look at the past. All this is coming from the past. The wound belongs to the past. I don’t want to look at the wound.”

Why don’t you want to look at the wound? Do you want to imagine that it has disappeared? Let’s be practical. For you, the one who is talking, the one who is questioning and seeking solutions, does the wound not exist? Let’s talk reality, does it exist or not? Then why do you want to imagine and act as if it does not?

It does, and living in the moment does not mean denying the past. Living in the moment, living in the present, to be more accurate means living in the one who is ever-present — living in the one who is omnipresent — living in the Truth. And how can you live in the Truth and simultaneously deny the fact? To live in the Truth is to live in an unconditional acknowledgment of the fact, and the wound is the fact that you can’t dismiss. The wound does exist. In the backdrop of the wound, what is it then to live in the present? What kind of action does that demand? Please.

You are a person carrying a wound from the past, and the wound is still open. Is the wound healed and closed? No, and you are someone who honestly, sincerely wants to live truthfully. Now, what should such a person do to treat the wound? That is what living in the present means, to not be oblivious of the fact. To not hide away from the fact. And facts don’t just pop up in the moment. You may perceive the fact right now. But the fact belongs to a long, complicated unknowable stream of network, of causes and effects. Does…