History has a way of repeating itself if you don’t pay attention. In one video I’m telling you to forget your history, pretend you have no history, don’t pay attention to history, drop your history, but there’s a part where history does come in useful, and that happens to be where you learn from your mistakes and try not to make them again.

A lot of times people will mistake guilt for something wrong with the self, but guilt actually has a single purpose: to help remind you that you don’t want to want to do it that way again. So do pay attention to your history, take notes from it, notice where your patterns are. Notice what you do constantly that gets into the same stupid situation over and over again, because we all do that, don’t we? So whatever your history is, learn from it. If you feel guilty about something, learn from that. That means that there is something you are trying to signal to yourself that you don’t want to do again. So in order not to repeat history, pay attention to what history teaches you.

On the mass level, we should pay attention to what history has taught us; maybe genocide is not a good idea, (for instance) and in our personal history, we can see patterns where we’ve created situations in our lives that we might not want to create anymore, because we don’t create happy moments. Nothing wrong with an unpleasant moment, but if you can have more happy ones, then why not, right? The way to do that is to pay attention to your history, notice where you have patterns, and don’t make the same mistakes.

You can learn from the mistakes of others, too. You don’t have to learn just from your own mistakes. Take a look at mistakes other people make, and make a mental note not to do that yourself because you might not want be in the same situation.

So, history has its place, it does have its purpose. But once you have retrieved the gifts that looking at your history has to give you, then drop it. Be here now. Free the patterns that you have in history.

Have you ever seen an animal suffering because of its history? Animals don’t care about their history. Animals are better at being in the present moment than humans, because they’re better at being in the here and now. Have you ever seen animals wage war? You don’t see herds of animals waging war against other species. They might chase each other off their little territories, but they don’t do all-out wars like humans do. Animals don’t live by their history, so maybe humans shouldn’t live by their history either.

So use history for what it is, a way to measure your patterns, things you don’t want to do again, and then drop it. Don’t identify yourself as your history. You are not the story.