Burying the Past

What does it mean to bury the past? It is like burying the dead, which means not just acknowledging the fact as in “Gilgamesh” where the hero sees bugs coming out of his dead friend’s nose, but having come to terms with it, funeral rites a very ancient form of ritual perhaps to acknowledge that people have to be accepted as really dead because they visit us as ghosts and memories, no one really dead until Aldous Huxley replaces rituals with allowing factories to recover and recycle chemical remains. Then dead people are really dead because people now actually dead people really are. Similarly, burying the past is to do more than acknowledge that past times are over, whether the Romantic Age or hula hoops or JFK, but have come to terms with that fact, moving on or not with that sensibility. People can do that. It is possible for consciousness to transform dead people and past situations to become established as in the past. Here are some ways by which to wrestle with the past so that it is over.

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