After all, Bao Bomu says, what is the past but what we choose to remember?

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

You think your past defines you, and worse, you think that it is an unchangeable reality, when really, your perception of it changes as you do.
Because experience is always multi-dimensional, there are a variety of memories, experiences, feelings, “gists” you can choose to recall…and what you choose is indicative of your present state of mind. So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.

Choosing a past helps us to construct a future.

In general, past things come to be in the memory not as they were, but as we would like or how we wanted them to have been.

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The past, and how we view it, is more a reflection of where we currently are than of the past itself. As the psychologist Dr. Brent Slife states in the book Time and Psychological Explanation (emphasis mine): “We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present. . . . Our memories are not stored and objective entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what's bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

The past is the past. Who or what we used to be doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is who and what we are now and who and what we can become in the future.

It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

The past is more than a memory.

the remembrence of things past is not nessecarly the remeberance of things as they were

So many people get caught up in allowing the past to define them or haunt them simply because they have not evolved to the place of seeing how the past did not prevent them from achieving the life they want, it facilitated it. This doesn’t mean to disregard or gloss over painful or traumatic events, but simply to be able to recall them with acceptance and to be able to place them in the storyline of your personal evolution.