On the surface, Krishnamurti is suggesting a daily ritual of forgetting. He means that to truly live, you must actively disengage from all that has happened before – your memories, your hurts, your achievements, your very identity as shaped by experience.

This echoes a core tenet in many non-dual traditions, though Krishnamurti eschewed formal labels. The "past" represents the accumulated "self" – the egoic construct built from conditioning and thought. To "die to the past" is to recognize that this construct is not you. It's the cessation of identification with the thought-forms and emotional residues that bind you to a fixed, limited sense of self. It's not a literal death, but a constant, moment-to-moment annihilation of the psychological past, allowing for a state of pure, unconditioned awareness. This is akin to the Buddhist concept of impermanence (anicca) applied not just to external phenomena but to the internal landscape of the mind, or the Sufi idea of obliterating the ego (nafs) to realize the divine. Without this daily "death" to the self-created past, you remain a prisoner of your own history, unable to perceive reality as it is, here and now.

In your life: When a negative thought or memory arises, acknowledge it without clinging, and let it pass, returning your attention to the present moment without judgment.