Searching for the Donkey While Riding It: The Myth of Meditation for Letting Go of the Past

It is a funny thing, isn't it? We spend our lives looking for the donkey while we are already sitting on its back. We run around the world, diving into books and techniques, hoping to find a way to finally be free, yet the very ground we stand on is the freedom we claim to be missing. We talk about meditation for letting go of the past as if the past were a physical weight we could drop at a specific station along a spiritual railway. But who is this "you" that is going to do the letting go? And where exactly do we think we are going to put the past once we’ve unburdened ourselves? When we sit in silence, we aren't building a ladder to the absolute. The absolute is already here. It is the screen upon which the movie of life is projected. Whether the film is a tragedy, a comedy, or a horror story, the screen remains untouched, unstained, and utterly present. We often hear people say they want to use meditation for letting go of the past because they are tired of the same old stories playing in their heads. And sure, sitting quietly might make the body-mind feel a bit more relaxed. It might bring a sense of comfort or a momentary lapse in the noise. That’s perfectly fine. If we feel better, we feel better. But let’s be frank: that comfort isn't enlightenment. It’s just a shift in the weather of the body-mind. There is a common misunderstanding that there is a "process" of awakening, a gradual climb toward a peak where the air is finally clear. But the air is clear right now. The separate self is the one who wants a process because a process implies a future, and the separate self lives and breathes in the illusion of time. It wants to know that if it does "X" today, it will achieve "Y" tomorrow. But the absolute doesn't know anything about tomorrow. It is vertical, not horizontal. While the body-mind moves through the horizontal world of improvement and learning—learning to be a better parent, a better worker, or even how to calm the nervous system—the truth of what we are is already complete, right here in the vertical "now." Think about when we wake up in the morning. Before we remember our name, our debts, or our history, there is a first opening of conscious presence. It is a simple "I am" before it becomes "I am a person with a difficult past." In that first flash, there is no time and no space. There is just this aware presence. Then, the mind rushes in to build the walls. It creates "here" and "there," "before" and "after." It starts weaving the story of the separate self again. We think we need meditation for letting go of the past to fix this story, but the story doesn't need fixing because the story isn't who we are. We are like a dreamer who dreams they are sick and is desperately searching for a cure. In the dream, the search is very real. The struggle is exhausting. But the moment the dreamer wakes up, they realize they were never sick, and more importantly, they weren't even that specific character in the dream.