The Donkey and the Rider: Why Meditation Benefits Are Not the Path to What You Already Are

We often find ourselves in a strange comedy, much like the old story of the rider who wanders from village to village, frantically asking everyone he meets if they have seen his donkey. He is distressed, exhausted by the search, and desperate to find his mount, never realizing for a single moment that he is already sitting on it. This is the curious situation of the separate self. We look for aware presence as if it were a distant land to be conquered or a state to be achieved through effort, yet who is it that is looking? And what could we possibly find that isn't already the very ground we stand on? When we talk about meditation benefits, we must be very honest with each other, like friends sitting on a porch at sunset. There is a great deal of noise in the spiritual marketplace today. You see the apps with their soothing voices and the groups filled with spiritual chatter, all promising that if you just follow these steps, you will eventually reach a destination called enlightenment. But there is no path to where you already are. Enlightenment is not a goal; it is the realization that the seeker who wanted to get there was never a solid entity to begin with. Does this mean we should throw away meditation? Not at all. In our daily lives, we inhabit a body-mind, a functional unit that navigates the world. This body-mind can be tight, stressed, and clouded by a thousand useless thoughts. Meditation benefits are real and tangible at this horizontal level of existence. We might notice that through quiet, the blood vessels relax, oxygen flows more freely, and the immune system finds its strength again. We might see the chronic tensions we didn’t even know we were carrying begin to dissolve. The mind becomes clearer, and the heavy, repetitive thoughts that serve only to discharge anxiety start to dry up. This is all wonderful. It makes the dream of life more harmonious and less painful. But let’s not confuse a better dream with waking up. Taking a seat in silence is a beautiful celebration of life, but it is not a transaction. If you are meditating to get something in the future, you are simply reinforcing the illusion of a separate self that is "not yet there." You are creating a temporal gap, a distance between yourself and the absolute. But the absolute has no distance. It is vertical, not horizontal. It is the screen upon which the movie of your life is projected. Whether the movie is a tragedy or a comedy, whether the character is meditating or shouting, the screen remains untouched, silent, and ever-present. We often hear about the need to "transcend the present" or "go into the now," but even these phrases can be traps of logic. The present is not a container we enter; it is the only "non-thing" that allows everything else to appear. It is like the silence that underlies noise. The noise doesn't replace the silence; they exist simultaneously.