One of the most common topics I hear is the question: “How do I let go of the past? My relationship ended, but I’m still living in it. A loved one died, and I keep endlessly переживать it. I used to earn a lot, and now I can’t. How do I let go of the past? How do I find something new? How do I again feel in life a state of strength, freedom, creativity, joy? How do I stop clinging to the past?”
A powerful story, of course, is connected with death. When a person dies, it gives no peace and literally eats you from the inside. Work can also “eat” you when a person lost it. In the same way, endless memories of some past time or of a relationship with a person eat you up: there was a husband or wife, and they left or disappeared. How to be with this дальше? How to find yourself? How to find freedom and harmony in this?
I suggest that to find an answer to this question — and it truly is a very important aspect — to start with another question. Holding on to past events or to what in the past should have happened but did not happen should be considered through the question: “Why do you want to let go of the past?”
It is precisely the reason why a person wants to let it go that contains the answer.
Usually people say they need to let go so as not to suffer; they need to let go to free up space and energy for new events and opportunities; they need to let go to get more.
In reality, a person often wants not to let go, but to keep. A loved one died — relatives suffer not simply because he died, but because they want him to continue to be present here and now. There were good relationships — you want them to continue to exist today.
Therefore the first question that is important to ask yourself: “Do I want to let go or do I want to keep and at the same time stop suffering?” This is very important. If inside there is a desire to keep, then this is already a separate big area for research.
There is an illusion that you need to “free up space for the new.” This is a social delusion that people talk about a lot. People are constantly being told: “You don’t find a new business because you haven’t closed the old one yet; you don’t find a new job because you’re still holding on to the current one; you don’t have new relationships because you keep remembering the old ones”.
Here I always give the example of a mother who has ten children, and a mother who has one child. Does it mean that a mother cannot give love to ten and that for real love the child must be only one? Does it mean that you cannot одновременно suffer for one person and love forty others? Who said that, having stopped suffering over a former man or woman, a husband or wife, or an old job, letting it go and finding something new, you will not continue to suffer now together with this?
Why not allow the possibility to both suffer and not suffer at the same time?
If you look at professional activity and business, a huge number of people live with the установка that they can have only one business or one job. Society transmits this. It is like an extreme example with love for one person. I have one wife, one personal relationship between a man and a woman. But why can’t I love five hundred women? Why can’t I be friends with five hundred women? And moreover — through this love for other people, strengthen love for my wife?
Here it is important to уточнить, especially for those who like to joke or do not fully perceive the information: I am not talking about sexual love now. I am talking about love for a person as such. Who вообще limited it by quantity?
Exactly the same in business and in work. Who limited by quantity the idea that you cannot have thirty businesses and you won’t cope with them? I know a huge number of people who have many businesses, and at the same time they are not geniuses at all — and everything works. And there are super-smart people who have not a single business.
This idea of “freeing up energy” is very often an illusory construction: in essence, a person wants to pull in a result that has not happened yet. He says: “I want to free up space for another person.” But that does not exist, he simply wants it. He pulls a future result into the present, and it becomes easier for him already now.
A person draws plans and illusions: “I will earn money — and then I will be free. I will earn money — and then we will have a child.” And he lives precisely in this state of illusion, not in the reality of what is happening. This is the same as when a person speaks about the past. Only there it is the opposite: a person does not want to let go — he wants to pull the past further and live it now.
Now let’s analyze a very important construction. Why do you want to forget the past? The thing is that when you proceed from a motive, it is a universal and very strong solution. But it is important what motive you proceed from.
If you want to forget the past in order to make yourself feel better, stop suffering, get a good future — that is the motive of the ego. And when you want to do something for the ego, know: you will always lose. It is impossible to negotiate with the ego. There are no scales of balance there. The ego is always stronger on its side.
The only thing you can do is say to yourself: “I want to forget the past because it is true and right.” But for that you first need to understand: is forgetting the past truly and right? And do you need to forget it at all? Maybe the truth is in remembering? Or in remembering it now, not forgetting?
If you want to truly разобраться with the past, the future, and your dependencies, the first thing you need to do is look at your motivation. At that moment you do not build illusions, but you are in the present perception of reality. And here there is a very interesting aspect: as soon as you enter such a state of perception, the very problematics of the past begin to disappear.
I have seen a huge number of states within spiritual meetings, sessions, and just conversations, when you discuss a problem with a person — and after 20 minutes the problem is already gone. Nothing changed, except the conversation. If you periodically have such situations, it is very important to pay attention to them. Because that means that you are in an uncontrolled state of your own delusions, illusions, and problems.
The thing is that in the past you had a huge life. And it is important to ask yourself: why do I cling to some people because I lost them, but not to others? Why do I переживаю strongly over some deaths, but not over others? Why do I constantly remember some events, but not others? Why do I remember one teacher, cling to how good it was with him, but I don’t remember another at all, I don’t even remember what he looked like?
This immediately shows the irrationality of perception. Because if we are to cling to the past, then let’s cling to the whole past entirely, rather than exalt the significance of individual events and try to replace something else with them.
Dependence on a person, on events, on old perceptions, states, projects is no different from dependence on heroin. It’s just that it is convenient for many people to make a distorted conclusion and say: “It’s normal that I depend on this person. It’s normal that I remember him. It’s normal that I remember him like this. It’s normal that I depend on the apartment and the city where I used to live.”
But it is dependence. And here it is important to calmly look at the very word “dependence.” You can be dependent on a memory, on an image, on an illusion. The question arises: who creates the dependence? The person in relation to whom it exists? Or do you yourself create dependence — for yourself and for the other?
Amazingly, when you tell people that, by remembering another person and not letting them go, you create dependence toward them and the other person suffers because of it — people do not believe it. A state arises: “How is this even possible?”
This is a very important construction. When you create dependence for another person, you generate a powerful cause-and-effect связь. You create a huge karmic layer. You create manipulation, and you will have to deal with it and you will have to answer for it. Even if this dependence is formed not at the level of material things, but at the level of thought and inner state.
What is the main problem of working with the past for most people? It is that they do not want to admit: everything will end. If you are now suffering over an old job, know — you can suffer like this an endless number of times, because everything ends. The next job will also end. Relationships with any person will end: with children, and with parents. Your presence in a certain year will end. Everything ends.
People live a short flash of time, not realizing that they have a big, long life. I am not even talking about the fact that many do not realize the existence of a spiritual space and that life does not end with death. Even if we do not go deep into this topic and do not consider it.
At least look at the fact that ahead of you there are still 20, 30, or 40 years. And then what? And then — uncertainty. A person sits and does not know how to pay the mortgage in three months. Does not know where they will live in two months. Does not understand whether they will be hired or fired. They have endless problems. What 30 years are we talking about? Those 30 years are a collected abstraction. And there is also a “vision board” hanging. All of this plunges a person into a very specific, negative inner space.
Our task here is to obtain inner meaning, a state of calm and freedom. So that the past that should not constantly be present in memories is easily released. And the past that creates переживания is found in an aware field: you could see it, but it had no power over you.
Do you really want to return to a job, the memories of which you cannot withstand? What kind of job is that then? Who has power over whom?
The task is not to forget a person, not to replace one with another, and not to “free up space.” The task is to see: why am I holding on to this past? What motive stands behind my desire to let go? What dependence have I built for myself?
In the state of real analysis there are no categories of “good” and “bad.” They simply do not exist. In the стремление to understand there is no formation of ego. Leave yourself only one thing — the state of analysis. This will give freedom immediately, at this very moment. And at this very moment the past will begin to dissolve, taking exactly the volume in which it truly belongs.