Why you can’t let go of the past

AVAlexander Volchek

One of the most frequent subjects I hear about is this: someone says, "How do I let go of the past? My relationship has ended, but I am still living in it. Someone in my life died, and I am still endlessly grieving over it. I used to earn a lot of money, and now I can't. How do I let go of the past? How do I find something new? How do I feel strength, freedom, creativity, and joy throughout my life again? How do I stop clinging to the past?" Death is an especially powerful example, of course: someone has died, it gives you no peace, and it eats away at you. Work eats away at people too, when they have lost a job. There are these endless memories of some past time, or of a relationship with another person. You had a husband or wife, and they left or disappeared. How do you go on with any of this? How do you find yourself? How do you find freedom and harmony in it? To find an answer to that question—this is a very important aspect of clinging to past events, or to events that were supposed to happen in the past but didn't—I suggest starting with this question: why do you want to let go of the past? Why does someone want to let go of the past? The answer lies in the very reason they want to let go.

People usually say, "You need to let go so you won't suffer. You need to let go to free up room and energy for new events and new opportunities. You need to let go to get more." In fact, people often want to hold on, not let go. A loved one has died, and the relatives suffer because that person died, while they want the person to be here now, in this situation. There used to be a good relationship. You want that relationship to be here now too. The first question to ask yourself is: do I want to let go, or do I want to hold on and stop suffering at the same time? That is very important. If what is present is simply the desire to hold on, that is a whole separate area, and we will examine it very seriously today. There is an illusion that you need to let go to make room for something new. It is, of course, a social illusion. People talk about it a great deal. Many say that supposedly you cannot find a new business because you haven't closed the old one yet. Or you can't find a new job because you are still holding on to this one. Or you don't have a relationship because you are still remembering your old relationship. Here I always give the example—I always give it—of a mother with ten children and a mother with one.

Does that mean a person cannot give love to ten children? That, to show real love to a child, the child has to be an only child? Does it mean you cannot grieve over someone from your past and come to love forty new people at the same time? Who told you that, after you stop grieving over an old boyfriend or woman, husband or wife, or an old job, let it go, and find something new, you won't keep suffering even while you have it? That you won't keep suffering with it? And why couldn't you have the capacity both to suffer and, at the same time, not to suffer? If we look at professional life and business, many people are fixated on the idea that they can have one business or one job. That is the message society sends. It is like that extreme example I just gave about loving one person. Why can't I love five hundred women? I have one wife, one relationship between a man and a woman, specifically an intimate relationship. But why can't I love five hundred women? Why can't I be friends with five hundred women? And through that love for other women, increase my love for my wife even more? Again, this is very important for people who like to make jokes or don't fully take in what is being said: I am not talking about sexual love. I am simply talking about love for a person.

Who put a numerical limit on it in the first place? The same goes for business and work. Who set a numerical limit for you, saying you cannot have thirty businesses and that you won't be able to handle them? I know an enormous number of people with many businesses who are not at all intelligent, and their businesses work. There are extremely intelligent people who don't have a single one. Not a single one at all. This idea of "freeing up energy" is very often a construction that is highly illusory, terribly illusory. People essentially want to pull in an outcome that hasn't happened yet. They say, "I want to make room for another person." That doesn't exist. They want to do it, pull a future outcome into the present, and already feel good. People draw up plans, draw up illusions. I'll earn money, and then I'll be free. I'll earn money, and then we'll have a child. They draw up illusions. They are precisely in a state of illusion. It is the same as what someone says about the past, only the other way around: they don't want to let go; they want to pull the past in and keep living it now. Now let's examine a very important structure: why do you want to do this? Why? To forget the past. The thing is, when you start with the motive, this is a universal, incredibly powerful solution.

When your motive for wanting to forget the past is to make yourself feel better, stop suffering, or secure a good future, that is the ego's motive. When you want to do something for the ego, know that you will always lose. You are guaranteed to lose. You are guaranteed to lose. You will never in your life be able 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 tell yourself, "I want to forget the past." The only thing you can do is do it because it is true and right. But to do that, you have to understand that forgetting the past really is true and right. And does it need to be forgotten? Is the truth to forget it, or should you remember it now? If you want to truly understand your past, your future, and your dependencies, the first thing to do is examine your motivation. At that moment, you are not building any illusions; you are perceiving reality as it is. Interestingly, as soon as you begin moving into that state of perception, the very problem of the past begins to disappear. I have seen an enormous number of situations in spiritual gatherings and sessions, and in discussions in general, where you discuss a problem with someone. There was a problem, and twenty minutes later, there is no problem.

Nothing has changed except the conversation. If situations like that happen to you from time to time, or can happen, it is very important to pay attention to them and understand that you are, in effect, in a completely uncontrolled state of your own delusions, your own illusions, and your own problems. The thing is, you have lived an enormous life in the past, and you should ask yourself: why am I clinging to these people I lost, but not those people? I grieve deeply over these deaths, but not those. I remember these events, but not those. Why do I remember this teacher and cling to how good it was with them, while I don't remember that other teacher at all, don't remember what they look like? This immediately reveals a certain irrationality in your perception. Because if you really needed to cling to everything, to the entire past, then let's cling to all of it. I suggest clinging to your entire past, then, instead of exaggerating the importance of particular events and trying to replace them. Dependence on a person, on events, on past perceptions, on states, on projects: this dependence is no different from heroin addiction. Many people will simply draw a distorted conclusion for themselves, saying, "On the whole, it is normal for me to depend on this person.

It is normal for me to remember this person. It is normal for me to remember them this way. It is normal for me to depend on the apartment I used to live in. It is normal for me to depend on the city where I used to be." But this dependence—again, you simply need to examine it calmly.

This word, "dependence." You can depend on a memory, an image, an illusion. Who creates the dependence? The person you are dependent on, or do you create dependence for yourself and for the other person? It is astonishing: when you tell people that, by remembering someone else and being unable to let them go, they create a dependence directed toward that person, and the other person suffers, they don't believe it. They feel, "How can that be?" This is a very important structure. When you create dependence for another person, you generate an incredibly extensive chain of cause and effect. You create an enormous karmic layer, you manipulate that person, and you will have to work through it and answer for it, even if that dependence is not formed on the level of material things but on the level of your thoughts and your inner state. What is the problem with the past and working through the past for most people? For the most part, people don't want to acknowledge that everything will end. If you are suffering now over an old job, know that you can suffer like that an infinite number of times again, because everything will end. Your new, different job will end too. Every relationship you have with absolutely anyone will end, including your children and your parents.

Everything will end. Your presence in a particular season will end, in a particular year will end. Everything will end. Everything always ends. People live in a flash of time, without fully realizing that they actually have a broad, large life. I am not even talking about their failure to realize that they have a spiritual being, a spiritual realm, and that their life doesn't end when they die. Even without entering that discussion, without looking into it, at least consider that you still have twenty, thirty, or forty years ahead of you. What will happen next? There is so much uncertainty there. A person sits there not knowing how to pay the mortgage in three months. They don't know where they will live in two months. They don't know whether they will be hired or fired. Their problems are endless. What do you mean, what will happen in thirty years? Thirty years from now is some assembled abstraction. Often there is a vision board hanging on the wall too. All of this immerses people in very particular negative states. Our task here today is to find inner meaning for ourselves, an inner state of peace and freedom, so that the past that should not remain in our memories can be let go of easily. So that the past that creates distress can be held in awareness.

So that you can be calmly aware of it, and it has no power over you. Do you really want to go back to a job when you can't even cope with the memory of that job? What kind of job is that? Who has power over whom? The task is not to forget a person, replace one with another, or make room, but to see: why am I holding on to this past? What motive lies behind my desire to let go? What dependence have I built for myself? When you are seeking to understand, there are no categories of good and bad. They don't exist. When you seek to understand what is happening, the ego is not being formed. Leave yourself simply with the intention to understand. That will give you freedom at that very moment. At that very moment, the past will begin to dissolve. At that very moment, the past will become important to the extent that it should be.