The Path of Freedom
A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.
—lao tzu, tao te ching
To come face-to-face with your constricted self is to face your death. As you recall from the information and exercises you’ve worked through, this is what happens when you die. You face the challenge of letting go into the unknown. Letting go shifts your attention from what appears to be constricted reality and opens you to expanded reality. This shifting takes courage and a genuine achievement of perseverance and strength.
As I described earlier, I was overwhelmingly surprised when I faced death one night while on a meditation retreat. The next day, I made an appointment with my teacher and told her what had happened the night before. I was shocked when the first thing she said to me was, “That took courage.” I knew I had experienced a shift in my awareness of who I was, but I didn’t know how courageous I had been. I thought I had no choice but to face what was creating terror in me. It took months to untangle the repercussions from my confrontation with death. It wasn’t until I began studying, reflecting, and writing about the death process that I realized how strongly attached I had become to my constricted self. So for me to just “let it all go” did take courage and strength. As I now reflect on the attributes of the constricted self, I realize how big a process it is to release this self. What I realized, however, is that the constricted self is not my separate body, my feelings, my reactions, my need to control, or my desire to be someone. This someone I am with a personality seems remarkably complete with mind, body, sensations, emotions, perceptions, and consciousness. The question becomes what is wrong with being “constricted”?
Remember how the personality of the constricted self tricks us into believing it is who we are? You learned its ways in the step-by-step strategically developed person that you’ve become. From working through how your constricted self is constructed, you know its formation, structure, and control over you. But now you are about to embark on the journey to face and detach from it.
The next hurdle for you is to surrender or let go of your constricted self. What a scary thing to ask you to do. Yet it is the same thing that happens when we die. When you surrender the constricted self, it will not vanish or go away, but it will no longer be in control of your life. Your constricted mind appears to be continuous as it goes from one moment to the next. Your brain/mind links your thoughts, your emotions, and your experiences so that there is an appearance of an uninterrupted flow in your life. You will not be unconscious of your constricted self’s behaviors and actions. The great blessing of letting go is that you will have a choice of what behaviors and actions you will choose.
The purpose of the exercises and guided meditations (and the video journeys, if you chose to also incorporate them) has been to help you understand how your constricted self is constructed and how it developed. Now we are to begin on the path of action to change your perception or detach from the constricted self to the awareness of the expanded self. The objective of this next phase of your journey is to live your life in this freedom of awareness of the expanded self before you die. Remember, at your last moment before your death, you want to be in the quality of mind of expanded awareness. While you are alive, you also want to be free and independent of the rise and fall of life’s situations and challenges.
Attention and intention is the practice you will use to begin this new path. Your attention will be placed on who you really are. Your intention is to practice awareness of the expanded self daily. Your daily practice will be instrumental for the fundamental change on the path to freedom. Freedom is being free from reacting to life’s ups and downs and being relaxed, calm, open, spontaneous, and playful.
As you engage in the practices of attention, you will not be engaged in the default mode network (DMN) in your brain. As you recall, DMN is the internal wondering brain that envisions your future, memories, and daydreams. The DMN’s neuronal pathways are the neuronal construct of the constricted self. By the use of focused attention with these practices, you will no longer be creating the DMN. When your mind is focused with attention, you increase the neuronal networks of the task-positive network (TPN). This TPN shifts and generates an evolutionary change in the brain, which will affect the clarity and aliveness of your entire body, mind, and emotional system. You will be at the point where there is “no you,” only a loving awareness. Life will continue to unfold as it always has with its distractions and problems, but you will respond differently.