FREEDOM FROM FREEDOM
Dissolve the seeker of freedom,
and all will be found timelessly free.
To desire liberation is to believe in separation. That which was never bound has no need of being liberated. When we discover our true nature, we have acquired nothing, and yet the felt sense is one of freedom. Openness has no agenda, no goal, and does not proclaim any identity. It does not elevate formlessness over form. It is not seeking to maintain a position, does not call itself a subject or an object. It is free of concepts and free from the “me.” Because it is not separating itself from life in any form, it is free to have the experiences called “birth” and “death” within its unborn nature. It is free to play at “two-ness.” The Heart that is boundlessly awake is free even from freedom; it is not attempting to escape from anything.
Truth liberates. It is dependent on nothing, has no cause, and has nothing to defend. To glimpse truth is relative easy; to see into our mind’s untruth is more difficult. We all want to know Truth, but how many want to pay the price of illusion—the illusion that our mind can figure out the Mystery, that life should move for a “me” according to “my” desires, that we are “right” and others are “wrong,” that freedom means maintaining a “state,” that we can be free and still be “in control”?
How much freedom do we want? This is an important question, because once there is awakening, we realize we can only be truth. Being what we are is not the same as thinking about it or talking about it. To be truth is to see through our mind’s illusions, the ones that we continually find fascinating or entertaining, the ones we continually exchange for the peace of our being. To be truth is to move from what is undivided. There will be many moments when this is not the experience, however, as we begin to see more and more clearly our habit patterns. Awakened seeing has the clarity of discernment but is infused with the compassionate understanding of the Heart.
WORKING WITH HABIT PATTERNS
All of us have habit patterns that come from both our experiences in this lifetime and whatever karmic threads we are carrying. These habit patterns may be held deeply in the neurobiology of the brain, in our thoughts, in our emotional or subtle body, and in our physical sensations. When we notice ourselves accepting as a “truth” about ourself one or more of these habit patterns, we can first accept that the feelings we are having are here; they feel real. But we may begin to see that the trigger for these feelings in the current circumstance is not the real reason for the reaction.
It is in compassionately allowing and then looking deeply into our actions or reactions that we may find certain knots of resistance and separation. When we do not judge them, but rather hold them in the Heart of Awareness with compassion, we may deepen our understanding of our habitual patterns of beliefs or emotions. When we become more interested in what is true than in judging ourselves for our conditioned views, these knots begin to loosen—from the deep and compassionate seeing alone. We may need reminding that habit patterns do not create, affirm, or define a separate “self.”
Even if you experience hard, tight contractions, know that they are much like a baseball—seemingly hard on the outside, but only made up of layers of yarn wound over a central core. In the case of our contractions, threads of memory, feelings, beliefs, and interpretations are seemingly wound over a core of emptiness, each ultimately discovered to be quite insubstantial when seen from Presence. If we are deeply interested in awakening to Truth, we will not spend a lifetime trying to unwind every thread but rather will seek to find out what is the core, the truth of who we are. We will seek to discover what lies at the root of our idea of a separate self.
You are not a problem to be “solved.” You are not your time-bound wounds. You are not your thoughts about a “self.” You may want to find more skillful ways of living or relating, but trying to rid yourself of each unwanted aspect simply fuels your idea that you are a separate person who must strive to be different in order to be what you have always been—divine, whole, pure in essence, beautiful inside and out, free to simply be, deeply loved by the love you are, and free to express that love in your living.
FREEDOM FROM THE KNOWN
When we are free from the known,
we are free to live from the Unknown.
Are we willing to consider that we do not live in freedom because we are afraid to step out of what is known into the unknown? The mind lives in what it knows. It lives in thought, in duality, in its remembered, then projected, pains and pleasures. What is it like to live in the unconditioned? To live from the unborn? Life in its totality blooms, blows, moves, grows, gives birth, and dies in its own continual and undivided flow. Are we free enough to open to the flow, whatever it may contain?
To live in the unknown is our freedom. Yet this freedom is not at all what the mind imagines it will be. The mind believes that its security depends upon knowing something and that spiritual realization will be the ultimate state of knowing—knowing who we are, what we should do, how we should act. The irony is that our deepest freedom is really a state of continual insecurity for the mind that is searching for a place to arrive, a position to maintain, or something to “know.” Peace is beyond the known and much simpler.
When we are telling the truth, we cannot say with any certainty that we know what the next moment will bring. We do not know how life will move, what events, thoughts, feelings, pleasures, or pains will appear or disappear. When we begin to sincerely investigate the question of who or what we truly are beyond our ideas, here, too, we eventually have to admit, “I don’t really know.” In the face of the mysteries of life and the vast silent Mystery of our Being, how do we respond? Do we want freedom more than we want life to look a certain way? Are we being life, or are we struggling to control life? A student once asked Adyashanti:
“Isn’t enlightenment the ultimate state of knowing?”
No, it is the ultimate state of Being; knowing is the price.1
FREEDOM TO HAVE OUR HUMAN EXPERIENCES
When we encounter the vast openness and freedom of our true nature, understandably, our thinking mind then imagines it must become “only awareness,” or it must “remember awareness,” as if awareness were an object one could obtain and hold. Mind then begins to judge all human experience as somehow separate from the truth of formless awareness or Spirit. But this is more subtlety of ego, attempting to “become” what the Self already is. Can we simply notice that what is awake is already aware of this very moment, this movement of mind or emotion, this very experience?
Out of the infinite potential of our true nature, all phenomena arise, manifesting as Being. In awareness, the “ten thousand things” each have the freedom to be what they are, including the ten thousand moments of our experience that pop up in our Consciousness on any given day. Out of the dark womb of the unborn arises all that we know as Being, as form, as energy, and what is awake to all moments, all experiences, all phenomena. None of us is separate; none of us is where we do not belong; none of us is more or less advanced as essence. There is only God, only Buddha nature, only the Heart of Awareness. All forms, including our own, arise from the same ground and manifest the same universal awareness. In the openness of our true nature, we are free to be a human form, a feeling form, a thought form, a moment of anxiety or sadness—free to be real instead of needing to be perfect.
Without having to protect a self-image and without the fear that we are not “spiritual” or “love worthy,” we are no longer pretending we do not feel what we feel or that life should only look a certain way. When we do not take ourselves to be separate from the action of Totality, we are neither blaming ourselves nor congratulating ourselves, neither feeling guilt nor needing to forgive—unless, of course, we do. Our actions are not always totally on the mark.
Compassion arises naturally, but it may not always be emotional compassion. Sometimes compassion moves to draw one to a deeper truth, a deeper authenticity. Those who are familiar with Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, know that the sword of wisdom and compassion cuts through illusion in ways that may not always feel comfortable to one’s egoic identifications. Yet there is a great compassion of clear seeing in the midst of our very human experiences.
When we are truly living in the openness of not-knowing mind, we are not attached to the absolute dimension or the relative dimension. We are awake to whichever side of the coin is showing up in any given moment, knowing they are not separate. We have discovered that the essence of our ordinary mind cannot be separated from the essence of awakened mind. Thus we are free to have the experiences that appear in our human incarnation and to see that the truth and beauty of what we are is found in the most ordinary moments of our life.
THE EXTRAORDINARY WITHIN THE ORDINARY
Greatness hides in smallness
Simplicity in complexity.
Nakedness has no preference
for the clothing that
wants to cover it.2
Concealed within the ordinary tasks, relationships, landscapes, and events of our everyday life lies the extraordinary. Habitual patterns of perception and response obscure our vision and dull our sensitivity to the miraculous nature of life unfolding in all its rich detail. We wait impatiently for a sense of the extraordinary to make itself known in our lives while failing to notice that the peace, love, presence, and beauty we yearn for are already present.
When we are truly open and deeply present to the moment of our experience—any experience—something amazing begins to happen. What once seemed hidden becomes visible. Simple acts of daily life can touch our heart and bring joy and clarity. The ground on which we stand appears holy, and so does the turnip we are peeling, or the person sitting before us, or the warm, fragrant tea we are sipping. Mindfulness of the ordinary brings experience of the extraordinary. As Mother Teresa put it, we may not be able to do great things, but “we can do small things with great love.” It simply requires a shift from the mind to the true heart.
It is never life as it is that is boring or mundane but our thoughts that render it so. It is not our life that is constricted but our minds. It is not our daily activity that makes the extraordinary seem distant but our failure to be present to the ordinary moments as they appear in their exquisite variety and fullness.
FREEDOM FROM OUR OWN FREEDOM
When we have ceased striving for a different or better experience, ceased efforting to be someone else or somewhere else, ended the mind’s incessant demand for some extraordinary state, we are no longer attached to an “experience” called freedom, no longer wanting to be “done” with our humanity. Rather, we realize that our freedom is to simply be what we are. Struggling for a goal or for an identity has ceased, not because the mind has figured out how to stop the struggle, but because we are intimate with that which has no need for struggling, no need for an identity built on striving. We are simply, naturally, and without fanfare here for what is here.
What is our response to the gift of freedom? Gratitude. Unending gratitude for the preciousness of this human life, for the unborn Spirit that is our essence through and through, for the mix of both light and darkness in experience, for the moment of this breath.