no one to be
"No matter what happened in the past, we are now solely responsible for our own freedom" writes John Kain.
A liberation in this. A paradox. The word "responsible" can make freedom sound like an endeavor to embark on. Somewhere to reach. Yet as soon as I approach it as such, the freedom I seek eludes me.
Here is the thing. When I think of doing something about freedom, for a future way of being, I pre-suppose there is a me, think of myself as me. Which gets in the way.
Our minds give us thoughts. Yet the thoughts are not us. What I think I am, I am not. Alice in Wonderland: "I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning," she said a little timidly; "but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."
Freedom as a non-endeavor then, not personal. Nothing to hold on to. Energy happening in the moment, moving between formless and form. I know, this is a scary thought. Says Dr. Dan Siegel: "Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. However, energy can change forms. That is the gift we are each given. The energy of the universe is within us. It is in that stardust that makes up each of us.”
This then: A momentary merging of experience and awareness, delight and terror holding hands, aliveness now, forever on the brink of everything. A becoming translucent to the one energy that is continuously seeking to unfold through each of us. Life dancing with itself.
We can trust this, reliably. Which may be easier than I think when I see that perhaps freedom is center, still, vast, full and empty. No one to be, nowhere to go.
An un-layering: "Love says I am everything. Wisdom says I am nothing." (Sri Nisargadatta.)
And for the research:
Daniel J Siegel, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, also writes: "We have experienced things in the past and created generalized summaries or mental models of those events, but we stop seeing clearly because we think we already know what we need to know. Wording the world can make us more distant still from the sensory richness that surrounds us."
Andrew J Taggart offers a simple metric for freedom: "A true sign that you are free is that you can pick up a piece of work, or stitch some things together for a bit, put it all down at the drop of a hat, and summarily forget it." Taggart also inspired large parts of this post, the delusion of us. HT!
Nisargadatta Maharaj (17 April 1897 – 8 September 1981) is the author of I am That.
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