Liberation is the commonest term of spiritual jargon used by people seeking enlightenment. I have grown to mistrust this word as it comes with the notion of living in a ‘blissed-out’ state, free from pain. It’s a lofty intellectual ideal that seems cold and sterile and is essentially part of the effort of trying to escape from the story of me.
The myth of enlightenment promises that the world with all its slings and arrows will no longer hurt. This doesn’t happen, the story without me doesn’t always go the way the ego wants and it has just as much pain. The story does take on a more sheer quality though, it becomes like a diaphanous layer over love, life’s foundation. The translucent fabric of all that appears is also the infinite in disguise.
The word freedom seems less tainted. To talk about absolute freedom though, we almost have to redefine the meaning of the word freedom or at least look at ideals that have developed around it. Our view of freedom has been tainted with the notion of personal or political gain. Politically freedom has been something to fight for, people struggle against tyranny and oppression.
Infinite freedom is remembering that you are love. In knowing this all other knowing is undone. Everything that exists has been given the freedom to express and everything is an expression or an aspect of love, even hate, war, abuse, greed, envy etc. This is not what the individual is looking for.
Freedom is here and now and all around it is the reality in which we live but the individual person doesn’t recognize it as they are expecting to find a utopia that is completely different, more like personal freedom.
A person looks inside and finds fault and then they look at the world and find countless faults with that too. Freedom is seeing the world as it is, with all the apparent pain and suffering and the sense that this is not some big experiment gone wrong, we do not live in a mistake. The separate individual is the critic. That is not to say that there can never be judgment and response to events in the story.
Divine freedom is freedom from the tyranny of thinking that you are separate. This freedom is more like coming than thinking; it includes everything that has an earthy, gritty reality. Actual freedom is not the ideal or thought in the same way that the fantasy of unrequited love is not real love. Freedom is a sense of humour to spot the mischief of the eternal;
Freedom is unconditional love
Unconditional love is the life force of everything. All types of music are allowed to be played not just romantic sonatas but music that is chilling with horror. Unconditional love does not discriminate. It’s not like the shadow of love shared between people. In dividing life up into smaller pieces an individual believes that they can own love, that they have a finite resource of this inside themselves to give as they choose. The world is not really divided in this way. Unconditional love is the magnificent power of the entire universe that could wipe us all out in a heart beat.
Life is God in drag
But it is more than creator or destroyer- these words are attempting to describe the world, not as something that is separate from the creative energy. If the infinite is like an actor dressed up for a part, one being is also the costume and the stage. Our world is nothing dressed up as something. We are the music, the instrument and the musician.
When self-identity ceases then the unity that is life is seen.
For the infant there is no concept of ‘I’ and there is no world outside. Then a sense of separation arises and self-consciousness develops. As an adult there feels a nagging doubt and you feel incomplete. You seek and long for wholeness. Through over identification with thought you have overlooked ‘being life’ as if paradise has been lost.
Consciousness or awareness is impersonal. What you are is the essence and source of this world of matter and everything that is in it. Liberation is an energetic shift from ‘being me’ to ‘Being’.
This message is simple and ordinary there is nowhere to go and nothing to do. You are already that which you seek. There is no separate self. You are the awareness that is appearing as the story from the perspective of an individual.