Real Freedom

Enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is the idea that freedom is a core American value. But the question remains – What is freedom? I think there are three stages of freedom, and until we carefully differentiate between them, all of our well-intentioned dialogue about this vital issue is doomed to end in frustration and confusion.

            Let’s call the first and most rudimentary form of freedom adolescent freedom. At this stage of our development freedom simply means doing whatever you feel like doing. As children we are ringed round with authoritarian structures dictating our every move. Adolescents necessarily rebel against these external control-mechanisms as they evolve toward personal autonomy. I think we can all agree that adolescent rebellion is a good thing, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. It’s how people are made. But personal evolution is rarely neat and tidy.

            It turns out that this first stage of freedom isn’t very free. As adolescents we are driven largely by unconscious needs and the forces of peer pressure. We only think we are free. Then we grow a little older and wiser.

          At the second stage of freedom we mature beyond hedonism and learn that our best self-interest is often served by postponing immediate pleasures for larger long-term gains. And on an even deeper level we learn that our best self-interest is entirely interwoven with the interests of others. We learn that there is no me without we – that there is no such thing as private happiness or private freedom. Our freedom and happiness cannot flourish if others are imprisoned and miserable. As Nelson Mandela wrote, “To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” At this second, mature stage of freedom our separate sense of self grows translucent, transparent even, as our sense of interdependency expands. We begin to see ourselves not merely as individuals, but as a part of a whole. We are evolving toward the third and highest state of freedom – awakened freedom.

            In awakened freedom we drop more and more of our cravings and attachments, we get better at accepting current conditions without resistance or resentment, and we move from reactivity toward acceptance. Spiritual teacher Krishnamurti called this state of consciousness “choiceless awareness” – to experience reality as it is without the neurotic compulsion to have an opinion about everything. Asked once what his secret was, Krishnamurti replied, “I don’t mind what happens.” Imagine how freeing that would feel.

          Awakened freedom means shifting from the consciousness of scarcity to the consciousness of abundance. It does not mean receiving everything I want, but realizing freedom from want.

            Awakened freedom means allowing the ebb and flow of life to rise and fall unabated without taking it personally. Sometimes we feel strong. Sometimes we feel weak. Sometimes we receive joy unbidden, other times a nameless sadness overwhelms us. It’s o.k. In awakened freedom even our sadness becomes a friendly companion. As contemporary teacher Adyashanti puts it, “Real freedom is freedom from the demand to feel good all the time.” We realize that we are deeper than our thoughts, deeper even than our pain. In the boundlessness beneath the thought stream, we are irrevocably free.

            Awakened freedom mean relinquishing the illusion of control, slipping into the unbridled miracle of the present moment, and resolving to walk through this brief, beautiful life awash in wonder and willing to love.

[This piece was originally published in my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2018 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permision.]

Wild and Precious Life

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

                                                                        ~ Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

It is the sacred task of poets, songwriters, and artists of all stripes to awaken us to our own magnificence. They plumb our depths and announce the ugly impotence of our fear. They celebrate our breathtaking bravery in the face of certain annihilation. They illuminate the beauty of the world with light drawn from the funeral pyre of our grieving. They shadow us as we carry out our appointed tasks and pop up suddenly through the cracks of our inattention. They inspire us on the climb and balm our wounds. Artists use images normally consigned to dreams and bathe the waking world with their strangeness, eliciting melancholy, memory, hope, breathless longing, and wild aspiration. Were it not for the lifting power of art we would bog down in the minutiae of our pedestrian duties, little more than cogs in the machines we have made. Art saves. Art awakens the grandeur of our significance. Art gives us a reason to go on.        

 And it does it by asking all the right questions.

            Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

            Not everything is possible. We don’t have forever. Most of the elements of life are handed to us. We didn’t ask for most of this. We did not choose our race, ethnicity, or national origin. We did not choose our parents or brothers and sisters. We did not choose the century we were born in. We did not choose our gender or sexual orientation. We did not choose the shape or height of our bodies, nor our hair and eye color. We did not choose the economic class of our family of origin. We did not choose the city, state, neighborhood, or house we grew up in. We did not choose the other kids in our neighborhood and in our classrooms, the kids that would become the change agents in our lives, the kids that would spark our interest in music, or books, or baseball, or drugs, or surfing, or camping, or crime. We did not choose our genetic proclivities for introversion or extroversion or a hundred other traits. All of these choices were made for us. But within this rich tapestry of context we still had free will and an infinite array of options before us. We don’t control the weather, other people, or the past. But we’re radically free to choose our thoughts, words, actions, and attitudes. And now that many of us are all grown up, with fewer years ahead than behind us, we see as clear as glass that our own choices had a bigger impact on our life than all of the given conditions in which that freedom played out.

            The bracing and inspiring heroism of the human experience is the capacity to wrest freedom from the fate we are handed. To wallow in the tired and false dilemma – is life meaningless or meaningful? – is to miss the point entirely. Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. It is we who impose meaning on the phenomenal realm by the heft of our choices. Like sea mist rising from a jagged shoreline, meaning arises from the vigor of our engagement with the travails of our lives.           

In another poem Mary Oliver asks a different question: “Are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” It is an accusation. It is a question meant to catch us unaware, and nearly shame us into real self-examination. It’s pretty in your face. Artists are like that.

            The good news is that there’s plenty of inspiration lying at our feet, at our fingertips, within earshot, and hidden in plain sight. The more we struggle with real questions, the clearer it becomes. The jewel of the world is polished by our suffering, burnished by our longing, and laid bare by our awkward flailing. All around us are clues to the infinite value of the nameless mystery. When we see with eyes made new by an open heart we see a world worthy of love. Confusion gives way to clarity. Woundedness gives way to healing. Paralysis and ennui give way to fluid fascination. We begin moving in the direction in which we are called, not sure of every step, but filled with an unearned conviction that all of this suddenly matters, and much more than we ever thought before. In our sleep everything was blanketed with the fog of unconsciousness. But as we awaken, the whole world awakens with us.

            Our boredom, our restlessness, our dissatisfaction – these are a call to action. They impel us to take risks we previously and studiously avoided. I don’t know what we were afraid of, or what we were protecting, but our suffering drives us onward. We don’t fully know the dangers that lay ahead, but they can’t be any worse than this sadness, this frustration, and this fear that we’re wasting our lives. Eventually the conviction arises that what lies ahead is worth the risk. Soon we viscerally and completely understand the words of Joseph Campbell when he wrote, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” We learn to take risks and leap where prudence counsels us to wait and hold back. The darkness of the unknown, the fear of failure, and the threat of annihilation are no match for the joy that draws us forth. “Find the place inside you where there’s joy, and the joy will burn out the pain,” wrote Campbell. And he’s right. Our joy is always brighter, stronger, surer, and more real than any so-called obstacle. Joy trumps fear and pain every time.

            Looking back we see that our blunders and weakest moments were signposts that showed us how to navigate the path ahead. As Campbell wrote, “Where you stumble, there lie your treasures.” Without our failures we would have utterly lost our way.

            Too many times we got it wrong. We misread our mistakes. We misread our fears. We ran from both ashamed, leaving unredeemed treasures scattered on the road behind us. It’s time to get it right. It’s time to let our loving show us the way toward our own best life. It’s time to stop crawling along on our bellies, apologizing for being alive, worrying about what other people will think. Let them go. They have their own roads, their own standards, their own struggles. Life is wild and precious, as Mary Oliver wrote, and a treasure too valuable to squander on fear and misgivings. There is a meadow or a field or a forest or a seashore right outside your door – go there and listen. Really listen. Sit on the ground and wait. Let the flight of birds and the paths of clouds point the way. Let the wind through the trees be a song of your unfolding. And in the stillness hear your own heart asking you to finally, firmly, and lovingly claim your place in the heartbreaking beauty of the world.

The Seven Best Things

There are many wondrous things to behold in this brief and brilliant life. But of all the ways the infinite universe baffles our senses, defies our explanations, and sustains our lives, these are the seven best things.

1. Freedom

Freedom is both a heartening gift and a terrifying responsibility. It comes in many forms – freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech. But behind every form of freedom is a single guiding principle – as rational human beings, each of us possesses the tools to best determine the course of our life. This optimistic assessment stands up to close scrutiny, which is not to say that everyone always makes the best decisions, whether for themselves or for the interests of the community. Still, our humanism demands it. It is a profoundly loving act to grant another their freedom. When we remove the hindrances to freedom we honor our highest calling and facilitate the fullest possible expression of our inherent greatness.

2. Love

In the game of life love trumps every other hand. Nothing matters more than the sustenance love offers. What is best in us grows strongest in its nurturing light. Each of us is called by our natures to both receive and offer this eternal spring. Love takes many forms and finds its way through innumerable channels, penetrating even the most hardened barriers. Yet in the end, love is just a word, a word we’ve chosen to signify the interconnective tissue of Being itself. Love is the name we’ve given to the nurturing energy of life – a name for the fundamentally nameless. Love informs our simple kindness and emboldens our struggle for justice. It is the yearning of the sapling for the sun, and the longing of an infant for her mother. We reach out for each other, sometimes skillfully, sometimes not, knowing instinctually that love is the food that sustains all of our souls.

3. Truth

Truth is a word we use for that which is ultimately real. Whenever the word “truth” is used the first question that pops up is, “Whose truth?” But here we are not using the word in such a pedestrian fashion, as if unlimited and transcendent Truth could be contained in any single proposition. Truth statements, bound as they are by language and thought, are necessarily partial and limited. This is not a debate. We are simply using the word truth to point to the ground of Being itself, beyond all thoughts and forms. In traditions willing to personify this ultimate reality we hear the many names of God. In traditions less interested in personification words like Brahman and Dao emerge. But beyond the names and forms lay a simple, universal source. Because of the limitations of human perception and cognition, we must make peace with the fact that our knowledge of truth remains a work in progress, comprised of little more than fleeting insights, partial glimmers, and a general sense of direction. A sailboat never moves in a straight line. It moves to and fro zigzagging across the moving surface of the water. So too we move dialectically across the landscape of our collective understandings, trusting the overall direction more than the momentary tack. Truth is the harbor calling us home.

4. Beauty

One of the great contributions of the Renaissance was its assertion that Beauty is Truth, and that God reveals His infinite perfection through the pleasing forms of this world, both natural and created. This revolutionary declaration simultaneously elevated the role of the artist in society and redeemed nature from the degraded state to which it had been assigned by the medieval church. Artists were no longer seen as decorative laborers or worse, liars, despite their crafty use of illusions and metaphors, but as geniuses whose vision and expertise opened up the gates of heaven. And celebrating natural beauty as a divine realm paved the way for the later Romantic and environmental movements. Beauty is a language to be read with the faculty of intuition. And intuition is that faculty of knowing best equipped to apprehend truth. Our love of art and our awe before nature enlivens and nourishes our moral sentiment, strengthening our courage to honor truth and embody love. Beauty is our source and our soul. Without it we would whither like flowers cut from the vine.

5. Grace

Grace is a word normally associated with Christianity. But when we lift it off the platform of a single faith-tradition we find a boundless, universal phenomenon that defies easy explanation. In personified theologies like Christianity grace is God’s way of supporting everything in creation. In the less centralized theology of India dharma expresses the sacred sustenance that upholds the fabric of reality. Even atheists and agnostics know that they live within a natural order whose interconnected and mutually supportive structures do more for us than we could ever do for ourselves. We do not make the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food that sustains our life, or the sun that grows our food. In every way we are supported by forces not of our own making, and by the work of thousands of people around us, most of whom we’ll never meet. Grace is a simple word for a beautiful and complicated thing. And without it, none of us would for one moment continue to exist.

6. Life

On our worst days we forget, but on our best days we remember. Life is a priceless gift. And like a birthday gift, its bounty is only revealed when we tear off the pretty packaging and dig deep into what’s inside. Being alive means feeling everything, the pain and the glory. Despite all our setbacks and suffering we know it’s all worth it. We would endure a thousand lonely, hollow days for that one golden moment, that single breakthrough, that shattering illumination. And when we grow a little older and settle down we learn to stop chasing those moments and realize that they come unbidden to those who know how to wait, grow still, and see the world anew with each breath. This is it. And we’re glad it is. A self-actualized life informed by freedom, love, truth, beauty, and grace is the Holy Grail, nirvana, and the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the treasure of the quest, the prize of the sages, the rapture of the saints, and the birthright of every beating heart.

7. You

None of the first six best things would have any power at all were it not for our ability to perceive and experience them. As your gratitude for these priceless jewels rises and informs your thoughts, your actions, your rituals, and your relationships, add yourself to the list of miraculous wonders. For some reason the universe decided to express itself as you, in this time and place, and imbue you with all its consciousness and creative capacity. The worst offense is to waste your life. Beginning now, vow to honor these seven gifts by removing for yourself and for as many others as possible any and all impediments to self-actualization. It is our birthright to be amazing. And it is our sacred responsibility to get out of our own way.