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.]

Solvitur Ambulando

Solvitur ambulando is a Latin phrase meaning “it is solved by walking.” According to legend it was first uttered by the Greek philosopher Diogenes. After listening patiently to another philosopher’s ridiculous “proof” that motion was impossible, Diogenes simply got up and walked away, muttering “solvitur ambulando.” If ancient Greeks had mics, that’d be a mic drop.

            Since then, solvitur ambulando has taken on a much wider meaning. Countless poets, essayists, and philosophers have cited the aphorism as proof of the benefit of a robust walk. But its usefulness extends even beyond that.

            Human beings evolved on their feet. For hundreds of thousands of years we walked everywhere, all day, every day. Our bodies were designed to move. And yet in this mechanized age we sit for hours at a time, often all day, walking only to get another cup of coffee, or pee the last one out. And it’s killing us – obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and a host of other problems shorten our lives. After centuries of increasing life-expectancy, we are the first generation in a long, long time to die sooner than our ancestors. As health experts put it, sitting is the new smoking.

            Beyond physical wellness, walking significantly improves our mental health. Depression, anxiety, and other maladies of the mind shrink beneath the grandeur of a wide open sky. There’s something about leaving the confines of your four walls and stepping out onto the path through your village. Whether on a nature trail, a suburban lane, or a downtown street, walking reintroduces you to the community of things – the world that gave birth to you and everything you know, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you are. Coming out of isolation and sauntering far afield brings you home to yourself.

            Walking through my neighborhood the other day I bumped into a neighbor I hadn’t seen in three years. We had a lot of catching up to do. Thirty minutes later I felt as though I’d read an entire novel rich with pathos, grief, recognition, and laughter – and I’ll wager she felt the same. We need each other. We build each other. We are each other. I felt deeply my own sorrows and joys in hers. The rain-wet sidewalk, the bare winter trees, and the leaden sky felt warm and safe. I was at home in my own skin, and in this beautiful, painful, hopeful world. By coming to know strangers, we are no longer strangers to ourselves.

            And so we come to the deeper meaning of solvitur ambulando – that there is wordless healing in ambulation, that is, movement. We overestimate our intellectual capacity to solve all of our problems at the level of thought. Rational discourse, refined conceptual thinking, and intellectual discernment yield many fruits. But they have limits. When it comes to the really big problems – the meaning of life, death, love, and everything in between – we can’t think our way out of a wet paper bag. When words and thoughts fail us, take to your feet. Move. Feel the problem shift, soften, open, and dissolve all on its own. I don’t know why it works. It just does.

            In an even broader sense, solvitur ambulando conveys the power of embodiment – that wisdom isn’t something you know, it’s something you are. Truth-claims made by others, no matter how compelling, shimmer and fade like ghosts until you test them in the laboratory of your own life. Only through action does the truth take form.           

You don’t understand cooking until you cook. You don’t taste the challenges and joys of marriage until you walk down the aisle. You can’t criticize the creative product of another until you’ve dared to risk offering your own creation on the same stage. Only when we walk the walk do we earn the right to talk.

            Even our moral positions benefit from the deep-tissue empathy of embodiment. Until you have faced an unwanted pregnancy yourself, your position on the legality or morality of abortion falls short, no matter how learned or principled. Good people disagree on the rectitude of terminating pregnancies. But until you live it, your words carry the taint of sanctimony and grandstanding.

            Out beyond the platitudes of the sermon or the pronouncements of the lecture hall there is a messy world of complicated interconnections, wordless realizations, and untraceable sensibilities. We ought to learn how to do better at leaving each other alone to the authority of our own embodied knowing. Life is hard. We make it harder by interfering with the natural pathway wisdom often travels – the inner road of our soul-wanderings.

            As each of us walks through this world, we see what we see, feel what we feel, and come to know what we come to know – by walking. In the alchemy of time, substantive wisdom arises like steam from the cauldron of our suffering. Life is going to hurt. There is no short cut. You have to walk right through the fire.

            Get a dog. The rescue shelters are full of them. Bring one home. Walk her every day, rain or shine, whether you feel like it or not. Let a dog reconnect you to your neighborhood, your neighbors, the natural world, and your own latent joy. There are clouds to trace, fields to cross, and trees to interlace with your meandering. There are shores along the lake or sea that never show themselves the same way twice.   

            In high school I sometimes struggled to pay attention to my teachers. My mind often wandered. (How ironic that I would one day become a teacher myself, my work as a lecturer deeply informed by the lived experience of how boring school can be). One night, while trying to do my homework, I chanced upon a poem by Walt Whitman called “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” I felt as though I’d been hit by lightning.

            When I heard the learn’d astronomer

            When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

            When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

            When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

            How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

            Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

            In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

            Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

            I closed my book, turned off the light, and went for a walk through the silent darkness of my sleepy suburban neighborhood. I never did finish that homework assignment. Whatever problem I was working on remains unsolved, by me anyway. But I have a feeling it solved itself.

            Ultimately, you cannot receive truth second hand. What another proclaims, I must experience myself. So it is that the best advice often falls on deaf ears. Until you have the ears to hear, the most beautiful words are nothing more than clanging cymbals.

Life On Purpose

I didn’t make soil, or blood, or light. I didn’t make the water I drink. I didn’t cause the sun to hang in the sky or the crops to grow. I didn’t design the system by which plants cast off oxygen as a waste product, oxygen that keeps me alive. Nor did I extract the crude oil from the ground and refine it into gasoline to fuel my car. And I wouldn’t, for the life of me, know how to make a car from scratch either.

            I didn’t grow the cotton, weave and dye the cloth, or sew it into these clothes. I didn’t invent language, write the world’s literature, or teach myself how to read. I didn’t discover electricity, design this computer, pave these roads, build this house, or make all the art that lends depth, significance, and beauty to it all.

            My life is supported by countless natural systems, and the work of hundreds of thousands of people who I’ll never meet.

I don’t do anything. I just get up in the morning, put on my pants, drink some coffee, and try to keep up. Everything I do, everything I build, everything I create, is only possible because of the boundlessly supportive universe in which I find myself. All creation is co-creation. There is no such thing as the self-made man. Even if you pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps, somebody else made the bootstraps.

            In Vedanta philosophy these dynamic relationships are known as dharma. The Sanskrit word dharma comes from the root dhri meaning to support, to sustain, or to hold. In its most basic sense, dharma is the supportive nature of universe, including the laws of physics, the maxims of biology, and the breathtaking harmony of all of these systems nested within systems that make life possible. But it doesn’t stop there. Dharma also means the social order, the way human ingenuity weaves a web where all of our contributions intertwine to create sustenance for us all. We are clever builders with opposable thumbs and an insatiable drive to create.

            There is no such thing as insignificant work. From the field hand to the brain surgeon, the cafeteria worker to the Nobel laureate, every human effort matters, because it all exists in an interlocking edifice of inter-being: pull one brick out and the whole thing comes down.

            And now the moral dimension. Dharma imposes an ethical obligation. It’s imperative that we pitch in. In the same way that we are supported, we are morally obligated to take the talents, passions, and abilities we have been given and offer them as contributions to the sustenance of the universe. For some mysterious reason, the sacred formless source of the universe took form as you. Trust the source. Allow the fledgling idea that you are infinitely significant to take flight. There has never before been a human being exactly like you with your sensibilities, talents, and gifts, nor will there ever be again. You’re a one-off. And there must be some reason why the sacred, eternal, formless source of the universe took form as you here in the world of time-bound, embodied forms. You’re needed. There is work to do – work only you can do.   

When seen through this lens, the work that we feel called to do is a sacred calling. Our calling is that still, quiet voice within us nudging us to take risks, think big, and throw ourselves into the flow of our own best life. Something’s tugging us toward self-actualization the way sunlight tugs the branches of trees upward in ever grander expressions of themselves. How do we discover our dharma? Your mind doesn’t know, but your heart does. Your love will lead you to your purpose. As the Sufi poet Rumi put it, “Let yourself be silently drawn by the pull of what you really love.”

            You have eyes. You see the woundedness of the world. You have a heart. You feel the pain of injustice and cruelty. You have ears. You hear the quiet voice of the truth hidden just beneath the din. You have hands and a mind and two strong legs. You can help. In fact, your own happiness depends on it. As we feed we are fed. As we teach we are taught. As we heal we are healed. As we love we are loved. Our joy arises only insofar as we are able to lift the joy of others.

            As you discover the places where your passion meets the needs of the world, you are uncovering your dharma. And when you live in accord with your dharma – when you are true to your sacred purpose – two amazing things happen. One, life gets easier. It gets easier because you feel yourself being lifted. You’re no longer struggling alone. Allies and resources mysteriously show up when you least expect them. And two, the quality of your work elevates. Your work is better now because you are weaving your unique contributions into the supportive outpouring of literally everything else. In cosmic cooperation, our efforts are amplified.

            In chapter three of the Vedanta classic The Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna, “Every selfless act is born from Brahman, the eternal, infinite Godhead. He is present in every act of service. All life turns on this law.” In other words, in the consciousness of surrender to your higher purpose, working not for your own gain but in the consciousness of service, the flow of the universe is pouring forth from you like water from a fountain. You are not doing the work, the work is doing you. In the theologies of the west, where God is personified, a similar concept is found. It only sounds different. Jews, Christians, and Muslims say things like “God, use me. Make me an instrument. Lead me where you want me to be. Tell me what you want me to say. Thy will, not mine be done.” The result is the same – selfless action performed not for self-interest but for the good.

            Peak performance in any endeavor is realized only through self-forgetting. When we are attached to selfish outcomes, we fail. When we put other’s needs first and act for the sheer joy of it with no attachments to specific outcomes, our egos disappear leaving an opening through which the light of the divine reveals itself. We didn’t need to seek greatness, we had only to get out of its way.

            All work is service. We must cultivate the consciousness of seeing our work as a love-offering. This shift will liberate us from the chains of craving and attachment. We’ll no longer be working for a private reward alone. We know we’ll get paid. But we know the wealth and wellness our work co-creates goes far beyond self-interest, far beyond dollars and cents. As we work for these larger purposes, our deeper reward will be the embodied knowledge that we are fast in the arms of a conscious, loving universe. You can’t get that from your 401K. But you should have one of those anyway.