This is Freedom

One thing that vipassana meditation teaches is how to dis-embed oneself from experience. All experience is made an object, and by virtue of making it object, we know that the we, the subject, are not that. The subject—or more accurately, the sense of being a subject—moves to a higher and more subtle position, until that new position has been made object. And on-and-on this process goes until there is, as one of my teachers told me, “just the dance of experience.” There’s nowhere left to go, and thus there’s nothing left to do. We could call that awakening.

One side of this awakened understanding has to do with seeing that I am no experience. I am none of it, because all of “it” can be seen. The other side, however, is that I am ALL of it. I have no fixed position, including being behind experience, and thus I am the totality of experience itself. The potential problem with vipassana, is that if we focus too much on dis-embedding from experience, then we can get in fixed patterns of fearing being “identified.” Non-duality is not about being completely dis-embedded from experience, that’s the formless Witness. Rather it’s letting Reality flow between the formless and form, and aligning our life with the fact that neither is an absolute refuge, and conversely that neither is to be feared. Emptiness and form are one. If we fear being embedded, and we feel we aren’t free while engaging with life, then we aren’t truly free are we? Freedom is not only “freedom from” but also “freedom to.” Freedom to be and freedom to become.

That’s why the focus on Nirvana being completely apart from Samsara was undermined by later Buddhist schools. And that’s also why the Bodhisattva’s vow was such a revolutionary perspective. Because with the Bodhisattva there wasn’t a contraction around suffering, rather a full embrace of it. And still, there is a recognition that I am none of this. This new paradox, which isn’t a paradox at all, is the crux of a non-dual understanding of life. And this understanding calls forth from us, what Jack Kornfield calls, “the wisdom of uncertainty.” We can’t rely on awareness alone, as awareness is only one aspect of a multi-faceted gem. Nor can we take ourselves to be only this experience, even in all its subtlety. Rather we must let the dance of “not this” and “this to” flow back-and-forth, privileging neither… letting both be as they are. This is freedom.