I gave a short talk last week, at Blue Ridge Meditation, on The Great Paradox of Freedom (it’s available there if you want to listen to it).
I decided to take on the topic of Freedom because it has been such an essential principle for me, from the very beginning of my practice. Interestingly, I can see that I wanted to be free, initially, because I felt that I was not already free. There was a distinct feeling that things were not ok, and that in order to be free I needed to transcend, or see beyond, this pervasive sense of “not okness.” I think that this is a developmental phase, that most (if not all) seekers go through. The very nature of seeking is rooted in the thought-and-feeling that things are not already ok, and that there is something, which when attained, will bring the okness that we’ve been looking for. This is the logic of seeking.
But there’s something which starts to flip, or transform, during the awakening process, and that is that this fundamental okness, or inherent freedom (as I refer to it in my talk) is not seen as something to be attained, but rather as the already existing ground of experience. What happens is that this ground comes into focus more. And at some point the ground is unmistakably obvious as part and parcel of what we are. We see that not only is the ground who we are, but everything that arises in experience is a manifestation of that ground, what Eckhart Tolle calls “ripples on the surface of being.” And these ripples are also who we are, because they can’t be separated out from the ground. Everything is itself freedom, without any need to change or manipulate it. Recognizing the inherent freedom of the ripples and the ground, of form and emptiness, becomes the practice. Not of gaining freedom, but of coming into alignment with the freedom that already is.
May we all realize our fundamental nature and awaken!
