Freedom

(From the Archive of writings from 2009-2011)

A friend who has been experiencing some life changes, recently commented that he had ‘been aware of inner freedom’ but had only just realised that ‘outer freedom’ was also possible. It was an interesting comment that seemed to refer to various assumptions about the nature of reality, any of which may or may not be relevant to the friend in question. 

In the ordinary sense of things, it can appear that a person can have freedom or choice to behave, or experience life, in different ways. Sometimes this can seem to be constrained by conditioning, societal convention, fear, love, prison bars, or any number of different things. So there can be an appearance of freedom or an appearance of constraint. When there seems to be a person involved, it seems that there is a me that is free or bound, or a me that is experiencing this.

In liberation, it is obvious that there is no person with any sort of agency or separate existence. There is only life in which appearances of freedom, restriction or separate person-ness might arise. Actually there is no-one to be free, or not. Life has always been free to ‘do its own thing’ and anything that arises can only ever be an expression of this. In a way, the freedom of liberation is the freedom from any need for freedom, from any need for life to be any different from the way it actually is (including appearances of neediness, freedom, captivity, taking practical steps to change things etc etc). There is never anyone to whom any of these experiences belong or refer, so there is no-one who needs to, or can, ever really interfere (or get it wrong!). Appearances of interfering or perceived wrongness can seem to arise but no-one is doing it, and there is no-one to really be effected by it.

This is not to deny that appearances of suffering and apparent harm can, and do, arise, and that apparent humans will often respond to each other in caring and empathic ways, and that kinder responses often seem to enhance experience. And all of this is still the play of life, and still there is no-one to actually do anything at all.

The idea of inner and outer freedom is also interesting. In the absence of a person, is there anything that can be inner or outer? Where is the division and to what does it refer? Everything that arises, arises in (or on) awareness/ stillness/ beingness/ life/ intelligence-energy. Not that it is somehow physically contained within it, but rather that there is no possibility of any experience of anything outside or beyond or in any way separate. Everything that is, is This. So experience isn’t personal or impersonal; it is simply experience. And there isn’t anyone who experiences it; there is simply experiencing. So fear, my shoe, apparent choices, the ceiling, typing, a memory of the picnic on Sunday, or feeling a little hungry, are all just what they are. Nothing is really mine or personal or not mine. No internal or external and nothing that could or should really be any different. Now what’s for supper…