of separation). It’s another thing to say I long to discover that I am free. Already free. The difference between the two is significant. This is not a playing around with semantics. In the “someday” orientation to possible freedom, the eyes are on a later time. On getting something, achieving a condition not inherent. The mind is caught up in the necessity for change. (The task is daunting. So much seems to need changing.) In the other orientation, the “already here” one, the eyes are on right now. Something that is already the case, just not seen.
Someday keeps time alive. But reality isn’t experienced in time. Certainly not later. The truth of our essence is known in immediacy. When this is seen, when it is felt in the viscera, time is felt to have stopped. But really, it’s that time is understood to be an invention by the mind, a convenience for ordering events and making plans. Time didn’t stop exactly; it never started in the first place. Any moment in which there is a direct knowing of the real — including the real as it expresses itself in human awareness — time is not experienced. This is because the mind (where time lives) has grown quiet.
Why is this distinction so important? Of what use is it to deeply get that freedom is already here — to see how different that is from saying Maybe someday I will attain freedom?
When the great waking-up takes place, one thing that is realized is this: I was free all along. I just didn’t know it. What is realized, probably with something of a shock, is that all along, an essential choice was being made: whether or not to locate who I am in the events, roles, and history of what life holds. Understood another way, the choice being constantly made is whether to allow what happens to cause (or to relieve) suffering.
The question is Who am I? Am I my background, the roles I play in my personal and outer life? Am I my values, the way I imagine I am seen by others? Am I the sum total of my prior experience? Am I my physical features (age, gender, health condition)?
The revelation that comes at the radical awakening is that there is an awareness contained in this living body that has nothing to do with any of these things — with who I have always thought of myself as being; with the push-and-pull of outer events, of desire and fear, ambition and dissatisfaction. The discovery of utter calm and well-being within, at the heart of all the commotion — the realization that this content awareness has been there right along — is shocking, for sure. And yet: it is known to be the case. It is deeply familiar, this unconditioned “self.” It feels like home.
Something in us always did know. However consciously aware of that knowing we may or may not have been.
So go back to the other side of awakening. The before part. If a person, caught up in the compelling apparent reality of conditioned life, says to self I long to become free, what is being looked past is the possibility that I am already free; I just don’t know it.
If I sit with the idea that my task is to discover how I am already (constantly) exercising freedom, then a gently insistent pressure is brought to bear on the present, as each moment unfolds. In the stillness of the immediate — in the willingness to look deeply at how the familiar self keeps itself alive, keeps itself believing it is ultimately real — light can enter the seeing. The discovery can be made (it really can) that each moment is brimming with freedom.
The Choice to Carry a Thing
When my mother was dying, which took a long time, I practiced accepting her death. There were so many times we thought — this must surely be it, surely this time she won’t survive. Each time, I got ready for that to be it, for it all to be over. I imagined the after of her: the utter stillness of her skinny body, the no more struggling to breathe, the never again of her voice. The lowering into the ground of the box. As if practice could get me ready for it. But then she’d survive. The ventilator hose would be withdrawn from her throat, leaving it raw, and before you knew it she’d be sitting up. Talking. Maybe even smiling. Of course, eventually she really did die. That time, when the ventilator hose was pulled out, it did not leave her throat raw.
A person can practice to die. Not by imagining the heart quitting, but by constant letting go. This isn’t the reason to do this constant letting go, to prepare for death. That is a secondary outcome. The reason to do it, to let go of everything that comes, is so you can live life as a free being. Actually, letting go is not really the thing. The thing is to not hold on in the first place. Letting go can’t happen if there has been no prior holding on. Talk about free.
A person can also practice holding on. Talk about not free. Often it feels like what happens is that the thing holds on to us. Like, say I’ve never forgotten the pain of the loss of this certain man in my life. It sure does seem as though the thing has held on to me. I prefer to see it that way, that it has stuck like flypaper to me, not that I have kept my fingers curled tight around it. It: the memory of his face, voice, body; the fact that I never had him in the daily way I wanted him. I carried that around in my fist for a long, long time, having no idea it could be put down, or how much energy was going into holding tight to it.
Until one day it all revisited me, and it taught me about itself. I was in the kitchen when it happened. It all came full force into me, not the memory of him exactly, not the data, but the feeling of it, the consuming quality of loving, missing, wanting, grieving. It poured into me, took up residence in my body, shook me, pulled ancient tears up out of me. Then it was gone. For good gone. I knew it. It was like it had come back for the purpose of teaching me something. Not teaching me about him, or about love and the force of loss. But teaching me about the power of choice, a power I’d always had but didn’t know it. Not the choice to love, but the choice to carry a thing with you, long after it no longer applies. And the pain that comes with that choice to carry.
That day, the day it all came back to me, and left for good, he wasn’t the only thing that came back. There was my father’s death, and there was my break-up with my husband, and there was the torment of my child’s difficult youth, and there was a woman who had once maddened me with jealousy because someone I dearly loved loved her. This went on for several hours, one powerful episode after another. Each came back to me, re-entered me, with the full force of how it had been, with how tightly I had held to it, with how I had ever afterward let it define me. I cried so much that afternoon I thought my body would run dry. It was as if the force of this thing had control over me, one relived experience after another coming to throttle me, to show me how much suffering it carried with it. Each in turn came, in its fullness, and then — it was gone, never, I knew, to return. That is how it was. I was being emptied. I understood this to be the case. Letting go was practicing on me, on all the gigantic stories from which my life and my sense of self had been constructed.
Because I realized, as each thing came, that it was a kind of last hurrah, there was a strange poignancy about its coming and going. Even though so much of what came that day, what burned through me, had to do with painful history, it had also been — for so many years — the way I could tell I was alive. It was the stuff of poems. It was what a person could know me by. When I became close with someone, these stories were what I had to tell, the long and complicated stories of what I had gone through. What I had survived. What had changed me. It was as if I were saying, if you don’t know this story, you don’t know me.
That was how I always was: my stories were who I was. That day they came back and then left, and I knew were leaving for good, I felt a wistfulness, that all of that history was truly history now. But I also felt light, incredibly light, and free. Unburdened. It wasn’t exactly that I had let all those things go. Not that exactly. It was that who I had been wasn’t there anymore. I had changed. The person I had been had left with all those dramatic events that had defined her. She was a memory too, like they were. Now, in the aftermath, I was just standing in my kitchen, dry-eyed, marveling. Utterly empty. Free.
Tissue Paper Wall
I hadn’t been home in a long time, so long I had no memory of having been there at all, at least not till I got there and knew it was familiar. So familiar, in fact, that I couldn’t believe I could ever have forgotten it. How could this be? So dear it felt, like the most precious thing ever created, and yet all my life I hadn’t been walking around with a memory of it, or even a sense of missing something.