There are three types of freedom: outer, inner, innermost. The attainment of innermost freedom leads to a complete, hardy,and irreversible freedom.
The first, outer, is political and economic – the absence of perceived external restrictions and constrictions. The second, mental freedom, is freedom from emotional distress – afflictive, ceaseless and uncontrolled mental chatter. The third, innermost, is freedom from the known ¬– from the past, and from all mental conditioning. Total freedom is the freedom to simply be. We can call the first conventional freedom, the second psychological freedom, and the third spiritual freedom.
In the West we’ve come a long way in assuring outer freedom, but at the same time we’ve failed to address inner or innermost freedom. And without these subtler aspects of freedom, we are anything but free, regardless of our customary notions about freedom.
If I were to make a general inquiry into the question of freedom as it applied to my own life my initial response would be a certainty that I was fortunate to be free – free to choose to be here or there, write these words, organize my life as I wish, make choices freed from compulsion, assert views arrived it without undue influence, choose friends, career, home, and dinner. A simple review of my life would assure me of my freedom.
So why not leave it at that? Why go further? Why inquire more deeply? The answer is clear yet difficult to grasp. Because I appear to be free does not necessarily mean that I am actually free. Authentic freedom is actually quite subtle and profound. What do I mean? Please consider the following. Many life experiences appear one way but actually exist in quite another. We call them illusions – the railroad tracks that seem to meet in the distance, the mirage of water on the desert road, the echo, the reflection in the mirror, and the night dream with all its vividness and apparent truthfulness.
What if our sense of freedom was itself one of these illusions? What if we are actually living in an invisible prison woven by time, thought, habit, and fixed perceptions, but cannot see it and therefore mistake our condition for freedom when we are actually imprisoned? How could we ever get out? What if upon analysis we find our self free in a conventional or outer sense but are actually living a very predictable, automated, and pre-determined life? What if our illusion of freedom and free will is shattered? Wouldn’t it be worth knowing this? Wouldn’t it be worth knowing if we are actually living an illusion of personal freedom – the possibility that we are enmeshed in a self-betraying myth that limits our life and possibilities?
As humans this should be of particular interest as we have the unique capacity to attain a profound, complete, and total freedom. And only when we are totally free are we free to know, to love, to be at peace, and to live with out total being. So you might agree that it’s worth a personal inquiry that can establish whether or not we actually live in total freedom or the illusion of it. For if the latter is the case we will have surrendered our deepest possibilities to a comforting myth.
Outer Freedom: Perceived External Constrictions or Restrictions
I will not discuss outer freedom – political and economic freedom – in great detail as my focus here is to explore the subtler aspects of freedom. But even when it comes to political and economic freedom – the freedom to express our beliefs and be freedom from material needs ¬– there are important questions to consider.
Is the ability to express our beliefs the only measure of political freedom? Are we truly free if our beliefs themselves, our ideologies, arise from complex religious, cultural, and personal forces that compel our viewpoint and limit our perspective? Consider whether any ideology based on thought, based on the known, based on the past can be free. Where is its flexibility, its openness, is relevance to the direct experience of the moment? And further, does a fixed ideology bring connection or disconnection, an open or closed heart? When you have a fixed viewpoint are you able to respond to the facts of the moment as they are with an open mind and heart? Or, are you limited to seeing and responding with your set political perspective? If so you are coming from habit and from the past rather than a spontaneous and fresh response to the truth of the moment? It may seem like political freedom, but is it?
The same can be said for the issue of economic freedom. Can we be economically free if we are influenced and compelled by a cascading series of wants that are confused with needs? Are we economically free when we lack contentment and gratitude for what we are given? Are we economically free when we are dissatisfied with how we live, fearful that we may fall back, or always reaching higher and higher for more and more? When thought defines what we need and the income we are required to generate can we ever be free of want? When the mind is involved in cascading desire can we be economically free regardless of what we have?
I would like to leave these questions here and ask you to consider them further. Inquire, reflect, examine whether you can be free when the mind is constructing and pledging allegiance to ideologies or enslaved to ceaseless desires. When you analyze this to its end you will discover that even in the most politically open and economically secure cultures outer freedom is not possible without mental freedom.
Mental Freedom: Psychological Freedom
Inner freedom is the freedom from mental disturbances. It’s the freedom from fear, anxiety, stress, worry, mood disturbances, and afflictive emotions such as anger, jealousy, hatred, and false pride. Each of these mental experiences shows up as ceaseless mental chatter – the active mind that we live with each day. When we look at our mental activity we realize that 90% of it is negative, afflictive, and disturbing. Do I have control over this mental activity or does this mental activity have control over me? Can I be free when I ceaselessly and involuntarily chase after mental activity? Few of us would allow another to control our lives to the extent that we are controlled by the random mental movements of our mind. Yet, we allow this to happen each moment, never recognizing our enslavement to this inner tyranny of mental chatter.
Let’s inquire together. To be certain, this is a difficult inquiry because it will force us to see the truth of our existence and the horror of our lifelong enslavement to the autonomous movements of our mental life. But for you and I to be willing to undertake this inquiry right now in this moment is in itself a radical freedom that does not arise from routine mental activity. It is a statement that there is an innerness that can stand separate from and make decisions about our mental life rather than be constantly subject to random thoughts, feelings, and images. Such an inquiry is an assertion of our humanity and a down payment on authentic freedom.
Let’s begin. Make a choice here and now to attend to your breath for a few moments. You’re free to do that, aren’t you? Observe how long you can follow your breath before your mind automatically draws you to its mental chatter that you may become enmeshed and lost in for a moment, hours, days, or a lifetime. Where is your freedom if you cannot control how your mind works, if you cannot pay attention? Try it again. Can you hold your free choice to follow your breath more than a few moments before your routine mental activity pulls you away? Who is in control?
Pick another focal point. Place your attention on anything you are doing – tying your shoes, eating a meal, walking down the street, watching a beautiful sunset, talking to your beloved. How long can you hold your attention? Is it measured in seconds? Can you pay attention to another’s words for more than a brief moment without your mind taking over with judgments, interpretations, or the formulation of a response? Try this experiment. Try listening to another with a clear and still mind. How long can you do this? Where is your freedom to choose what you do with your mind? Try this over and over until you are willing to confront the actuality that you are enslaved by the autonomous activity of your mind. We call our self free but we cannot control our own mind and thus our speech and actions which follow the uncontrolled movements of our mind.
It is an imaginary world that we wander in – a world of repetitive and predictable thoughts, feelings, and mental images. They enslave us but allow us to think we are free. We’re compelled to dance with our mental chatter yet we think we are free. This is the mental illusion of freedom.
The initial step in gaining mental or inner freedom is to attain some distance and freedom from our enslavement to mental afflictions – our continuous and disturbing mental chatter. For this we use the practice of meditation. Meditation is to inner understanding what the microscope is to outer understanding. Meditation stops our ceaseless mental activity and allows us sufficient separation from it to see it as it is, to understand what is actually happening in our mind. We become able to see our prison. We begin to see the mechanics and horror of inner enslavement.
We begin to taste mental freedom at the very earliest stages of meditation. It shows up as diminished reactivity, greater patience, improved relationships, growing compassion, and increased mental stillness and spaciousness. This can be seen in the first few weeks of meditation practice. And with the dawning of this new awareness we then we ask with great disgust, “What has been going on all of these years?” Where have I been?
The ability to observe mental activity without grabbing onto it – the progressive development of a witnessing state – is complemented by the simultaneous recognition that random mental activity – thoughts, feelings, and mental images – have no real substance. Left alone they merely dissolve back into awareness leaving no trace behind. Just watch a particular thought, feeling, or image and you will note that if you merely observe it its life cycle is quite rapid and simple – it rises, abides and dissolves quite instantaneously like writing done with a finger on water or waves collapsing into the sea.
We discover that the same thoughts, feelings, and images that can enslave us from dawn to dusk are empty of any substance. Left alone they disappear by themselves. We suffer from nothing. We’re enslaved by ghosts of time past.
As we progressively take charge of our inner life, calm our mind and allow mental chatter to subside we discover a previously unknown inner spaciousness and freedom. We are no longer compelled to automatically react or to ruminate for hours on whatever arises in our mind. We are increasingly more able to live moment-to-moment with a presence that is free to allow life to unfold as it is. Our life is no longer a response to random mental activity but rather a vivid aliveness and presence in the unfolding moment. We learn to experience and let go, experience and let go. And in daily life this translates into greater peace and ease, diminished reactivity, and an enhanced presence in the moment. This is the nature of mental freedom – freedom from afflictive emotions, freedom from the out-of-control mind, inner peace, and a presence to life as it is actually happening.
Spiritual Freedom: Freedom from The Known
If we’ve already gained freedom from the tyranny of autonomous mental chatter and afflictive emotions what further level of freedom can there be? Yet even with an inner mental freedom there continues to remain a further obstacle to total freedom. This obstacle is our very subtle conditioning.
Because of previous life experiences and our cultural education we progressively develop a fixed set of perspectives, attitudes, and patterns of behavior. We unconsciously and rapidly attach these to all new experiences. We name our experiences, shape them, and lock them in place according to prior understandings and experiences. Our tendency to freeze moment-to-moment experience by labeling it, elaborating it, and fitting it into our templates of previously acquired knowledge automates our lives and experiences, robbing the present moment of its freshness, firstness, vitality, and freedom to be as it is. We become like wind-up toys, wound up in youth with ideas, attitudes, and perceptions and then robotically unwind over the course of our lifetime.
When a child first sees a tree it has no previous knowledge by which to categorize it. The child looks at the tree for the first time with a sense of awe and wonder freed of labels and elaborations from memory. The child lives into the unfolding experience of the moment as it is. The child is totally free to experience the tree in its uniqueness of the moment. The present remains unshaped by the past. The tree as it is in the moment, freed from our learned stories about it. Rather than a highly conditioned and shaped experience that has little relevance to the moment, the child is free to experience the actual moment.
Have you ever really seen a tree in your adult life? Have you seen its texture, movement, its rhythm, colors, or its relationship to its environment? Have you ever seen a tree not merely with your eyes but with you entire being? Have you ever seen a tree not as a separate observer with the boundaries of subject and other but as one with your experience? Have you ever seen the beauty, truth, wholeness, sacredness, and actuality of this experience as it is and has never been before? Can you feel all that is in the tree: the elements, the water, the sun – all of life itself? Have you ever seen a tree without knowing it as a tree – or for that manner anything else?
Consider our relationships. Is it possible to experience someone you already know as if you are meeting this person for the first time? Can you see and hear this person in the moment unaltered by past perceptions and images? Are you able to let go of all of your prejudices, judgments, likes, dislikes, fears, hopes, acceptance, rejection, and fixed opinions? Are you able to meet this individual in the total freedom of the moment without constricting beliefs, without a name, without a past – just as he or she is in that moment? Or, are you forever stuck with a fixed sense of this person, in a past image of this person, in an illusion of who he or she is?
What we are speaking about is the natural capacity to experience with a naked, bare, choiceless awareness. When we experience in this way we are fully aware of our experience without altering it according to our stored mental activity with its old ideas and perspectives. We are living in the continuous moment-to-moment unfolding of life. We are present to the moment as it is rather than as we shape it with our mental activity. The perceptions of our sensory organs are fresh without commentary. Mental experiences similarly arise and fall without commentary. There is a freshness and vitality to lived experience that is freed of any fixation or shaping.
Of course, we are not speaking about an end to our cognitive mind and memory. Certainly we don’t wish to learn how to drive a car over and over. The cognitive mind plays an important role in allowing us to live life, but it is simultaneously a great obstacle to experiencing life authentically as it is each moment. So we learn to use the cognitive mind with all its marvelous capacity when necessary and as an instrument of a deeper knowing. Our cognitive mind does not run our life. Rather, it is an instrument of our life to be used when needed, not allowed to obscure our direct and unfiltered experience of life. Our primary mode of consciousness becomes an open and naked awareness.
This subtlest and most profound freedom from the conditioning of the past is spiritual freedom. It’s the innermost and final accomplishment of personal development. It’s not easy to express this state of being in words, as it transcends our ordinary experience. It differs from how we’ve learned to live and experience the world. It’s a radical departure from conventional life. Spiritual freedom shows up as a stable, effortless, imperturbable, and natural moment-to-moment awareness freed of mental elaboration, fixation, and rumination. Life unfolds and is experienced as it is moment-to-moment
without mental commentary.
An open, naked, and choiceless awareness is like space. It’s expansive, open, pervasive, transparent, and clear. Like the sun it’s luminous. Like the vast ocean that’s steady irrespective of changes on its surface, it’s stable when confronted with the winds of adversity. Like a mirror that reflects but does not react to appearances on its surface, moment-to-moment awareness is unaffected by the ongoing appearance of sensory or mental experiences. In its clarity it knows. We can say it is wise, not in a conventional rational way. Its knowing arises from a deep knowledge that goes beyond ordinary thought. Spiritual freedom transcends and seals all lesser aspects of freedom.
Total Freedom: Freed to Be
Total freedom is the freedom from the two major obstacles to freedom – mental afflictions and mental conditioning. When these are overcome what is left is who we are – a simple and quite ordinary awareness living in complete freedom in life as it is.
We are free of mental disturbances that occupy and disturb our mind. We are free of the conditioning of past experience that fixes, shapes, and alters present moment experience. We are free from acceptance and rejection, hope and fear, desire and aversion, past and future, mortality and immortality, restriction, constriction, and suffering, and we are free from time. We are free to be, now. And this freedom is holy, sacred and religious in nature. For here lies the immediacy, spontaneity, and directness of experience as given in its natural and ordained truth and beauty. There is no barrier between our self and the divine experience of life in its glorious, full, and unfolding splendor.
This is not an unreachable goal. It is in fact who we are at our essence. We’ve each experienced moments and glimpses of total freedom. If it wasn’t already our natural essence we couldn’t create it anew. Once experienced, all we must do is to extend and stabilize these moments of total presence and freedom. To accomplish this we slowly become aware of and chisel away at the two obstacles to complete freedom – mental disturbances and mental conditioning. We do this initially through the practice of meditation, and related study and reflection. Progressively we discover the insubstantiality of our mental afflictions and the fraudulent shaping of present moment experience through cognitive elaboration.
Our lives become more open and present. This is our aim. And as we progress we gain a lightness of being. We move beyond the constraints of ordinary notions of freedom to an authentic freedom that was always present but only revealed once the temporary obscurations of emotional afflictions and entrenched conditioning are lifted. That is total freedom. And you can have it in this moment.
The Path: Gradual and Immediate
If you are reading this posting, like me, you are on the gradual path to total freedom. This means that through the process of study, reflection, and meditative practice we are simultaneously diminishing the intensity and frequency of afflictive emotions and undermining the shaping forces of past experiences, fixed perceptions and mental attitudes. As a result we experience more of reality in the moment as it is rather than as we shape it from our memory. We are not detached but actually more present to life and to others.
Once we begin our efforts to expand personal freedom we’ll begin to see changes within the first few weeks. We will feel more patient, less reactive, more peaceful and easeful, and a notice a joyful lightness of being. This will extend itself as we gain further experience with practice and simultaneously integrate our efforts into day-to-day life. And there is more. Our heart will feel more open, we’ll be more understanding of the suffering and struggle of others, and the feel of mental and physical tenseness and constriction will slowly be replaced by inner spaciousness.
These changes will be gradual and take time to stabilize. There will be many back and forths. These must be used to motivate further practice rather than causing disabling frustration or disappointment. It is important to note again that we are gradually purifying our ordinary mind, cleaning it of disturbing mental afflictions and habitual conditioning. This takes time and it takes help – guidance from a skillful teacher, a like-minded community, and life changes that support your efforts.
However, there are those very rare and fortunate beings who touch total freedom, the experience of an open and naked awareness, one time and never return to the ordinary mind. They have been blessed by grace to see the truth and essence of life beyond the ordinary and henceforth to permanently remain in this profound state of being. They are our wisest mystics and sages who demonstrate by example the final attainment. They allow us to directly see the joyful fruits of our effort.
Yet it is important for us not to focus on the final attainment alone but rather, on the day-to-day changes that we achieve through our daily efforts. In this way we will progressively feel an expanded sense of freedom accompanied by all of its related qualities – happiness, wholeness, love, compassion and peace. It’s this gradual process of human flourishing that will be our contribution to a better life for our self and for others. It’s the great healing elixir for our mind, body, spirit, and world. It’s the way to total freedom.