Freedom...

What Is It to Become Free?

When you wake up, when you become established in the knowledge of what you deeply are, you've become free of illu­sion, the primary one being that you are what your mind says you are. You are free of seeking, since you've found yourself to be (already) where you've always wanted to be.

Living as a free being, you no longer experience yourself as the center of the universe. The important thing about whatever life holds isn't how it affects you, what you think or feel about it. The important thing is the plain fact of it. You are free of whatever has been challenging or unresolved. Nor is there the familiar vivid impression of your being a particular individual, in any significant sense, or of being separate or fundamentally different from other people—or from anything at all. Because your sense of identity has changed, your feelings can no longer be hurt, nor can you take offense. You're no longer subject to others' opinions of you (favorable or unfavorable). When you become free of the illusion that you are your ego-mind, there's no longer someone to maintain, protect, or enhance.


Even when something happens that affects your life directly, you don't experience it as having an impact on your deep nature. If you learn you have terminal cancer (which clearly has everything to do with your physical well-being), you don't slip into the belief that a tumor-riddled body is what you are.

You've become free of fear. If you're confronted with some-thing that requires action, you're able to move forward with that. If there's nothing to be done, you simply relax into what­is—even if it's difficult. As regards possible future challenges, since they are not presently real, you do not fear them.

When you live in freedom, your inner state is no longer determined by the situation you're in. You experience a steady sense of the real—the sensation of beingness—that isn't subject to fluctuation.

Even as your identity is no longer determined by what happens in life, or by what your mind tells you is true, you're thor­oughly attuned to what-is. There's no impulse to resist anything, nor is there any need to assess what something means, to assume a response is necessary. Whatever is simply is; that's your pri­mary orientation to life. No longer at the mercy of judgment and reactivity, you've ceased to live as though your beliefs are reality The familiar felt need to have an opinion about anything is gone.

Because an awake person experiences the newness of each moment, unencumbered by whatever has come before, there's an almost childlike delight in living, a perennial freshness of encounter, with even familiar things and people and experiences. The capacity for fun, for spontaneity, for carefree engage­ment with whatever life delivers is boundless. Beliefs, memories, conditioning, and language do not put themselves between awareness and whatever it's attending, which means there's no intervening "filter" to color the experience of the moment. The encounter is direct, unmediated by anything in the mind. The names for things and categories they're ordinarily placed in


(including good and bad) do not automatically spring to aware­ness, nor do inner commentaries typically accompany experi­ence. A thing is just itself. You've become free of expectation, so that when something out of the ordinary takes place, some-thing sudden or even unprecedented, you take it in stride. This is because you don't go around carrying a background expecta­tion that things will be a certain way (including the way they've always, somewhat predictably, been before).

There's an ongoing sense that things just happen. Gone is the familiar impression of there being a you (or a someone else) that's doing something. In part, this is because your sense of where "you" leave off and the rest of the world begins doesn't feel significant. Moreover, you don't experience yourself as separate from the living moment. What you do and what you are, in a given now, are a unity. In the experience of both time (doing) and space (location), the accustomed boundaries are not a part of perception. Ease attends all you do; this is part of the sense that everything just happens. Things seem to unfold with-out strain. There's a freedom from effort, even as you're able to apply yourself with focus and perhaps great force, if the situa­tion calls for it.

In freedom, you do not seek security, because you don't live in the future, and you don't experience yourself as being at risk. "You" are all-that-is, and it's understood that within all that is, things simply are as they are. You're blessedly free of any discom­fort with not knowing, with not being able to control, predict, or understand a thing. You're at ease in the presence of instability.

When you are free, you no longer experience attachment—to the roles you play, to possessions, to ideas, to the outcome of action, to the people you love. You are free of ferocious desire, of the driving "need" to get (and keep) what you want. Even so, you have a rich capacity to savor, to experience pleasure. You can still love, still enjoy, still (yes) want—prefer one thing over another—but getting it or not getting it will feel very much


the same, since (as always) whatever is is always primary, oblierating in a subtle (but potent) gesture of "is-ness" anything that might have been.

Love in the awake state is unencumbered by attachment and the fear it engenders. In normal life, where the ego holds sway, love often is tied up with need, with desire and the longing for fulfillment. In awakeness, where there's no need for ego gratifi­cation, love is free to flow without fear of loss, without grasping or the wish to change the other person. Without need or fear in the picture, you're able to love unconditionally. You don't need to be loved; you don't need to be needed. But when love is in the picture, it's wide-open, generous, without constraint.

Liberation means you are free of identification with all that has defined you in the past: your beliefs, roles, history. Some of these things will still function, in a superficial or practical way, but you no longer take your sense of self from them.

You've become free of the tyranny of the mind. It no longer runs you; rather, it serves at your pleasure. Its default condition is quiet. If you need to think about something (usually something practical), your mind is able to function with remarkable clarity, creativity, and efficiency. When you're finished needing to think, you are able to stop, leaving the mind to rest. You've become free of mind-caused stress, of anxiety.

The underlying "feeling" state is stillness, alertness, a subtle orientation of tenderness. If you're in the presence of suffer­ing, you may feel it, perhaps even keenly (You can also readily decline to "go there," if you choose, simply by directing your attention elsewhere, or by declining to put it anywhere at all.) If something difficult comes to your own life—the loss of some-one you love, or physical discomfort—you surrender fully to the pain. You're not afraid of feeling the fullness of whatever is real here and now. You've become free of the habit of resistance.

Being free means freedom from time. You're free of the belief that something important can happen in time. Of the sense that


the future has the potential to make things better, or that there's something to be feared in the possibility of change or loss. You're free of ambition, of the idea that you need time in order to finally experience fulfillment, and free too of the constant feeling that you don't have enough time. You are free of hope, and free of the burden of the past, of all it has delivered you: the weight of memory, of conditioning, of patterns, of unre­solved anguish. New life—unfolding life, as it comes moment to moment—is not felt to cling to you anymore, to be carried over (as residue in the form of emotion or thought) into whatever is next. As each moment happens, it is felt quickly to be gone, supplanted by the compelling reality of this moment, and now again this one. New conditioning does not take place.

Living in the present means you don't particularly look forward to things (as before, when looking-forward-to was a way to endure the imperfect present). This is not because you believe nothing fun or rewarding is in the future. It's because the future doesn't feel real.

Nothing is real but now. And now is enough. It's abundant....

Jan Frazier ..