Liberation, Not Levels

Kristin told me recently that a mutual friend said, "Wow, he's really into levels, isn't he?" Not at all. Liberation is different than freedom. Existential freedom is like the basis or firmament of living. Awareness is freedom. Liberation, though, is a privilege. Rather than being the basis of life, it is something we might grow into, something we may develop in our awareness, something we might continually return to until it becomes consistent with our experience of life.

In this sense, "freedom" may be something fairly ephemeral concerning individual awareness of freedom. It's hard to grasp what can be meant by saying that freedom is the basis of living or life, and that's an arguable perspective when it's formed into concepts. I'm not much interested in talking about freedom. But liberation is something we can grasp, something we feel very distinctly, something anyone can be aware of. Liberation is something like the movement into and with freedom. What is it like to move into freedom or openness? It sometimes feels like being released, sometimes feels like grace.

Another way of coming at it is to say that there is no way to or need to structure freedom. It's already ready already. "It's in there"--Prego. You don't add freedom. But, depending on where we're coming from at any given moment, we may want to devise a way out of delusion, dissatisfaction, suffering, greed, animosity, victimization, shame, pressure, etc. If you're already feeling graceful in this moment, good for you--you're moving with/in freedom. If you're not, there's some way to open mind, some way to liberate the individual experience of this moment.

The levels I talk about are one way of bringing vichara, self inquiry, into one's ideation. Ramana Maharshi suggested a simple type of self inquiry. Like freedom, because it is simple, it applies to almost anyone or to anyone. But--also like freedom--direct self inquiry can be hard to grasp for some of us. So Maharshi went as far as to recommend belief in God for folks who could not feel or grasp or utilize self inquiry directly and tangibly. These are the ways he structured and spoke about liberation.

While I have great respect for Ramana Maharshi, I believe it can be helpful to have a general structure that fits this time period, that begins in people's lived experience of society as we know it. That is why I believe it is worth making the relationship between self identity and globalization explicit. It's an interesting tension that influences most people of our time period directly or more indirectly. But beyond the benefits that one can come to by recognizing this tension and dealing with it consciously and intentionally, there is the "fourth level" or ubiquitous possibility of not being identified with or feeling locked into this tension.

My own manner of structuring the relationship between self-identity and liberation is to make explicit the growing awareness and tension between self(jiva)-identity and globalization, but then to also recognize, state, and (often) feel that freedom is within or contiguous with all the identification, thinking, and the rest of our personal activity. Why all this extra structure? Well, realizing Self or freedom may be fine and good, but it can also be helpful in dealing with one another to be aware of many ways of moving into a sense of freedom, many ways of experiencing liberation from over-identification.

If one can follow the question, "Who is asking/doing/being?" through to the end/beginning, talk about levels is optional and may be superfluous. If one feels the need for some tangible sense of progress towards freedom, then any method of structuring or feeling liberation is just fine. It's mostly a question of what works. If you can state and feel what works, you can easily recognize that it is possible to ask whether it is important to work. "Who is the doer?" It's possible to be free in doing and in doing non-doing. Beyond or within a distinction between levels or a distinction between liberation and freedom, something lives right now. What is that? It's as prosaic and straightforward as, "Good morning to you, too. Have a nice day."