At some point you might get tired of the game that promises but never delivers. That promises a certain happiness without sadness, a certain pleasure without pain. Or you feel that you’ve been lied to. And the truth is you have.
The worst thing is you’ve believed it all. So, what if you try truth? What if you try truth and say, “I want to live from truth. I want to meditate,” if you like. “I want to set my mind on what is true.” What does that look like?
Well, I would suggest that truth is freedom. And what you’re saying is when you say, “I want to know the truth and I want to live the truth, “is to say, “I want to be free, “is what you’re saying. Now, if you want to be free, it doesn’t take very long to recognize that that’s freedom that cannot be had in relation to objects.
You can’t be free “from.” Because as much as those words sound appealing, as much as those words sound interesting, if you’re free “from,” you are entangled in the thing that you think you’re free from, when you’re actually not free from it. You’re bounded to the thing that you think you are free from, and you are bounded to the thing that you think makes you free.
So if you want to be free from, say, lust, then you are going to always have lust in your mind. And that freedom you have will be qualified in that it is not an absolute freedom. It is a freedom that requires for lust not to be there (i.e. to be there). And so it won’t last.
That the real freedom is the freedom that’s “in” whatever the circumstance is. So this means that your freedom is not circumstantial. It is by no way qualified by anything around you. Now, that is true freedom. That is the only freedom that’s actually worth talking about.
All the other types of freedom are words we use to say, I feel a certain liberation as long as this and this and this stays true. I can only feel free if I’m happy. I can only feel free if I’m satisfied in my bodily desires. I can only feel free if I don’t need to worry about money. That’s not freedom. That is actually a form of anxiety.
So to be free “in” is to ask the question, what is true? And what is true is as things are. And what is true is that there is no judgment. And the truth is there is no freedom from life. But that is the freedom, is to see that. Is to see that “all is happening.”
And for those who do not resist that, those who do not have a strong preference, who do not have a moral qualm about things being the way they are, they are free. But even if you happen to find a moral qualm in your mind and say, I wish this was different, can you hold that and see that that’s also just part of the way things are?
That it is not the end of your conversation, it’s just part of the pattern that you’re weaving with your own experience. There is the freedom. This means that what the Buddha says is true. If you want to eat, eat. If you want to sleep, sleep. If you want to fuck, fuck. If you want to be lazy, be lazy. If you want to work hard, work hard. Do all of that. Experience it.
But the simple idea is if you begin to think of these as actions that buy you freedom or happiness, you’re wrong. There’s just life happening. And I would say wrong in the sense that it’s not the truth. It’s not that you’re making a mistake if you think that. It is not a moral problem. It’s just a problem of… It’s just a fact that you are not living. You’re setting up… You’re going to suffer your experience at that point, which ultimately also is not wrong. It’s okay if you want to do that, if that’s what happens.
This is the truth. The truth is things are as they are. And we experience them as we choose to experience them, as we wish to experience them. Even, “I don’t want it this way, “is a choice.
So, there you go. That’s the essential idea.