Here’s what I’m focused on: freedom. External freedom? Sure. But what I’m talking about here is internal freedom. And what that means to me is this:
Absolute unflinching experience of Life.
Okay… so what is that?
I’m interested in digging. In discarding illusions, beliefs, investments in anything. What is left when their is nothing left to disclose? I think I know the answer: Life Happening.
There is Life Happening, and that is it.
To understand this we simply need to look out a window or even to a potted plant. While a plant, like a human being has many internal processes, what does it do? It Lives. Until it doesn’t anymore (like any squirrel, bird or fish), and then it is subsumed by its environment. It is my observation that we as human animals are the same—we just think we’re different.
Why?
Because our adaptation in the game of survival has been our forebrain. Ah, the forebrain. This organ, rooted in survival, highjacks survival instincts and twists them into something else—it tells stories, it creates gestalts, ideas and concepts, adventures, meanings and virtual worlds which we then inhabit, or think we inhabit. It allows us to forget that we are bodies, that we are simply Life Happening.
So freedom, in the sense that I mean it here, is uncovering, disclosing and revealing anything that distracts or deceives this “us” we think we are away from the immutable fact of Life Happening. Freedom is living free of the attachment and investment in the virtual world our forebrains create and coming back to Reality. Living as Life Happening.
Is this even possible, given our biology? Yes. I know this because you and I experience moments/periods of this.
We notice being “in our heads” and not being “in our heads”. “In our heads” is another term for the virtual world, for the constructions of the forebrain. Engagement of the forebrain by pure awareness, by Life, rather than illusorily existing within the confines of the forebrain-world, is quite another way to live. It’s infinity v. a speck of dust. I don’t know that I can consciously decide to be out of the head (because this is the head deciding), but I can certainly engage in every way I am aware in exposing the lies to the light of truth (unattached attention=Love) as this local awareness observes them, perhaps bit by bit sloughing off the virtual world, watching the cockroaches of the illusion scatter and poof! dissapear, and returning to this body, to the experience of Life Happening. It’s the only adventure I want to be on—with my attention not on that process, but on Life Happening.
David Richo, in his book How to be an Adult, defines our task as adults. That task is not to eliminate the healthy ego (for God’s sake, he points out, we need that to cross the street), but to dissemble the neurotic one. Ah. And it is this neurotic ego that stands between us and the experience of Life Happening. It is the neurotic ego who thinks we need A, B, or C to survive, having mistaken, retained and twisted actual survival instincts and needs required in our infancy, perhaps, into beliefs and operating systems that as adults, keep us in our heads, in our own personal virtual realities rather than in the experience of Life Happening.
And so… dissembling this neurotic ego requires brutal honesty and thus bravery. It requires desiring freedom from illusion more than the illusion itself. It requires nothing less than the dissembling of who we thought ourselves to be—this construction, this cobbled together, caddisfly home we’ve built out of beliefs, random comments, ideas from our parents, a stranger on a bus, grade school teachers, a book we once read. This is not who we are.
We are Life Happening.
So this, then, is my truest aim (as I believe it is for every human animal). To release, shrug off, thrust away and in any way available to me remove the false images of who I am and simply to be the Life that is Happening, and to experience this absolute freedom in form. This releasing of all defenses, as it may be viewed, is terrifying to the neurotic ego. And it is terrifying to other neurotic egos who think that safety lies in stability of illusions, in holding onto and protecting the cobbled together lie of the small self. It is not an easy path. But it is a Real one, and a True one.
So heads up: I intend, my friends, to live the Freedom that I am. And where I have tried to do this in any half-hearted, fearful and thus manipulative ways—and by this I mean attempting to retain either my own or your good opinion of the “me” I or you think I “am”—be forewarned. I am not in this for “winning the game of life” in the way this is defined by all those who seek to sell me something, desire my dependence on them or wish for me to act in a way that makes others or myself feel comfortable; I don’t give a damn about how the culture, society or world of human animals defines success or safety. I am in this for the experience of Life Happening—my observation is that this is what I’m here for. And my observation and experience is that this is the only definition of
Love=the Experience of Life Happening.
Even using the term “acceptance” of Life Happening is untrue—there is no acceptance here, there is BEing. There is presence. Acceptance implies a distancing, a mind-activity choice. Life Happening has zero to do with this. So, coming from “someone” who feels acutely the strictures of the neurotic ego of non-BEing (which is only the virtual reality of the forebrain and not what’s actually there), completely owns both my own complicity in my experience of imprisonment and my sole responsibility and ability to acknowledge and assume the actual Freedom that I am, I step outside the prison walls, take a last look at the costume I removed in the cell, and head out, naked, into the sunlight. Let’s see what Happens.