28. No Escape

"I" has its function, its role in the game of society. It is polite. It puts up a non-threatening image while thinking to itself "ooh, nice boobs she has".

It is not necessary to kill or "transcend" the false authority of the poor little "me". It is enough to simply see that the dictator has no real power at all. And when you see that the "I" has no power and that life just goes its way, you realize your freedom.

One is free to just be as one is. Life moves freely. Always. And in this immense space of freedom, the space of life in and as this glorious universe, there is "me" mumbling things like "Ah fuck, it's raining again, I'm going to be late for work, why didn't I take a cab. I have to pee."

That's hilarious, isn't it. "I" is hilarious.

So freedom is not the freedom to do this or not do that because one doesn't care about the consequences. Freedom means that you don't have a personal choice, a choice you made…. You just can't help doing or not doing something.

Life is moving. Life is free. You, as "I", is not. Well, actually, you as "I" is also free. You can't help but think she has nice breasts or complain that it's raining again. What to do. Even the psychopath, who indeed doesn't care about consequences for others, can't help it.

There is no freedom from circumstances. They evolve as they will - sometimes they get better and sometimes they don't - we have no control over them.

Robert Saltzman:

"As long as one focuses upon a myself who has a life and must manage it, one will obviously be living in a realm of ambitions, decisions, tactics, and apparent choices. There is nothing wrong with that view or with that way of living. It is one way of seeing, and no one ever chose to see things that way. If that is where you find yourself, do your best, I say, to make the best possible decisions, and to be comfortable with them.

But there is another level of being entirely different from that one. On that level, I do not have a life, I am life. I am an expression of aliveness, just as a tree or a fish is an expression of aliveness."

Robert Saltzman, The Ten Thousand Things

You are not responsible; no one is. But you do respond to the movements of life. In that you have no choice. And again: that is freedom.

Paradoxically, the opposite also works: taking absolute responsibility for everything that happens to you, because you are everything that happens.

"If you can accept your fate so deeply that you come to embrace it. If you can embrace your fate so deeply that you come to love it. If you can love your fate so deeply that you become one with it. That is freedom. Freedom is total accountability."

Shiv Sengupta, Facebook, 20-06-2023

No escape.

Robert Saltzman writes this on Substack, 19-06-2023:

"When one is not looking for any escape at all, but finds oneself participating in whatever thoughts, feelings, perceptions, etc. make up the constituents of THIS very moment, without any hope that things will get 'better', including that one will 'eventually' be 'enlightened', then one is IN the moment, and it is only IN the moment that anything true, anything real, anything that is not escapism and fantasy, will be found.

So whereas most of the 'teaching' points elsewhere, points, I mean, to an improved condition that you will attain by following the teaching, I point only to what you are right now in this moment. The one who is reading these words is IT, and there is no other.

Q: This is so painfully true.

A: Or perhaps just true.

Q: Probably yes. For me, it seems rather painful. That's why I spend every waking moment escaping it. Perhaps part of the escaping is just a bad habit though, and then it appears to be painful to come back to what is.

A: Yes. We humans do seek escape from pain, both physical and emotional. Some of us come to see that pain will always be, but not necessarily the pain OF pain. The pain OF pain is the pain of trying to escape what cannot be escaped."