Freedom #3

                                                              Freedom #3

                                        

              Nasrudin walked into a house and exclaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?" he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more."

Freedom is liberation from yourself to yourself. There are many versions of this concept such as when Christ says; “Be in the world but not of it.” The self and world to be liberated from is the one of the indulgent ego, the fragmented, isolated, fear based sense of separation and all the attendant dysfunctional adaptations such as Facebook and Twitter. The self to abide in is the higher self, the self that is able to watch, observe, and dispassionately be entertained by the drama that is human life. This self is a witnessing consciousness watching itself, a consciousness that knows that everything is but a play of one unitary stuff in a myriad sea of diverse configurations.

The witnessing self is the archetype of the King/Queen, this awareness has the capacity to steward the kingdom, that is to oversee the big picture both within and without and to apportion resources to attend to the needs of self and environment. The King archetype is God residing within you as you. The Kingdom of Heaven is within.

St. Francis said; “That which you are looking for is that which is looking.” This is a reference to this inner, meta awareness that is cultivated in practices like meditation, yoga, and psychotherapy, it is the practice of building self-awareness, and it is the thing we most take for granted and assume that we are naturally self-aware, when actually, we are far from it most the time. Our culture is a self-unaware culture, one that does everything possible to distract and trick us into believing that we are aware. The greatest way to enslave people is to make them think they're free.

There is a lot of mythology around the gods hiding humanity's divinity and power from them lest they compete with the gods, occasionally a mortal will steal something from the gods which really pisses them off, such as Prometheus stealing fire, or Eve eating from the tree of knowledge. The best place the gods could hide humanity's divinity from them is of course within them, they'd never think to look there!

Yet every tradition tells us explicitly that within is exactly where we need to look, this is the path to freedom, but it is paradoxically where we have the hardest time seeing clearly. We have constructed what Wilber calls The Atman Project, which is an elaborate, endless game of looking in all the wrong places. Much like Nasrudin the wise fool who was asked why he was down on his hands and knees under a street lamp. He replied that he had lost his keys, the curious stranger then asked him where he had last had his keys and Nasrudin said; “Back in the dark alley, but the light is so much better here under the street lamp.”

The way to freedom is through the exploration and relationship with one's darkness, not with our convenient and familiar light.