Freedom, Meditation and the Fourth of July

We all want freedom and consider it to be intrinsic to our sense of happiness and well-being. Willingly or not, healthily or destructively, each of us is socialized within our families, communities and culture; we are taught how to get long. Eventually, getting along can become an insidious form of oppression.

The great opportunity the fourth of July provides to celebrate out freedom and independence as a nation can also be used to examine the notion of spiritual freedom in our personal lives. The Declaration of Independence is a spiritual manifesto and a road map for this journey.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people …to dissolve the …bands …which have connected them with another and assume ….the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and nature’s God entitle them…” A parallel epiphany awakens many individuals. Mary Oliver describes it this way: One day you finally knew what you had to do…though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice…you strode deeper and deeper into the world determined to save the only life you could save. In that moment of knowing there resides the confidence to chart a new course in order to claim our birthright of human equality, harmony with Nature. This quest is both inward and outer-directed. From inner freedom, teaches the Bhagavad-Gita, arises effective action.

The spiritual pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness requires no special skills, neither intelligence nor education: in the capacity to achieve liberation we are all equals. Buddhists tell us we are born holding the purest, highest consciousness of Buddha Nature. No tradition maintains that only the smart or the saintly can acquire spiritual liberation.

To whom, then, do we send our manifesto? Which governance is destructive of those ends? What despot truly keeps us imprisoned?

We have seen the enemy and they is us, observed the cartoon character, Pogo. The demands of Ego –in spiritual terms, the relentless, vigilant despot exacting perfection, forcing comparisons, demanding distraction and perpetuating fear - runs and ruins our lives. This tyrant is not easily overcome or even appeased and we are not alone in our reluctance to commit to its defeat: Mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. We will endure the familiar, no matter how painful, rather than take a bold step towards change.

When we come to meditation it is often out of the awareness that an obsession, a job, an illness or relationship has consumed our lives, has become an absolute despot, and in our guts we know we must find a refuge, a new guard for our future security. It will never cease on its own, this endless inner warfare. Appeals for justice and magnanimity hold no sway with that which holds dominion over us, exacting repetitive, unsatisfying or destructive behaviors. For the few minutes we sit in meditation, we turn to face this brutal monarch with an attitude of calm and humor.

The weapon we use is awareness. We witness our enemy with love and non-judgment. Relying on principles of non-violence, we sit simply in peace and acceptance of whatever shows up - pain, fear, rage, the despot. We sit and breathe and continue to sit until little by little, day by day, those voices lose authority. The obsessions begin to relax. Glimpses of peace and clarity emerge. The voice of guidance becomes audible. And with this arrives the freedom to make new choices, independent of the opinion of others, perhaps independent of our own opinions, independent of our own cycles of punishment and reward.

We who meditate don’t sit because it’s easy, or portable or trendy, though it is in fact all of the above. We meditate as a gesture of freedom and alignment with Nature, Tao or the Dharma. We learn how to literally go with the flow, in times of struggle and in times of peace. Through practice we become the “guardians of our future security” and the liberators of our personal joy. For a meditator, meditation is a daily declaration of independence.