You Should Want to Be Free
I'm thinking today about how compelling the ongoing dramas of our world are, and how the flow of our Dharma practice can get so easily tied to the drama as a kind of ultimate medicine. The sense can come through the teachings that if we were just more mindful, loving, patient, creative, equanimous… we would be able to thrive amid the challenges of our lives, and even contribute something more wonderful to the world than if we fully were lost in the drama.
This may be partly true, but as a primary view it's normative in what is sometimes called "Protestant Buddhism," which most of our postmodern western forms basically are. These forms suggest that we don't have to radically change the structures of our lives relationally or materially—or the structures of our capitalist economies or racist cultures, for instance—to be happy. All we need to do is let go internally, at which point participating will be a non-issue.
You know I think this is bollocks, so that's not what I'm going to talk about so much. But I do want to look at the ideal of full liberation and encourage us to ask ourselves how far we are willing to go in pursuit of true freedom—and we first may have to figure out what that means for us.
I am thinking about this not as an exercise in internalized shame or not-enough-ness (please don't!), but as a reminder that the places that suffering is most intractable are the places that are hardest too see clearly, and the hardest to let go of. Identities, life plans, romantic and family attachments, political and social agendas—all of these places where suffering is rooted are also places where we may have deep appreciation and values around living well and right on the Earth.
Our task is to reconcile the deep freedom promised by the Buddha as the fruit of renunciation with the eros of life in the sensory and relational world. I think the Buddha was correct in intuiting that there's something inherently constrictive and binding about eros, and that despite all its beauties, that binding—lifetime after lifetime without end—becomes more painful the more you feel how long you've been doing it.
So we'll look tonight at liberation and what it might mean for the lives we find ourselves in now.
