You are absolutely free. You have always been free. Absolute freedom is your nature, your being, your very essence. Absolute freedom is who you are.
How can that be? It can be, and is, experienced this very moment when you forget your personal existence.
As long as we think there is the slightest difference between the enlightened state and our ordinary life, we are caught in delusion and live our life as if we are unenlightened.
But that isn't the truth. We are absolutely enlightened.
When the Buddha woke up he said, "Now all beings have woken up." What did he mean?
When the self is forgotten, then this ordinary life becomes the expression of the absolute itself. Since there is only the one, and since the one is absolute freedom at all times, upon awakening the Buddha saw that all "beings" are only that, and thus inherently free in their very nature.
To reach to the other shore is to see that this very shore here is the other shore. When there is no separation in our mind between that shore and this shore, then in this very moment the absolute life awakens.
If we think this ordinary life is the absolute, we are lost in delusion. If we think this ordinary life is not the absolute, we are lost in delusion. The thoughts themselves are the delusion.
Any sort of thought, any sort of belief, is the delusion, is the reinforcement of self, and thus the reinforcement of the lie that we must undertake some kind of journey to arive at the awakened state.
But there is no journey. You are already there. You are already free. Open your arms to the life that is pulsing in you at this very moment, open to the point of becoming lost, and you will embrace your already inherent unconditional freedom.
Life is proceeding as it will. It is living itself. When we give up control, or more accurately, when we see that the river was always controlling itself, living itself, then we become comfortable with the out-of-control nature of life. When we become surrendered to the out-of-control nature of life, then we see that it is acting in itself, through itself, as itself.
Can we open to life in this moment, just as it is? Can we be profoundly open to whatever it is and wherever it's going?
In that radical openness, nothing changes except seeing—that in the light of non-selfhood we have always been inherently free, and that our little life with its anxieties and pains and uncertainties is the divine itself, falling down at its own feet in heavenly surrender.
—jim sloman, for 9/1/01
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