Deep Freedom Now

We can look in our lives. We can look in the world, listen to our brothers and sisters; human, animal, fish, amphibian, trees. Pain runs deep, doesn’t it? But what is it? Pain is the avoidance of our experience. It’s the illusion that we, as individuals and as a culture, can transform out of the defense mechanisms of the Manufactured Self.

This is like having a rotting house and applying a better coat of paint. It’s like these forests in Colorado that fed the Ute, Shoshoni, Arapahoe and Cheyenne peoples for thousands of years, with a lifestyle that the white man disdained as slothful because the First Peoples weren’t busting ass for some task master from dawn to dusk, trying to survive. The white man came, took the gold and cut the forests to feed the mills, then mono-cropped it. Now that forest is dying. In many places it is 85% dead. And the white man is going to “fix” it again. He’s going to “put it to good use” and replant it, too, just like he did last time, except better, always better, always “improving,” with his solutions generating the next problems.

We have this same relationship with our inner wilderness: a constant effort to conquer ourselves, regardless of how we feel, to improve what we profoundly do not know. What I call the journey of the Idiot Hero.

A day comes when we face the pain, we face the rot, we face the reality of our lived experience. A day comes when we notice that we have held the one who shows up in our mirror hostage to our ideas of him - and that she is none of those ideas. He is dying trying to breathe life into those ideas, and dying in a way that feeds little else but the fiction of himself. That is the day that we divest ourselves of our own hype and drop the search for a bigger, gentler, wiser hype. That is emptiness, and it devastates the fantasies a lot of us, of all colors and cultures, are running around in these days. That day is a painful day, and it’s the day that True Healing begins. It’s the day when we’ll learn to live out of something larger than a 1 inch area of our left Temporal-Parietal lobe. Suddenly we notice that there is a body, that there is a heart, gut, genitals, legs, the backside of our bodies, and that they are not just there to be USED, they have their own intelligence, they have been sensing and feeling our lives all along. That can be painful. It is also profoundly enlivening. Our entire civilization is heading toward that day. We know that not only our imagined world, but also our imagined selves will be undone.

There is a Deeper Intelligence inviting us into a Deeper Freedom. Human beings living in cultures of conquest are almost wholly defended from that Deeper Intelligence. Our lives are devoted to making IMAGES of that intelligence so that we can avoid EXPERIENCING it, not only religious images, but scientific images, too. Our culture is based in reducing ourselves and everything else to a mental object. We were taught to worship a so-called God manufactured out of endless narratives of genocide, and some of us discovered that that “God” is dead. Indeed He is. As are all the “Gods” & “Goddesses” that we try to replace him with, in the conviction that divinity is something outside of a “ Manufactured Self” that needs to obey “God” because it is fundamentally “wrong.” What remains for many to discover is that the “Self” that got manufactured in the image of that “God” is just as dead; another mental fiction that devours Life to try to make itself real. A change of clothes doesn’t change the inner reality. It doesn’t matter whether you put on a roman collar, saffron robes, a wizard’s hat or buckskins and beadwork.

There is a Beingness that we are made of and which does not require us to manufacture it. Our very Being is the expression of an intelligence that spontaneously and continuously BIRTHS what we cannot manufacture - and yet we persist in manufacturing part-by-part while we wallow in the toxicity manufactured out of our ignorance of Whole Intelligence. We want to take and get, even though our rapaciousness leaves us with much less than what a simple stopping, noticing, connecting and receiving is offering us continually.

When we can say, as my friend Michael Skye said to me in my last post, “Thank you for your willingness to be with your pain and to love me” then we come to the possibility of true relationship. This is the crux of the matter right now, isn’t it? Because right now, as we ARE, in togetherness there is pain, isn’t there? We love somebody, we want to enjoy their company, offer them the best we can, and then we see all the mechanisms of this disconnective “self” get triggered and engage. We experience how profoundly we resist connection. If we are willing to be with this pain that we carry from a long ways back, that we inherit from many generations, only then can we speak of crossing the threshold of a Loving that might eventually allow us to know each other as “People,” beyond some momentary senti-mentality.

This is a long journey. Maybe we will know each other, some day, as People in whose company we can offer more than momentary “wanting” and then long-winded tolerance. That starts with a new relationship to our own experience. An end to correction and a beginning to connection. It’s like planting seeds in the heart, and not just seeds for ourselves and the people we are with; seeds to human Life and ALL of Life thousands of generations forward. When we are willing to take this journey, not to “get” something, but to make a humble, simple offering to the Beauty of the Life within and without, then we will know how profoundly good it is to be just as we are; and we will offer Life within us a bigger adventure than trying to corral it into our idea of ourselves and the world.

And we can be gentle with this offering, too. Not yanking parts of ourselves out to offer up, but waiting and stopping - maybe a few minutes, hours, days and even years. This offering does not come from our idea of offering, it comes from Life. We don’t “make” it, it comes through us. It is the offering that Life makes to Life through the Life in us. First offer yourself the opportunity to know Life. Then we can set aside our heroism and our mutual tolerance. Maybe that offering requires that you shut the door and offer yourself a little protection, make yourself a sacred place where you can stop and let Life find its harmony again inside of you. Maybe that offering for your people is going to ask you to stop doing all the things you’ve been doing for all those people, all those things you thought made you “good”; a good daughter, son, brother, sister, mother, father, husband, wife, lover, boss, employee, teacher, student, etc. And when you stop, then you’ll FEEL, guaranteed, and your first trained program will be to DO something about what you feel. That’s why this culture doesn’t stop. We’re obsessed with doing because if we stop doing we realize that we’re caught in habits that numb pain but don’t give us joy. My invitation to you is, when you FEEL something inside that you are ashamed of, or want to “spiritualize” away, or want to react and express something to someone about: go back to FEELING, follow the stream of those feelings all the way up to the headwaters of your life, then up the springs of your ancestry and FEEL, just FEEL.

When we can make a little room for our pain, then we’ll be able to make a little room for ourselves, and then each other. When we cease to resist our experience of pain, as it arises inside of us, even when we’re all alone with no physical discomfort, we discover that pain actually IS resistance. In that willingness to cease resisting pain, we suddenly discover that pain is like a doorway that keeps us shut out of the core of our experience. When we open the door we label “pain,” what’s behind it is not “pain” but fundamentally vital. Then we discover that Deep Joy is not only possible, it is indigenous (in the genus) to our humanity, when we allow it’s Living Intelligence. Try it. Experience it for yourself. In that willingness to EXPERIENCE our experience, our journey in search of Freedom FROM turns into a Celebration of Freedom FOR our People, all of them, even the hard-nut cases like ourselves!

Dare to FEEL the Reality WITHIN and beyond who you imagine (image-in) your “self” to be, and within and through what you imagine your pain to be. You are an expression of a Living Intelligence that is much Wiser, more Sensual, Intelligent, Generous, Creative and Kind than your idea of your “self.”

©2009 Olivier Tryba
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