Longing for Freedom
“Look for me where I really am. Look for me in the heart. Look for me in the fountain of attention not in your destiny.” ~ Rupert Spira
I was thinking about happiness and freedom today - how the ego or the personality becomes distracted into believing that it's something that it has to go out to get or how it often is caught in the illusion that happiness or freedom is in the object. What came were the words of Aristotle, “Love (aka happiness, freedom, peace) is when two souls are sharing one body”.
There have been so many different translations of what this means and all are valid. What strikes me as important is that there are two which unite, making real this, that exists that's called love or happiness or peace or God, it doesn't really matter what you want to call it.
What matters is that you are aware that it exists and it is something that is, but that it doesn't exist out here in front of us for us to see and hold, nor is it a place where one needs to go.
And so this illusion - that we have to go out to get something - really sends us on a wild goose chase - on the fool's journey and an odyssey. Again, more words and fragrances and tastes and essences and cultures that are trying to define what is indefinable, infinite and boundless.
Still, you are the happiness that you seek.
How many of us really know what that means. How could I possibly be happy, free or at peace right now when a dear friend's child is suffering, or when there’s war on other side of the world, and famine and all sorts of horrible atrocities against mankind - against humankind, against the soul, the spirit of being human.
How can this be?
Well, it happens because happiness or peace or love, or freedom is a canvas. The canvas is blank and its flavor is whatever you choose to paint on it. When you have the freedom to paint - when you have safety and agreement and a sense of loyalty with life, when you can be with life in that realm of radical acceptance - you have the freedom to paint whatever you want on that canvas.
The canvas becomes freedom.
There could be atrocities happening on the outside, but you can still see through the them because you are not those atrocities and you can freely paint, whatever it is that you are inclined, called or willed to paint.
If let's say you have the basic needs in life that inspire happiness - a sense of safety, connection, harmony and having a family, maybe not perfect, but having that family and being able to have relationships - then you can paint upon the canvas of happiness.
Again, freedom - freedom to paint. And it's the same thing with peace and so on and so on. So you are the peace that you seek, and when you paint on the canvas in this way, then you start to taste everything in different ways. But to not be able to see the beauty in everything is just a matter of being nearsighted or far sighted.
If we are nearsighted, too connected to our stories about the past and triggered by them (we see them everywhere), the mind becomes habituated to recognize and prove, which keeps you in a constant negative state of sadness or frustration or despair or anger etc.
When we are farsighted and we can't see near. So we're constantly trying to make the future clear. We're worried. We're uncertain, we're cultivating anxiety and we are plagued with stress. And the only thing that’s going to negotiate these polarized state (which affect your body, your whole way of being in life) is to cultivate the muscles of Presence in the Now, cultivating the muscles that remind you that you are the canvas.
Naturally what flows from that is, “I am peace! I am the peace that I seek. Oh! I am happiness! I am the happiness that I seek. Oh! I am freedom! I am the freedom that I seek.” In this way we've programmed the ego mind, the monkey mind, the habituated mind to seek those things out in the spaces around us.
And that is when real change happens — when the colors we choose reflect our intentions, and when our brush strokes are committed, we make these dreams of Freedom, Love, Happiness, and Peace real.