Please note that I will be resuming my weekly Zoom meetings this Sunday, July 20th, 10 -11:30 am Pacific time.
THE FREEDOM OF EVERY APPEARANCE
For a moment, I invite you to simply allow everything to arise, as it arises. Notice how the arising of phenomena happens naturally, spontaneously, unpredictably, independent of anything we might be doing to notice or explore it. Life is here, every perception simply arising.
And now, just notice that the very nature of every moment, the nature of every experience is to arise and then depart. Every thought, every feeling, every sensation… all of it arises and then, releases itself, without our having to do anything to make it disappear.
See this, the absolute impossibility of holding anything in place. That's how free each moment is. No matter what we might do to try to hold it in place, every perception is ultimately uncapturable, freed in the very instant of its arising.
This is not some temporary state we can get ourselves into, one that feels free for however long it does but then eventually fades. No, this is the freedom that’s inherent in everything, the freedom of experiencing that lets go of itself in each instant.
Ordinarily, we think that there's some kind of bondage we must work to extricate ourselves from. But what I'm suggesting is that there is no bondage because reality is inherently free. The freedom of what is, is unbreakable because it's not in its nature to ever be bound.
See that nothing needs to be corrected about your experience to realize freedom because experience is already free in the very instant of its arising. The fact that what appears is here for no time owing to its dynamic nature is the evidence of reality’s inherent freedom.
Each moment is already freed, already not tied or tethered to anything. To be sure, we seem capable of rendering what appears, imagining that phenomena have become what we think they have become. And yet, every moment is free of all descriptions and designations, free of everything we could possibly think about it.
To be sure, what appears, appears as something identifiable and definable. We imagine we inhabit this world of people, places and things that’s been defined. But from this other vantage I’m pointing to, we don't actually inhabit a definable world for what we call the moment that we believe we’ve rendered descriptively vanishes no sooner than it appears. What’s appearing seems to become something identifiable. And yet, the minute it seems to become something, it becomes something else which is what I mean when I say, phenomena are free of identity.
The minute we think we’ve put our finger on what something is, it is gone. What is can never be caged in any of our descriptions. It's free of any way we might try to render it. Feel the unboundedness of that, the way in which everything that’s occurring is ultimately free of language, free of concepts and all their seeming and oftentimes limiting implications.
The definition of things tends to make them seem smaller than they are. When I define you, I put limits around what you are. When I say, “This is what this is,” I've just limited it. And yet, everything is completely free of all limitation because all that appears is, in its basis, indefinable owing to its relentless shape-shifting nature. And we're feeling this indefinability, right now. We’re feeling the release of each moment, everything freed of its supposed history.
But if this is gone, no sooner than it appears, how, you might ask, is it that there’s even an appearance of anything at all? There really is no answer to that question. Something appears to be here and yet what’s appearing has no duration and, in that sense, never actually appears, at least not as something fixed or formed.
And yet, here is this magical display we call, “the world.” It most certainly looks like something, something we seem able to grasp hold of. And in one sense, we can. We can hold our friends, our lovers, our parents, our children. We can talk to them, love them, quarrel with them and eventually, lose them. There’s no denying the experience of all these appearances and the sense that we can interact with, revel in, and enjoy them. But we can also feel threatened, overwhelmed, stressed or traumatized by things that seem to be here. And this is where the practicality of this ever-present freedom comes in.
Things can appear and be experienced as threatening or problematic from one perspective. And then, based on that assessment, we may take whatever steps we can to address those things. And there’s nothing wrong with approaching things in that way. However, from this other perspective I’m pointing to, there's no such thing as problems. There's just unbounded freedom that can look, from one perspective, like a problem that seems to be asking for a solution even if it isn’t ultimately what we think it is because reality, as it turns out, is unthinkable.
Each moment is the expression of this unbounded freedom, a freedom that is not a state, but the basis of every state. This is a freedom that doesn't come and go, a freedom that can never be lost. Everything that appears, disappears. That’s the freedom inherent in everything, the fact that each seeming phenomenon is let go of in the instant of its arising.
There is only this ceaseless flow, the constant disappearance of whatever seems to appear. This is the freedom inherent in everything, a freedom that is unconditioned by whatever is being experienced, a freedom that’s already here without our having to take a single step to notice or realize it.
Thank you John.
Beautiful, thank you.