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On the other hand, the term 'liberation' implies freedom from all states, including the capacity for awareness of any state.
On the other hand, the term 'liberation' implies freedom from all states, including the capacity for awareness of any state.
The thing about it is that it's not an experience. It's the recognition of the not-knowing upon which all experiences appear to manifest.
You are free to be as happy as you are. But happiness is not freedom.
originally posted by: HarryTZ
The word enlightenment has a lot of heaviness and stickiness and is in fact an extremely misleading phrase for serious seekers. The word implies the attainment of a specific state, perhaps a more peaceful and wholesome state. But this cannot be true freedom because the concept of 'state' implies a specific mental perspective, limited by its own existence.
On the other hand, the term 'liberation' implies freedom from all states, including the capacity for awareness of any state. I am talking of a total freedom from the known and a dissolution into unknowing.
Nisargadatta spoke of this absolute dissolution on many occasions. He said that even what we call consciousness is itself a conditioned mental state, and is in fact the beginning of seperation. Consciousness only exists in relationship with a seemingly separate world. If you are conscious, you are conscious of something, and that intrinsically implies a seperation of the 'known' and the 'knower'.
In an absolute sense, consciousness doesn't actually exist. There is no knowing of anything. 'Reality', if you will, neither exists nor fails to exist. Both existence and non-existence are essentially illusory in this sense. True freedom, therefore, is not a state, but is actually the 'reality' before the capacity for states to appear at all. And because all states are based on absolute illusion, freedom is already the case, absolutely. Liberation, then, in a relative sense, is the end of illusion, which never existed.
Once you're dead, is there still creativity and expression? What will be there to be expressed then? What is there now?
Only a delusional mind is capable of believing that freedom lies in action.
originally posted by: HarryTZ
a reply to: gosseyn
It's really a paradox because actually there are no states at all. Yet we experience apparent states through the pathological mechanisms of the brain and believe they are real. So in one sense there is nothing called freedom because everything is already as free as possible. But the end of suffering is a result of truly seeing the freedom of ALL apparent states.
As for having very limited control of things, really we have no control over anything because there is no seperate entity at all in you that has the ability to choose. Your actions are no different than the breeze blowing or the rain falling. The only difference is the thought there (which you have no control over) that says you have choice in anything. It's a meaningless affair, worrying about free will.