I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

Is freedom possible? Do we even know how to be free? Do we even know how it feels to be free?

Life does seem to put limits on our freedom. Society puts constraints on the way we act and communicate with one another. It would seem that there are even limits for the artist, although thank God they are constantly being broken down.

Creativity often flows from coming to terms with life’s challenges and through learning to communicate with a variety of people. For me this is becoming the key to ministry. It has taken me time to develop spiritual intimacy with the communities I serve and to learn how to communicate with the people I share worship with.

Unitarians claim freedom of the pulpit but we don’t have absolute freedom to do whatever we fancy, reason and tolerance are the counter balance to this.  We do need to push boundaries though at times. If our history had not been littered with folk who were prepared to do that then we would not exist today as a free religious community unconstrained by creed and dogma. That said I am not convinced that we enjoy total freedom, societal norms and human expectations constrain everyone at times. And there are positives to this as it gives people stability and a groundedness that any community needs.

I have shared the following story before in a previous blog (This version was written by Rev Darlison). I love it, it speaks powerfully to me. I believe that it is strikingly symbolic of Hindu spirituality.

While travelling alone through some rough terrain, a man called Mitali stayed the night in a wayside inn. Tired from his journey, he went to bed and was on the point of falling asleep when he heard a voice calling, Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!” from the courtyard below his window.

“Someone must be trapped nearby, “ thought Mitali. “I’ll go see if I can help”

He descended to the courtyard and looked around, but he could see nobody. Thinking he must have imagined the voice, he was about to go back in the room when he heard it again: “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!” but it wasn’t coming from a person; it was coming from a parrot sitting in a golden cage.

“How cruel”, thought Mitali. “no bird should be imprisoned like that”. He walked over to the cage and opened the door. “off you go!” he said to the bird. “You can go free now”

The parrot sat on its perch, calling out “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free”, but it didn’t move. Mitali put his hand in the cage, but the parrot cowered away, all the while calling for freedom but making no move towards the open door.

Gently taking hold of the parrot, Mitali tried to drag it through the caged door, but the parrot resisted mightily, pecking at his would-be liberator’s hand until the blood flowed copiously. Undaunted by the pain, Mitali finally released the bird and threw it up in the air. “Your free now my friend. Go off and enjoy your liberty!” The parrot flew off, and was soon lost to sight in the darkness of the moonless night.

Feeling very pleased with himself, Mitali went to bed. “Captivity is wrong for man or beast,” he thought. “Birds should be free to fly; they shouldn’t be forced to sit in cages for the entertainment of human beings. At least I’ve helped one creature to escape to freedom.”

He slept very soundly that night.

With the dawn he awoke, and he smiled as he remembered his good deed of a few hours before. But then he heard the voice once more. “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free!” “The parrot hasn’t gone very far,” he thought. “He must have perched on a nearby tree or rock. Perhaps he is sitting on the roof of the inn.”

Mitali went down to the courtyard to have a look. But the parrot wasn’t perched on the roof of the building. Nor was he on a nearby tree, or on a rock. He was back in the cage, shouting for freedom, and the cage door was open.

In many religious traditions the soul is often symbolised by a bird and it’s the same in Hinduism. The Hindu term for what we understand as the soul is the Atman. The Atman refers to the eternal none material aspect of the self. It never changes and is distinct from the mind and body. This real self is beyond the temporary characteristics of race, gender and even species. Ideas about reincarnation are natural extension of this concept. For Hindu’s consciousness, in whatever way it may manifest, is merely a symptom of the soul. Therefore for the physical life to have awareness it requires the soul.

The story of the caged parrot is symbolic of the soul becoming trapped by the body and or the mind, it is crying out to be set free. It is offered freedom but fights against it. Finally it is set free, but does not like or want this freedom and therefore returns to the cage, crying out for freedom “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free”

As Rousseau said “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”.

How can we free the soul? How do we attain this freedom? How do we set the soul free? How do we truly live as ourselves amongst others and with others? How do we escape the chains that bind us? How do we leave the cage behind? What can we do to stop ourselves from opening the cage door, climb back in, sit on the perch and squawk “freedom, freedom, I want to be free” How can spiritual freedom be attained?

For me the key to spiritual freedom has to be self transcendence. In my experience it is through self sacrifice that we truly find ourselves and we set our souls, minds and bodies free to live as we were born to live. This seems to go against the grain of much 21^st century thinking which seems to be all about me feeling good about me, right now. More, more, more, now, now, now!

The Rev Alex Bradley, the principle at Unitarian College Manchester, where I trained for the ministry suggests:

“People sacrifice themselves to others in various ways. In doing so, they find themselves. They give themselves in the lives they lead. They may be seemingly ordinary nameless people or ones whose names live on. Margeret Barr in lifelong self service, James Reeb in prophetic witness at the cost of his life. Real freedom is lived in relation to others: real freedom is found in community.

Real freedom is about choice, and sometimes it is found through the narrow gate. It is found in the true self and it is found in self denial. Jesus spoke of the kingdom as a great feast for all. He also said that those seeking to save their lives would lose them, and those who lost their lives would find them.

Here is the spiritual paradox that all the great faiths have taught. Here I believe is real freedom.”

Alex makes a very powerful point. Through self sacrifice, in community, the true self is revealed and we are set free from the cage, we stop squawking about freedom and begin to actually enjoy it.

The great twentieth century Hindu Gandhi saw Jesus as the great example of this. He held him up as the ideal Satyagraha, which is resistance to evil through soul force. Gandhi, a Hindu, studied the Bible everyday for years and was greatly impressed with the New Testament particularly “The sermon on the Mount”. Like many Hindu’s it was the gentle figure of Jesus that he admired, who taught his followers not to retaliate and to resist violence. For him it was not the historical event of Jesus that mattered, but what the example of the message of his life had to offer humanity.  For Gandhi Christ exemplified what it meant to serve your fellow humans and saw this as the guiding principle of his life. He saw the cross as being the perfect example of this sacrifice. He saw the cross as the perfect metaphor of self transcendence.

 

So is self transcendence the key to freedom? There are those who will say no to this and cry out “If I lose myself what will be left?”

Well self transcendence is not about destruction of “self” it is actually about the discovery of the “real self”. It is the key to “real freedom”. It is not a new idea and is a message found at the root of the great religious traditions, theistic and non-theistic. I like to call it the "Diamond principle". Through self transcendence our “real” nature is fully revealed; the “Great Reality”, deep down within every man, woman and child and all life for that matter. Some call this the “Cosmic Christ” or “Cosmic God”, what Matthew Fox has named as the “I am” in everything. It is a faith based on change, dare I say transformation, because this “I am” can reshape matter for ever. It is a change that is brought on by the spiritual activity of self giving love.

Self transcendence is “really” about delighting in our very being, by understanding that we exist beyond the confines of ourselves. Keith Ward has described it as “Non – egoist delight in being” Karen Armstrong suggests “For human beings transcendence is part of our experience of the world”. It not only changes how we are as individuals but how we relate to the world. It opens our eyes to a far more universal perspective. It enables us to see the world through the eyes of others and not just from our own narrow perspectives. This breeds compassion and leads to a “real freedom” that transforms the world for ever.

To be really free requires courage. It requires us to speak and be our truth and to do so in love. We need not be afraid to express who we are and where we are coming from; we need not be stifled by the fear of what others may or may not think of us. Freedom is not something to merely talk about as an abstract concept but something to be experienced and expressed, but I don’t believe that happens in isolation. It happens when we come together and meet and give of ourselves to each other. You see by dancing our dance and showing others they can do likewise, we encourage one another to know how it feels to be free.

It is no good merely squawking about freedom, “Freedom! Freedom! I want to be free” We need to show the world what it means to know how it feels to be free.

The Golden Rule & Rule 62

“The late Rabbi Albert Friedlander impressed upon me the importance of the biblical commandment “Love your neighbour as yourself.” I had always concentrated on the first part of that injunction, but Albert taught me that if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love other people either. He had grown up in Nazi Germany and as a child was bewildered and distressed by the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that assailed him on all sides. One night, when he was almost eight years old, he deliberately lay awake and made a list of all his good qualities. He told himself firmly that he was not what the Nazi’s said; that he had talents and special gifts of heart and mind, which he enumerated to himself one by one. Finally he vowed that if he survived, he would use those qualities to build a better world. This was an extraordinary insight for a child in such circumstances. Albert was one of the kindest people I have ever met; he was almost pathologically gentle, and must have brought help and counsel to thousands. But he always said that he could have done no good at all unless he had learned, at that terrible moment of history to love himself.”

From “12 Steps to a Compassionate Life” by Karen Armstrong

“The Golden Rule of Compassion”, found in every one of the great faith traditions reads. “Love your neighbour as yourself”

But what if we hate ourselves?

If we hate ourselves but show love to others, surely this is just as much a betrayal of the “Golden Rule” as failing to love others? If we love others but fail to love ourselves then surely we do not love our neighbour as ourselves.

It is so easy to get hung up on our human failings to give ourselves a hard time for not being perfect compassionate beings all of the time; to hate the person looking back at us each morning in the mirror. For an awful long time I hated that man looking back at me in the mirror.

How often have we listened to that voice that has told us we are just not good enough?

How many of us have true compassion for ourselves? Karen Armstrong in “12 Steps to a Compassionate Life” states that:

“The Golden Rule requires self knowledge, it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behaviour with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people.”

She suggests that we do this by taking an honest appraisal of ourselves and recognise both our positive and negative qualities. This though must be done with a degree of lightness, we need to be careful not to get too lost in ourselves. We need to learn to smile at the person looking back at ourselves each and every morning.

I had a moment of enlightenment myself a few years ago, at a time when I allowed life to really weigh me down. I woke up one day I looked at myself in the mirror, smiled and simply said “Life is too serious, to be taken too seriously...have a laugh” I’ve found myself chuckling away ever since.

Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a world wide organisation that is held together by the least amount of governance as possible. Alcoholics are notorious for taking themselves too seriously. In the early days of  AA the myth of “Rule 62” developed. Now no one is really sure where it came from and there appears to be no rule 1,2,3,4....upto 61 or beyond 62. Yet “Rule 62” appeared...the rule is “don’t take yourself so seriously, lighten up”.

Life really is too serious to be taken too seriously

Maybe we do in fact love or hate our neighbours as we love or hate ourselves. Maybe the real reason that we do not love others is because we do not truly love ourselves?  So what do we do? We attempt to suppress those darker qualities that are part of our humanity. By doing so we actually strengthen them, we feed them and they grow stronger. We feed the negative wolf deep within us. When what we ought to be doing instead is developing our compassionate natures and feeding that inner wolf instead.

I love the story of “The Two Wolves. Here is one version I found:

An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life: "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. "One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego. "The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. "This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old chief simply replied, "The one you feed."

We are not always as compassionate as we could be when it comes to ours or others pain. We tell each other that we must soldier on and ignore it, live with it. But is this a solution?

I remember talking with a counsellor many years ago and she told me that a large number of her clients were elderly men who had experienced some real horrors during the war, but had battened down the hatches and never dealt with this deep rooted pain. Sadly years later they suffered severely because of this.

Is this how we are meant to live? Are we meant to be stoic and strong all the time? Is it in fact weak to show and share our pain?

Armstrong states that “The ancient Greeks had no problem with shedding tears: they believed that weeping together created a bond between human beings; in Shakespeare’s day it was considered quite normal for men to weep.”

I do wonder if we truly honour each other’s pain; if we ever truly allow one another to grieve. Do we instead spend our time trying to cheer one another up and get each other through the suffering as quickly as possible. I know I have been guilty of this in the past and I do have to ask myself is this really about the other person’s pain or me feeling uncomfortable with their pain?

Armstrong says that it is vital that we see and accept our pain, no matter how insignificant it may appear in the grand scheme of things. She says that we need to have compassion for our own pain too, or we will fail to have compassion for others when they themselves are suffering. We will dismiss it, we will tell them to stiffen up and get on with it.

Armstrong is not encouraging self pity, quite the opposite. Instead she advocates that we use our past sufferings to help others during their struggles. This is true empathy, it is compassionate living. No one escapes the pain that comes with the joy of living.

Buddhism teaches all existence is suffering – Dukha –nothing last forever; that there is always a price to be paid for whatever we may achieve in life. The mistake we make is that we believe that we will attain happiness and escape pain and suffering if we get everything that we always wanted. These are human traits and we should not berate ourselves for having them, for being less than perfect. We need to develop compassion for these parts of ourselves. By doing so we will have compassion for the same traits in others and we will also begin to work on the other part of ourselves, our compassionate wolf that also dwells within us.

So how do we develop the compassion within us? How do we feed the loving wolf within us? How do we love ourselves and therefore love our neighbours as ourselves? Armstrong suggests that one way is through the daily practise of meditation. She highlights that the Buddha devised a meditation that made him conscious of the positive emotions that lay dormant within him.

The meditation begins by drawing on the warmth of friendship (maitri), that is already within us and directing it to our whole selves. This enables us to see how much love we do possess and how much we long for loving friendship.

The meditation then asks us to become conscious of our anger, fear anxiety; to unearth the seeds of rage that lay within ourselves; to bring to our minds our past suffering; to attempt to put current irritations to one side. The meditation is attempting to help us feel compassion for ourselves. It asks us to look at the seeds of rage within ourselves; to bring to mind past suffering; to try to put current irritations to one side. The purpose here is to feel compassion (Karuna) for ourselves.

It then asks us to bring our capacity for joy (Mudita) to the surface and become consciously aware of things that we take for granted that bring us joy such as our family and friends or other simple loves, craft work, walking in the countryside, dancing and singing...whatever brings us joy. Whatever puts a smile on our faces.

The final aspect asks us to look at ourselves with even mindedness and none attachment (upeksha) and to be aware that we are not unique in our joy or suffering, that we all have failings and we all have talents and gifts to offer to the world too.

The purpose of the meditation is to help us better serve one another. By developing our compassionate natures we can love ourselves and then truly love others too.

As the Buddha told his followers

“When your mind is filled with love, send it in one direction, then a second, then a third, and a fourth, then above, then below. Identifying with everything without hatred, resentment, anger or enmity. This mind of love is very wide. It grows immeasurably and eventually is able to embrace the whole world.”

The meditations purpose is self transcendence which will bring us into oneness, into wholeness, with all that is. We do not love ourselves because we are trapped in ourselves and we are trapped in ourselves because we are afraid of the darkness that we see in others, the very same darkness we want to remain hidden within ourselves. We can transcend this though and live open and loving and compassionate lives. When we consciously make the effort to abandon the “me first mentality”, which paradoxically begins by truly loving who we are wholeheartedly, our horizons begin to expand and our fears begin to disappear; the selfish wolf begins to die off and we begin to live the life that we are capable of living. As a result the compassionate wolf just naturally comes to the surface.

The purpose of developing our inner compassion is to unleash our true human potential and to encourage others to do likewise, to be the example. By simply practising the two exercises of balanced self examination and daily meditation on love, we can begin to love ourselves wholeheartedly. Then we can truly love our neighbours as ourselves, by showing them compassion, even if they are not doing so themselves. It is only by feeling genuine compassion for ourselves that we are then capable of genuinely extending it to others.

Having said all of that it is just as important that we remain light hearted about all of this. We need to remember “Rule 62”, not to take ourselves so seriously...we need to lighten up at times. I know I do.

Why?

Because life is too serious to be taken too seriously.

Simple Not Easy

"Simple not easy a price had to paid, it meant destruction of self centeredness."

Bill Wilson claimed that this was required if a "real" alcoholic hoped to be set free from their addiction. Now of course it is easy to misunderstand and misread this statement. It is not suggesting that a persons inner self requires destroying, merely their self centeredness. He and others discovered that the root cause of their alcoholism was in fact their self centeredness. This is why in Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12 Step fellowships it is claimed that through coming into relationship with a “power greater than self” an addicted person is set free from the bondage of their destructive mindset; a mindset that had previously compelled them to continue with their self, and other, destructive activity. Perhaps the greatest myth, perpetuated about addiction, is that the sufferer is somehow choosing to do what they do. Even if they are appearing to do so, they are making the “choice” from an insane mindset. How can this be called a “free choice”? That said many millions of people have been set free from their addictions by a change in heart and mind brought on by a way of life that at its core is the principle of self giving love, or agape.

Self transcendence is not about destruction of “self” it is actually about the discovery of the “real self”. It is the key to “real freedom”. It is not a new idea and is a message found at the root of the great religious traditions, theistic and non-theistic. I like to call it the "Diamond principle". Through self transcendence our “real” nature is fully revealed; what Bill Wilson himself has described as the “Great Reality”, deep down within every man, woman and child and all life for that matter. Some call this the “Cosmic Christ” or “Cosmic God”, what Matthew Fox has named as the “I am” in everything. It is a faith based on change, dare I say transformation, because this “I am” can reshape matter for ever. It is a change that is brought on by the spiritual activity of self giving love and not by “will powered” mental processes.

Self transcendence is “really” about delighting in our very being, by understanding that we exist beyond the confines of ourselves. Keith Ward has described it as “Non – egoist delight in being” Karen Armstrong suggests “For human beings transcendence is part of our experience of the world”. It not only changes how we are as individuals but how we relate to the world. It opens our eyes to a far more universal perspective. It enables us to see the world through the eyes of others and not just from our own narrow perspectives. This breeds compassion and leads to a “real freedom” that transforms the world for ever.