to be free

To be free

It is necessary to surrender completely

There is a paradox in this. Usually we might associate the word freedom with having choice: I am free to choose to live here, to live there, to eat this, to eat that. There is a sense in which we associate freedom with free will. There's the same word again: free. And whilst we are living the mundane, materialistic, normal life that most human beings live, this is as close to freedom as we can get. But if we are honest in that situation, we will see that we are not really free.

We have been heavily conditioned by parents, by society, by our life situation. And this so called free will is, in a subtle way, a prison. We are living in our mind with thoughts and ideas, and a lot of that mental process is there because we want to make decisions. We want to make a choice. And yet, even if a choice arises, still there is a feeling of being trapped. It's subtle, very subtle, but by asserting that we are the one in control of our life, we are creating a cage for ourself. There is an isolation involved in that. For sure we can make our life comfortable. We may well have made a gilded cage, one where we have all the material comforts that we want. And yet we will not feel free. Deep down, we will still feel we are in that cage.

So to really be free, to really discover what it is to live in a space of freedom, we have to realise that what we are really trying to be free of is our own psychology, our own mental machinations. We have only ourselves to blame and to be free we have to be free from ourself. And for this to come about, there is only one way for it to happen. There is only one step to take, and that is complete surrender.

And there is the paradox, usually when we talk in terms of surrender, we imagine that we are giving up freedom, that we are becoming enslaved, a prisoner in some way. But on our spiritual journey it's exactly the opposite. When we surrender to life, which is to say, we surrender to god, then there is a huge letting go. Our chains drop away. That gilded cage simply melts around us, and there is a tremendous lightness of being.

All we are really surrendering is an illusion, a certain perspective, an idea about ourself. And that idea includes the idea that we are the ones making choices, that I am in control. That is an illusion, and in surrendering that illusion, in acknowledging that we are actually living a choiceless life, in that, quite unexpectedly perhaps, we become free.