The way life occurs to us is that there’s always somewhere to get to until you realize that there isn’t so suffering similarly is always present until you realize that there isn’t suffering and that to me is the beauty of the human experience so suffering is unavoidable by virtue of we’re here but nonetheless the opportunity the possibility that it is to be human is to transcend suffering and it’s such a beautiful design again because if it weren’t for the previous suffering we don’t get to experience the latter freedom as an adult i got to see myself in a picture in all black and white of me as a child and my cute little onesie whatever it is running with my arms out my mother is sort of very gently ushering me from behind so you can see that she’s sort of directing me towards somebody who you can’t see because they’re off camera they’re out of frame from the picture but i know because of the setting it was set at a harbor at a dock where the boat had just you know come to birth and we’ve probably come off the boat and i’m running towards my dad because my dad worked on the boats and as i looked at that photo and it’s this old black and white this adorable little child which you know is running towards his father who he loves his dad and what it occurred to me is at that moment one of the most important parts of love is the energy of missing somebody we often think that love is i’m with someone i’m sharing a dinner with them i’m going to bed with them or it could be a family member who i’m living with or i’m sharing time with constantly but that denies the flip side of the same coin which is one of the most beautiful aspects of love is what feels like the absence of the experience of love and we can call that missing somebody and why it was so profound for me is to see that little child run towards his dad with the excitement of the fact that for a minute for a minute maybe a day maybe a week it could be longer,
we experience the separation from that which we love and if it weren’t for the experience of separation we would not appreciate the joy of love and so why use that example as it relates to suffering and freedom is because separation is hurtful it’s painful and that is suffering and in this case suffering is where we become separate from the knowledge from the true wisdom of our true essence whilst freedom is the remembrance and the awakening to the essence of who i am at my core which is freedom so the two are inextricably connected and simultaneously necessary in order to experience one or the other if it weren’t for the experience of missing i don’t get to go to the depths of the joy of love and equally if it weren’t for the pain and the seeming inconvenience of human suffering then i wouldn’t get to experience the elation and the joy of liberation that is true freedom when you really understand that dynamic it’s so beautiful to see the duality of everything and i would actually take it a little deeper which is to say that freedom really is the container like love is the container that holds both right so we have the joy and we have the misery we have the happiness and we have the sadness and this is where if we can be big enough expanded enough as human beings then we make space for all of it it would be as nonsensical you know for people who think they just want to be positive and happy that is like asinine it would be like me saying no no no all i want to do is inhale because that’s so good because you get oxygen ,
if you’re like what the hell like if it weren’t for the fact that i get to exhale and let go of you know in this case obviously physiologically biologically the toxins of carbon dioxide and stuff that no longer serves me because it’s already served its purpose in my body then i wouldn’t get the joy of having that cyclical process of inhale exhale that keeps me alive so similarly the actual nature of duality both parts are flip sides of the same coin that are an inherent experience of being human and the degree to which we can embrace both is the degree to which we are truly free to allow all aspects of what it means to be human so suffering is really one aspect but it is an aspect where there is ultimately a form of ignorance and i don’t mean that as a judgment i mean it truly in the fact that we don’t know something we suffer because we don’t know how extraordinary we are we suffer because we don’t know that we actually are loved we don’t we suffer because we don’t feel safe and it is in that ignorance the not knowing the absence of knowledge that we suffer and the process of awakening is realizing oh these are lies and as i transcend lie i expand into my bigger nature which then is the experience of liberation which is contained in the safety that we are held and beneficiaries of life because we are fundamentally loved so the way i look at it is that this dimension that we are in as human beings to me is a revelatory dimension what does that mean life will reveal where you yourself as a being do not experience freedom life will present you with people and circumstances to reveal where you’re not free so why is that a completely different perspective or a different way of looking at the experience of life because most people are playing the human game what is the human game they’re trying to accumulate right accumulation of status accumulation of possessions accumulation of finance and they’re trying to play the game of i’m becoming a better human by virtue of what i have usually now that’s not wrong but it’s also to me it’s a powerless game to play whereas the awakening process of who i am as a being who is limitless who is in its infancy and its true inherent nature nothing but love peace power freedom that is to me the game that’s really at foot for human beings that is the opportunity that it is to be a human is to awaken to the true essence of who i am rather than being defined by the persona that has been conditioned over time that is now founded in the essence of survival that is two entirely different approaches to the human experience,
one is linear and one is vertical right so linear is okay hopefully over time i’m going to improve i got a promotion i’ve got a corner office i got a bigger home i got a nicer car i’ve got a little bit more money that is you know there’s again no udgment but it is a futile dead-end method of trying to find internal value by using external and exogenous means to bring some sense of worth versus discovering wow my inherent nature is freedom my inherent nature is love my inherent nature is peace and life is constantly giving me the opportunity to awaken to those qualities by virtue of presenting to me ironically where i don’t experience those so that’s why again i said life will present you with people and circumstances to reveal where you’re not free we often look as though circumstances as frustrating as things we don’t want but that’s precisely why they’re being given to us because we’ve yet to see how powerful and extraordinary we are that we have yet to integrate those experiences and see that i can truly be with whatever is occurring and maintain my inner sense of peace and freedom and love we arrive as beings but shrouded in constraint we arrive as souls but constrained by fear and the game of this particular dimension of planet earth and being human is oh awesome we are set here so that we can reveal where we are confined constrained and have some sense of separation and limitation and so life is the process of slothing by virtue of these trials and tribulations and these sort of confronting circumstances really is a form of resistance which just like polishing a diamond is allowing us to recognize where we still feel constrained or we arrive with our bucket of fears and as i say you know the quote-unquote winner of the game is who can get rid of their fears the fastest not that there is any urgency but we could say and i would assert the true liberation and true freedom which is my main product is when we have confronted all of the fears that we arrive with to recognize that in fact there is nothing to fear itself whatsoever and that was always just a narrative that was part of our persona or our ego that was just simply the the cocoon in which we felt we needed to live in order to stay safe when in fact it’s quite the antithesis of that which is true security is when i no longer need the illusion of external security If the experience i have with another person is of some form of disharmony of judgment of hostility then that really is a reflection of what’s going on inside of me so as i say as we express so we experience right so if i’m expressing anger towards whoever or whatever the circumstance may be then i am experiencing anger right so this is water travels through say a garden hose,
if the garden hose was sentient and it had feeling internally it would feel the passage of the water when it was cold or hot or how fast it’s moving so likewise as we express our emotional state we’re under the impression that it’s by virtue of what’s going on outside of us but whether it is or not in terms of our interpretation we’re nonetheless experiencing all of that so then why wouldn’t i if i know that correlation if i’m if i’m actually aware of that formula then why wouldn’t i wherever possible bring an experience of love and joy to whoever it might be because then i’m equally the beneficiary of it and this is why exercises like gratitude journals or going and being a volunteer and being of service to a community feels good why does it feel good because what i’m actually doing is i’m bringing the experience of my true self is what i would have said and i’m sharing to another i’m giving to another and therefore i am equally the beneficiary of my own active contribution you know einstein said you either you look at the universe in one of two ways everything is a miracle nothing’s a miracle right and so really when you get like we are beneficiaries of life even though again i’ve been through a ton of what felt like unnecessarily hardship that at the time my little persona was like i don’t want this this sucks but really in hindsight is often the case we recognize wow if it weren’t for those events if it weren’t for those you know hardships then i wouldn’t have discovered that expansiveness of what i’ve just stepped into and why i use the expression that smooth seas never made a good sailor right so we need adversity itself is the catalyst for growth it is life is the greatest teacher by virtue of the fact that it gives us challenges ,
so that it can as i said earlier slough off anything that is confining us anything that is holding us back a constraint that is in some way limiting our self-expression we need some resistance to get rid of that and that is you know at times a very difficult pill to swallow but it is nonetheless the catalyst to discover that really we are held eternally it’s like the metaphor the image of these trapeze artists right the experience for anybody who goes up on a trapeze from the perspective of the ego is fear if there’s no net right you you would feel such intrepidation of letting go of the trapeze bar to transition maybe to your partner and be caught in the absence of knowing there was some safety net and that’s the ego’s experience as it goes through life it feels that at any turn its existence is in potential danger everything can come across as a potential threat and that’s an exhausting place to live from conversely if we can tap into this deeper essence of understanding the nature of life and particularly the nature of who we are then at every turn there is always a safety net it might not feel like it but we can drop we can fall we can miss the grip of the partner as we transition from trapeze bar to travis bar and it’s okay and that we could say our errors our mistakes our failures and it’s okay
