Live Session Summary, Sunday, February 11, 2024:
It was good to be with you for our Live session today. The talk was on ‘Two Roads for Awakening to Freedom’—1) the Buddha’s gradual path of training and cultivation leading to awakening and freedom from suffering; and 2) a road shared by contemporary (and past) teachers that focuses less on a path of training and more on freedom as being always and already present—and how to realize what we already are.
Here are some of the main themes, quotes, and poems:
I began by highlighting the Buddha’s path to freedom, including his teachings on:
• the four noble truths that lead to awakening, or Nirvana/Nibbana;
• the noble eightfold path (the fourth noble truth)—the training in ethics, meditation, and the cultivation of wisdom—that leads to the end of suffering;
• mindfulness (one of the eight elements of the eightfold path) as a ‘direct path to liberation.’
These and other central teachings, such as cultivating the heart practices (loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity) and the seven awakening factors, qualities that lead to enlightenment (mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquility, concentration, and equanimity) are at the heart of the Buddha’s path to freedom.
All of the Buddha’s teachings are directed towards insight and letting go, leading to ending suffering in this life. The Buddha said, “All my teachings have one taste: the taste of freedom.”
Broadly speaking, the Buddha’s path to awakening is a gradual one. Like the approach of the second path we’ll explore, awakening always involves a breaking through to insight and freedom. It may happen more gradually or more suddenly (or a combination of the two), but there is always a breaking out of our everyday and mundane ways of seeing ourselves and the world. In Zen Buddhism, they say, ‘Enlightenment is an accident; practice makes us accident-prone.’
Since we regularly discuss the Buddha’s path, we will focus more in this and upcoming sessions on the second approach, which I call the ‘already free’ approach. Here I highlight some of the teachings and practices of three contemporary spiritual teachers, who teach from their own experiences of awakening. They are not Buddhist teachers, nor do they form a particular school or tradition, but I believe their approaches have common elements that are distinct from—and also complementary to—the Buddha’s path to freedom. And that we can benefit from integrating our practice in these two areas.
The teachers we discuss and a book that for each highlights some of their core teachings are:
• Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
• Adyashanti, The End of Your World
• Gangaji, The Diamond in Your Pocket
I shared some of the main themes of their teachings and quotes from their talks or writings:
1) Freedom, peace, the deepest joy, are not ‘states’ that we need to reach or attain—i.e., something that we are not—but rather they are the essence of who we are, our true nature. We are ‘already free’ but we don’t know it since we think of freedom as being something ‘out there,’ something we need to get to or achieve. But, if freedom is who we already are, we simply need to let go of the stories, beliefs, and identifications that keep us from realizing our true nature, who we already are:
• Gangaji: “The peace, rest, and fulfillment you have been searching for outside, however exalted or sublime, are actually here now. If, in this moment, you can simply discard your outward reference points for what will give you peace, you might recognize that peace is already here, regardless of any internal or external circumstances.” (The Diamond in Your Pocket, p35)
• Adyashanti: “We are always and already whole and complete. We don’t become what we are, which is the ground of being itself.”
• Adyashanti: “This isn’t a journey about becoming something. This is about unbecoming who we are not, about undeceiving ourselves. We don’t end up anywhere other than where we have always been, except that we perceive where we have always been completely differently.” (The End of Your World, p114) [I mentioned the similarity between this and T.S. Eliot’s lines towards the end of The Four Quartets where he says, “We shall not cease from exploration // And the end of all our exploring // Will be to arrive where we started // And know the place for the first time.”]
• Gangaji: “The truth of who you are is untouched by any concept of who you are, whether ignorant or enlightened, worthless or grand. The truth of who you are is free of it all. You are already free, and all that blocks your realization of that freedom is your attachment to some thought of who you are. This thought doesn’t keep you from being the truth of who you are. You already are that. It separates you from the realization of who you are.” (p45)
2) The way to freedom or awakening comes through being present here and now with whatever is arising—honestly and wholeheartedly accepting our experience and reality just as it is, without judgment, resistance, clinging, or avoiding:
• For Eckhart Tolle, to be fully present here and now is to be free. We experience suffering, disconnection, unease, anxiety, fear, when we live unconsciously, lost in our mind, in our stories and narratives, in the past, in the future, elsewhere: “The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind.” (Tolle, The Power of Now, p19) “There is no salvation in time. You cannot be free in the future. Presence is the key to freedom, so you can only be free now.” (p51)
• Adyashanti: “We may think, ‘So-and-so shouldn’t have said that to me,’ but the reality is that they did. As soon as the mind says something shouldn’t have happened, we experience internal division. It is immediate. Why do we experience division? Because we are in an argument with reality.
This much is assured: if we argue with reality, for any reason, we will go into division. That is just the way it works. Reality is simply what is.” (p143)
3) A key to awakening is to stop—to cease searching for anything, trying to be anything, seeking to get anywhere… When we stop, we are brought back to the mystery that underlies who we truly are, the awareness that is our very nature:
• Gangaji spoke of her interaction with her teacher H.W.L. Poonja (known as ‘Papaji’): She said to him, “I want to be free of all my entanglements and misconceptions. I want to know if final, absolute truth is real. Tell me what to do.” He said, “You are in the right place. Then he said, “Do nothing. Your whole problem is that you continue doing. Stop all your doing. Stop all your beliefs, all your searching, all your excuses, and see for yourself what is already and always here. Don’t move. Don’t move toward anything, and don’t move away from anything. In this instant, be still.’ (p5)
I concluded by sharing my view that we can integrate the Buddha’s more gradual training to abandon harmful states and develop beneficial ones—inclining the mind towards the freedom that ends in complete letting go, enlightenment or Nirvana, with these ‘already free’ teachings that remind us that freedom is always here, available in any moment through letting go of illusions about who we are—and realizing our true nature. In the coming sessions, I’ll highlight other key elements of these ‘already free’ teachings and how we can integrate them with the Buddha’s path of awakening.
I shared a quote from Maha Ghosananda, “If we are to uproot the landmines from the earth, we must uproot the landmines from our hearts”; and shared some lines from Dorothy Hunt’s poem, ‘Peace is this moment without judgment.’
I hope this is useful and look forward to continuing our exploration in the coming sessions. Wishing you a good week ahead and I look forward to our next live session, Sunday, February 18 at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻
