Freedom means to be liberated from all that confines or limits you. That which imprisons you is the created self. It would seem you would want to happily let go of imprisonment and limitations, but you have become use to living in a limited, egoic, created self. You feel a false sense of safety there. You hold a belief that the created self is the way to be loved and accepted. To lose that would mean pain or death and out of those beliefs fear arises.

The ego wants to hold on and the ego is fear based. For your liberation to take place the limited ego must die and become transformed into divine ego. Your greatest fear is the loss of the limited ego and the created self.

Spiritual Imprisonment is to be controlled by your resistance, aversion and attachment – to be dominated by the created self. Spiritual Freedom is to be free of aversion and attachment, free of resistance and separation. Real freedom is to become conscious of what you are doing, how you are thinking and what you are feeling – and transform a limited way of being into a universal way of experiencing life.

Ending Personalization

The Path to Freedom

When you live in a created Self and ego dominates your experience, the result is that you personalize life. Every circumstance, every situation is life happening to you. Personalization is rooted in separation. Separation creates the illusion that your life is being controlled by outside influences.

This creates the feeling of being helpless, manipulated and adrift. It also creates a sense of victimization. When everything is happening to you and you have no control over it, it is natural to feel like a victim. But the reality is that everything in life is the divine unfolding of your realization and so every situation, every circumstance is unfolding for you to remember oneness.

From the perspective of the created self, everything is happening to you. From the perspective of returning to connection with the essential Self everything is happening for you. From a purely soul level, from the highest perspective, everything is happening as you because there is only the Self, the creative intelligence of pure consciousness unfolding its play within itself, in the mind of God.

In separation there is actually a false sense of connection because your experience is one of complete attachment to what you are experiencing. But it is a false connection because the Self is veiled and you are only experiencing getting immersed and lost in the experience. As your awareness expands you really start to become aware of the true separation and attachment. That can feel uncomfortable. Then that separation begins to diminish and authentic oneness begins to grow.

In a false sense of connection there is no freedom. As awareness grows, freedom grows. When you begin to experience life happening for you freedom expands and you can relax. When you experience life happening as you, then total freedom arises.

Observation

The Path to Freedom

When you are in a state of separation and your senses rest upon something, you become that object. Your awareness loses awareness of Self and is completely taken up with awareness of the object. The essential Self is veiled and the subject is lost.

When you live in a created self, you live in an illusion, a façade of your own creation. You forget who you really are and you super-imposed over the essential Self a role, a performance, an act that disallows the authentic Self to emerge. Then you experience egoic identity and separation. Your essential nature is veiled.

There are 2 ways to become the observer. The temporary way is to slow down and pull the mind back from engaging the senses and being attached to the object enough to look at what is happening now, without judgment. That is present moment awareness. You reposition your awareness in the Now, taking yourself out of the past or future. This allows observation of the situation.

The second way is the activation of divine energy within you and the complete resolution of all unresolved samskaras. This is a permanent solution that creates a new and natural way for your nervous system to function as the witness. This is the permanent state of enlightenment where waking, dreaming and deep sleep are observed from the standpoint of pure awareness. The essential Self is never veiled and stands as the witness to all relative life.

Both methods of becoming the observer create freedom by expanding consciousness. Present moment awareness brings freedom from being lost in the experience and Enlightenment brings freedom through the permanent experience of Oneness in unbounded awareness.

Understanding

The Path to Freedom

What is the highest understanding? Understanding that everything in relative creation is a manifestation of the intelligence and energy of pure consciousness concealing and then revealing itself – remembering you are God and then becoming the vehicle for that divinity to flow into the world.

This understanding frees you from the struggle of accumulation, survival and struggle and brings clarity of why you are here and where you are going. Understanding allows a relaxation and a letting go of the dynamic of the created self’s grasping for acceptance and worthiness.

Understanding purpose allows clarity and informs all choices and decisions in a way that supports your journey of remembrance. The mind can come from the standpoint of restful-alertness instead of a monkey mind always in turmoil.

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A story: The teacher took 2 lengths of heavy gold chain, each with a giant diamond attached and put them around the necks of 2 of his students. They were very heavy and beautiful. To one student he explained the value of the gold and diamond and what was possible when this value was realized. To the other he said nothing. After 2 days the second student only felt the weight of the necklace and threw it away. The student who understood the value used the necklace to improve his life and the life of his entire village.

A broader understanding creates a framework, a foundation, from which you can express in the most aligned and resonant ways. Understanding allows conscious, responsive, present moment living and this expands freedom.

Experience

The Path to Freedom

Experience creates your expanded reality. You can know all about an apple, understand how it grows, be cognizant of its nutritional value, know why its skin is red, but biting into the apple and eating it expands exponentially your knowing “apple”. Experience is connection. It gives you the only way to really know something fully.

Freedom can only be experienced. Intellectual understanding of freedom is only that; an intellectual understanding. To know something, to connect to that and become that, experience is necessary. It’s the same for love, bliss, peace, and fulfillment. They have value in your life only when they are experienced and integrated as a permanent experience. Knowing about love is far different than being in love. Reading a book and taking a course may give you more mental knowledge about something but it will not give you the experience.

The path to freedom is simply an expanding experience of connection. To know your divinity, to know God, to be in Oneness is an experience of the essential Self, pure consciousness. This is why there is such an emphasis on the energy and immersions. They are the experience of divinity. They go beyond the body, mind and emotions and directly connect you to Soul and the experience of Self. Enlightenment is an unending, ever-new experience.

Resistance = Suffering Acceptance = Freedom

The Path to Freedom

There is a natural flow and momentum to life that is the power of grace moving all of life into higher states of consciousness. This expanded awareness is the main objective of this flow of grace and life force. This expansion happens on all levels, all the time. This movement, flow and expansion is evolution, and evolution occurs in body, mind and emotions. Ultimately all evolution is in support of the recognition of Oneness and the remembrance of Divinity; the revelation of Soul, the essential Self.

Universal Creative Intelligence holds the entire evolution and unfolding in its mind and this destiny plays out as the play of consciousness and each person’s life. What is happening in your life is this perfect plan in the mind of God, revealing your perfection.

In your life there is one main reason that this expansive flow runs into obstacles – and that is resistance. The main forms resistance takes are attachment and aversion. Attachment is grasping onto outcomes, situations and desires you think will make you happy. Aversion is pushing away what is happening at the moment and trying to control, fix or change what is going on.

The energy of resistance begins a tug of war with life and the natural flow and momentum that is the evolutionary life force moving you into more. This creates a friction and the result of this friction is feeling out of alignment with life, out of flow. The experience is one of dissonance and non-alignment with universal creative intelligence. Resistance feels like you are always moving against the current, struggling against the flow. Resistance is the main cause of suffering. Acceptance is the main way to resolve resistance. It is the most direct path to Oneness.

Acceptance is the only way to real freedom. Your evolution will always proceed but in resistance you will experience friction as struggle. In acceptance the friction will disappear and freedom will expand as evolution expands.

Trust

The Path to Freedom

For most, life is a constant battle to control life and mold it into a shape that you think will produce some happiness. And in this battle, you are basically on your own, with all the forces aligned against you, people vying for power and position, money and relationships. No wonder life feels like a struggle. Handing over control requires a step by step process of surrender brought about by the experience and understanding of divinity.

You see limitation everywhere. There seems like there is a limited amount of money in the world, a limited pool of people available for a relationship, limited resources everyone is jockeying for. But the divine’s energy and capability to create the perfect circumstances for your realization are unlimited.

When you shift from the stance that outside things, circumstances and situations will create your happiness to one that recognizes that the divine is unfolding your perfect path to realization and permanent bliss, then you can relax, end the battle and begin to receive. When you battle life there is no room to receive. When you trust God and release your control, you open to receiving.

The only outcome of trust is freedom. In trust you enter the flow of expansion, the expanding joy of realization, and the expanding experience of Oneness. The opposite of freedom is being a prisoner in your own creation; your created self, your self-created struggle for outside satisfaction, your created attachments and aversions, and your created stories. Trusting the divine allows you to release all you have created and their limitations.