Depths of Inner Freedom

When I first started teaching meditation over twenty-five years ago, I spoke about the practice of no problem. Later, I spoke about the art of conscious contentment. Both approaches involve allowing our experience to be exactly what it is while remaining calm, open, and relaxed. If you are having a deep, restful experience, you are content with that. If you are having a boring or frustrating experience, you are content with that too. In short, you are content no matter what experience you happen to be having.

Don’t be fooled. This practice may sound simple, but resting in ease of being with consistency and deep attention leads to profound realizations.

In this essay, I describe two distinct depths of realization.

Level 1: Freedom from Preference
The first depth of realization occurs when we become authentically content no matter what we are experiencing. We are simply content to sit and be.

This does not mean we no longer have preferences. As long as we are alive, preferences will arise. We will naturally prefer some experiences over others.

But we can come to a point where we are equally content whether we are having an experience we like or one we dislike. This brings us to a profound realization of inner freedom.

Discovering and maintaining this depth of conscious contentment is deeply liberating. The key is learning to be authentically content even when we are having an experience we dislike. When we can remain content in the face of unwanted experience, we are deeply free.

Level 2: Freedom from Fulfillment
Beyond freedom from preference, there is a second depth of realization. We can call it freedom from fulfillment.

Anyone who attains freedom from preference will almost certainly be a dedicated spiritual seeker. It would be rare for someone to follow meditation that far unless they were deeply inspired and spiritually motivated.

After preferences, the next challenge has to do with our ideas about spiritual fulfillment. Even if we have attained freedom from personal preference, we may still carry assumptions about where that freedom should lead. We may still believe that “real” meditation should feel a certain way, or that some goal remains to be achieved.

Even though we have transcended the need to have our preferences met, we may still see inner freedom as being in service of fulfillment. We are still waiting for something to happen.

The second depth of realization, freedom from fulfillment, comes when we realize that meditation has nothing to do with what we happen to be experiencing.

With this realization, we not only transcend the need to have our preferences met, we also realize that there is nothing to gain or attain. There is no experience that is inherently more spiritual than any other. Fulfillment is not an experience. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no grand prize, no Christmas morning.

The most succinct way to describe freedom from fulfillment is this: you meditate in the ongoing recognition that this is it. The experience you are having now, whether you like it or dislike it, whether it feels spiritually fulfilling or not, is it.

You have arrived. You are here. There is nowhere else to go. Nothing else is supposed to happen. This is a radical and complete embrace of reality exactly as it is.

At this depth of inner freedom, we are completely and utterly present. We recognize that nothing has ever been missing, and nothing ever will be.

This has always been it.

And this recognition is fulfillment itself.