Inner Freedom and Universal Being

Twenty five years ago a long meditation retreat changed my life. During that two month retreat I experienced remarkable, often explosive, breakthroughs almost everyday. By the end of the retreat I was left in a state of unshakeable inner freedom. I remember sitting on my meditation cushion after one of the last hours of practice and simply marveling at the goodness of life. In spite of all of the terrible things that can happen in life, the privilege of life is always a blessing. I felt as if I had nothing to fear and nothing to hide from. Life was good and I was, and always had been, fine. In my journal I wrote:

I have a journal filled with descriptions of outrageous experiences that occurred during this retreat, but I would gladly trade them all for this one hour of unbroken trust, one hour of being in a perfect, loving relationship with life.

I just sat there seeing everything from a completely new perspective. This realization unfolds differently for different people, but for me it came as the realization that life is not something I have. Life is what is. I am alive because life is. My life is an expression of universal life. I am a living aspect of a universal being. The universal self is waking up to itself and my awakening is a small part of that awakening. All of spiritual life, our own efforts in this lifetime and thousands of years of religious tradition and spiritual work from around the world, is all part of one unimaginably vast awakening.

The mental walls that had imprisoned my spirit by keeping me focused on the dream of an independent and isolated existence, had crumbled. They were now scattered on the floor of my mind in a state of irreversible disarray. I didn’t know how I would live. How would I be able to do anything normal again? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. Nothing mattered except the realization of universal being. I knew that there was a divine being and we are all inseparable from that. This felt like the end and the beginning. The end of one life and the beginning of an unimaginable new life lived in a new reality.

Over the next few weeks I became my spiritual teacher’s personal assistant. I would go to his house everyday to work with him. I was floating through life in a state of deep and abiding freedom. I was concerned about nothing. Things happened. Some were wonderful. Some were not. But I was free. I simply responded to everything as best I could. Sometimes I was able to make a positive difference, sometimes I was not. But through it all the sense of a universal being was always with me. It lived as a vibrating energy in my heart and as an expansive sense of infinity in my mind.

That sense of divinity has never left me. It continues to live in my heart and mind. Does it sometimes get occluded by challenging circumstances? Of course it does. Sometimes life demands attention. Sometimes life spurs us to action. Sometimes our hearts and minds are overwhelmed with pain and darkness and our inner focus is consumed by self-concern. And yet, no matter what happens the universal divinity is there. Not always visible, but always present, the blessed background of all other experiences.

The discovery of universal being is the ground of abiding inner freedom. Once revealed this larger reality creates stability for all other experiences. Deep and abiding inner freedom is both the end of existential insecurity and the beginning of a higher path of awakening.

I found inner freedom through the practice of meditation and I’ve been teaching meditation ever since. My experience tells me that when we sit in conscious contentment, we discover an inner wholeness that is never separate from the divine life of existence. Inner freedom is the end of existential insecurity, but it is also the beginning of a new depth of spiritual exploration that the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo called “The Life Divine.”