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Freedom

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Our collective experience suggests that the process of moving beyond infancy involves learning and internalizing the skills and beliefs essential for the growth and survival of our bodies. We learned from our caregivers, community, and our innate instincts, allowing  our minds and bodies the necessary time to fully develop. 

 

As adults, it is commonplace to confront varying degrees of dissatisfaction, constraint, conflict, or feelings of unworthiness, particularly as our survival has become more assured and we feel nascent desire for greater freedom and spontaneity in life. We begin to recognize the limitations, or falsehoods, of old beliefs, self-judgments, and societal expectations (often shoulds and should nots.) Many of our fundamental thoughts, concepts, and beliefs stem from the conditioning of our childhood. Through introspection, we may uncover that underlying trauma feeds into the fears inhibiting our authentic self-expression.

 

We long to be free of suffering, judgments, guilt, blame and shame, anxiety, and fears. We yearn to be more open-hearted, loving, spontaneous, and genuinely responsive, rather than fearful and reactive. We want to fully relax. True freedom doesn’t entail indulging in the distortions of personality; rather it points to a maturity of being able to live from our essence, our true nature, free from the distortions of conditioning. 

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Quotes

 

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What you are is happiness, total complete freedom beyond the concept of freedom. The physical body becomes totally relaxed, enjoying a great ease that flows as a consequence of abiding in your natural state.

~ Jac O'Keeffe 

 

The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the thinker. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. 

~ Eckhart Tolle 

 

Don't worry about methods. If you are sincere and honest, and have a true desire for freedom, even wrong methods will take you there. Therefore, give rise to the desire 100 percent, and the rest will take care of itself. What you are doing is not important, the end is important. You can do anything you like. The end must be that "I have to be free." You must be sincere, serious, and honest. Then don't worry about the methods. This inside Self is consciousness itself. If you do not know the correct method, it will lead you. Where you are arriving, it already knows who is coming, and it will go out to receive you in the proper way for you. You must be honest and never mind proper method.

~ Sri H. W. L. Poonja (Papaji)

 

Your drive for freedom will bring up whatever is hidden within you. Resistances, doubts, egoic tendencies will come to the surface. Look at them, and with the skill that you have aquired in satsang, you will transcend them. You will see them for what they are, for your eyes see from the true position. That's all. Now you will come to a clarity. It may take some time for your mind to stabilise in the heart's stillness, but this is also a sweetness. Allow some time for this divine maturing. It is a great joy.

~ Mooji

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I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual truth: release attachment to outcomes, deep within yourself, and you’ll feel good no matter what.

~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

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The soul has no birth, no death, no beginning, and no end. Sin cannot touch it, nor can virtue exalt it. Wisdom cannot open it up, nor can ignorance darken it. It has been always and always it will be. This is the very being of man, and all else is its cover, like a globe on the light. The soul's unfoldment comes from its own power, which ends in its breaking through the ties of the lower planes. It is free by nature, and looks for freedom during its captivity. All the holy beings of the world have become so by freeing the soul, its freedom being the only object there is in life

~ Hazrat Inayat Khan

 

I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always. 

~ Byron Katie 

 

Freedom cannot be limited to any particular state or condition. It is free from having to be contrasted with any concept or experience, free from being seen either as within or outside any context. The freedom of true nature has neither comparison nor opposite. Freedom can even go beyond the concept of true nature, for this concept is a human way of knowing the purity at the heart of reality. 

~ A.H. Almaas

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Our appearance, direction, and actions simply happen. This realization is freedom. From that point on, there is no meditator, no meditation, no doing, no knowing, and no realization. There is only a mysterious happening that can’t be understood in any way. It becomes obvious there has never been anything else.

~ Darryl Bailey

 

Love of the body is nothing more than love of jail. Long accustomed to living in the body, we have forgotten what real freedom means. 

~ Paramahansa Yogananda 

 

You are free, the notion that you are bound has been dumped on your head by your parents, by your priest, by your society. If you get rid of all these, instantly you will find that you are what you have always been. If you give up all that you have read, heard, seen, touched or tasted, freeing yourself from all past notions, what will be left? You alone will remain, that which you have always been, what you will always be and what you are now. The exercise or sadhana (spiritual practice) or way is not something to be be borrowed from the outside. Just keep quiet, keep silent and you will know freedom from sorrow and suffering. I wish everyone would try this and see 

~ Papaji 

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True freedom comes to those who have escaped the questions of freewill and fate.

~ Rumi

 

Until the whole world is free to agree with you or disagree with you - until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them, or to see things differently- until you have given the whole world it's freedom, you'll never have your freedom. 

~ Adyashanti 

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Knowledge comes from study, wisdom comes from experience, freedom comes from surrender and fulfilment comes from giving

~ Isira

 

The Buddha spoke gently, "Once a person is caught by belief in a doctrine, one loses all one's freedom". When one becomes dogmatic, that person believes his or her doctrine is the only truth and that all other doctrines are heresy. Disputes and conflicts all arise from narrow views. They can extend endlessly, wasting precious time and sometimes even leading to war. Attachment to views is the greatest impediment to the spiritual path. Bound to narrow views, one becomes so entangled that it is no longer possible to let the door of truth open. 

~ Thich Nhat Hanh 

 

An infant, not being aware of having an individual identity, has no intellect with which to conceptualize and therefore lives in spontaneous freedom without resistance from moment to moment. The same is true of the self-realized sage, who has gone beyond the mind.

~ Ramesh Balsekar

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   And my heart bled within me; for you

can only be free when even the desire of

seeking freedom becomes a harness to you,

and when you cease to speak of freedom

as a goal and a fulfilment.

    You shall be free indeed when your days

are not without a care nor your nights with-

out a want and a grief,

    But rather when these things girdle your

life and yet you rise above them naked and

unbound.

   And how shall you rise beyond your

days and nights unless you break the chains

which you at the dawn of your under-

standing have fastened around your noon

hour?

    In truth that which you call freedom is

the strongest of these chains, though its

links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.

~ Khalil Gibran

 

Nothing you believe is true. To understand this is freedom.

~ Byron Katie

 

Something inside wants to burst open. The ego state is like caterpillar. It shouldn't be caterpillar all its life. Caterpillar has to become butterfly. Butterfly means to break free of ego, to find your Truth, your beauty, your freedom, your life! 

~ Mooji 

 

Realization is just a shift in perception that comes or doesn’t come, but there are shifts in perception all along the way . . . but there are these relative freedoms that we feel along the way when we do this work, and they bring a shift in perception, and for some reason we have seen the truth as the big shift in perception. I don’t know why it’s set up like that, and I think it was all this time that it was seen to be the “I’ll be out of it if that happens.” Be out of what? You see that you were never in it, but there’s no getting out of it, it’s just that the perspective of what this is changes

~ Jac O'Keeffe

 

It is quite obvious that physical death is the absolute freedom.The personal entity dies and it is absolute liberation.

~ Lisa Cairns

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We are beings who exist in two worlds at the same time, while believing that we exist in one world, the world we know. But the way we need to live is with one foot in each world all the time. With one foot in the appearance and the other in the reality, we will never forget one or the other. In the world of appearance there is suffering, strife, success and failure, pain and pleasure, life and death. The true reality of things is the absence of all these. There is no birth, no death, no you, no not-you, neither pleasure nor pain. There is complete freedom, complete release.

~ A. H. Almaas

 

Freedom is what happens when the arrogant and silly notion that we live our own lives by our own will has fallen off. 

~ Ramesh Balsekar 

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The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. What we go from is being born into our humanity, sleep walking for a long time, until we awaken and start to taste our divinity. And then want to finally get free.
We see as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.

~ Ram Dass

 

To act from desire and fear is bondage, to act from love is freedom. Love is not selective, desire is selective. In love there are no strangers. 

~ Nisargardatta 

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Freedom doesn’t make you immune to the human experience; it just means you are not identified with it anymore. Being unidentified with the human experience means you can embrace fully all that comes along with being ‘an earthling’ and be totally available to life as it is

~ Christine Wushke

 

Meditation is being free to the belief of being a separate person - then the byproducts of this freedom we reap in due time. We have to start from freedom. This freedom begins when we choose not to be identified with the personality. 

~ Francis Lucille 

 

In freedom there is no right and no wrong. In freedom there is freedom from right and wrong.

~ Papaji

 

But freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of "a someone who is in control" is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.

~ Adyashanti

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The bird has an honor

that man does not have.

Man lives in the traps of his

abdicated laws and traditions;

but the birds live according to the

natural law of God .... who causes the

earth to turn around the sun.

~ Khalil Gibran

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There is no birth, no death, no you, no not-you, neither pleasure nor pain. There is complete freedom, complete release.

~ A.H. Almaas

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