Already Free

John Evangelou

The whole idea is you have to let go of all types of longings, wantings, desires. You have to become a true devotee. It means you don’t care anymore. You’re not interested in getting anywhere or trying to do anything. Simply get lost in the teaching itself. Without looking for answers, without trying to become enlightened. Without saying I have to do this, I have to do that. You just live every moment, by moment, by moment in devotion, in love, in joy, not thinking whether you’re going to get enlightened or not get enlightened. Whether you’ll make it in this life or not. The person who is like this is already enlightened, already free.

~ Robert Adams

No one who learns to think can go back to obey as he did before, not out of a rebellious spirit, but out of the habit he has acquired to question and examine everything.

~ Hannah Arendt

She said, ‘I’ve learned that

whenever I decide something with an

open heart, I usually make the right

decision. I’ve learned that even when

I have pains, I don’t have to be one.

I’ve learned that every day you should

reach out and touch someone. People

love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat

on the back. I’ve learned that I still

have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that

people will forget what you said, people

will forget what you did, but people will

never forget how you made them feel.’

~ MAYA ANGELOU

We are all born free but the resident society of Lilliputians around us gets busy tying us down with teachings and answers. We are also assaulted by our own longings for something more than we are offered. Before we know it we’re on a wild goose chase that is profoundly unsatisfying to the reason we came. We live with the peripheral questions of ‘will I be successful, will I be somebody, will I be enlightened?’

What is a successful life, after all? Staying alive constitutes success for some people in some parts of the world. For other more privileged areas it’s measured in possessions and status. Those areas want to build high walls to exclude their more desperate relatives. They even deny they are family.

One of the more pointless pursuits in life is to be and to possess. Being someone or trying to, is the wild goose chase we learn by being measured and graded from our early years. We absorb the implications of value according to standards we’re taught are universal, but aren’t. They are invented, imposed and mythologized. Their auras are tinsel.

A Hug in the Garden Poster by Kaethe Butcher

A genuine life is simpler than we imagine. Love, joy and devotion are available to us without a lot of props. It’s all a question of whether we have an interior life or whether we live on the surface of ourselves. Our relentless culture of extraversion discourages the interior life, so we can get confused and lost in the weeds of inconsequentials.

Our cultural history tells a story of how we built a wall against Reality. A young person has to figure out a way to get over or through that wall. The assumptions of our common beliefs will have to be dismantled. That’s subtle and difficult work because we have been taught to settle on answers instead of continuing to look and wonder.

That habit closes the door to simple love of life and puts us on the path of striving to be more than we think we are. Trying to be something, whether that is expressed in material or spiritual terms, complicates our lives unnecessarily. I think it’s better to be simple to the point of anonymous, but living by the simple energies of love, joy and kindness.

Teresa Saia

Volume five of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.

Here are two reviews of my writing:

Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition

A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.

This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.

It is this version: