Political Limitations
Posted: Saturday, May 15, 2010
by e
Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation
Our current economic woes as a country will surely follow in the footsteps of Greece and California with a political fight ensuing between social program cuts and increased taxes for the wealthy. This is the crux of it.
If we are of the wealthy, urban, intellectual crowd, any mention of sharing our hard earned money with welfare loafers is repugnant, and when we are forced to do this by way of taxes, we become incensed.
Whichever side we find ourselves on, know that historically and worldwide the haves and the have-nots have been at each others throats, literally, forever. When things don't go our way, our alternatives become limited and we feel a lack of freedom, a restriction of our liberties.
Creating limitations
This restriction we feel is uncomfortable, and therefore we try to become unrestricted by changing the politics (power) to our advantage. In other words, outside circumstances affect our inner happiness. If the outside circumstances are good, we are happy inside. If the outside circumstances are not good, we are unhappy inside. If our representative gets elected, we are happy. If the opponent gets elected, we are sad. This is how we limit ourselves to our outside circumstances. We in fact create our own limitations.
Is there a way to break out from the limitations we create in our minds to which we are enslaved? That's a good question, because these limitations are the root cause of violence all over the world. Admittedly the outside circumstances will always change with one political party in charge for awhile before the other takes over. That means that because we have limited ourselves to one particular ideal or philosophy, when outside circumstances do change we are powerless to prevent the unhappiness that results. We are in effect, enslaved by our limitations - our shallow values of material, idealistic, or religious gain.
So, can we break free of these self imposed limitations? Or, maybe we don't want to. Maybe we feel that the constant stress of fighting against our limitations is a worthwhile endeavor and so invigorating that we never consider what else we could be doing with our time, things that might be very much more satisfying to our hearts.
Can we give in?
Can we surrender? Not give way and run as a coward does at the first sight of blood, but surrender in a way that understands the limit of our limitations. And in that understanding, can we find real freedom?
Can we ever be free without surrender? When we hold onto things, whether it is our ideals, beliefs, or our money, the very condition of holding on insures our bondage. We are hogtied to that which we love, and that bondage is always the antithesis of freedom.
What price freedom? Not the freedom to do as you choose or to have what you want, or to have things go your way, but the freedom from the one who is affected by all of this. Freedom from your self. What price?
How much do you have invested?
The price depends upon how much you have invested in your ideals, your opinions, and your self. If you are invested heavily, then the price will be great. And if the price is too great, then you will not experience true freedom, only a pseudo freedom that occurs between fights, which cannot be avoided because instead off freedom we have chosen limitations.
Letting go of ego and the ideals, opinions and views of ego is a spiritual surrender. It can't be done by the calculating machine of ego, the worldly mind. As a worldling, this concept of surrender is foreign even though the worldling is under constant stress and can‘t figure out why.
This is letting go of limitations and giving up the constraint of opinion. Although the worldling considers letting go of opinions as a failing and a giving up of one's principles, the actual act of holding on to opinions and ideals, as opinions and ideals not as facts that have to be sorted out, is a type of insanity.
Are we sane?
Until we actually surrender, let go of the notion of concrete ideals and opinions, we can be considered insane. Sanity, on the other hand, lets go, continuously. Sanity is freedom. Sanity is happiness inside regardless of the outside circumstances, which we really have little control over. Insanity is being pushed and shoved by every little thing that happens outside of ourselves, an endless ordeal because everything constantly changes.
If we can step back just for moment and consider that we are rarely affected by circumstances removed from what we are attached to, i.e. we might care less about what happens to the government in Botswana, yet get utterly destroyed if our local candidate doesn't get elected, we can see that this whole idea of what we attach to is a red herring - a deliberate attempt by our mind to make something out of nothing in the fleeting material world and divert our attention from developing inner wisdom.
Meditation
People often wonder about the benefits of calming one‘s mind to exclude such irrational attachments such as getting all upset about things that change anyhow. To some, meditation is being lazy, just sitting there worrying about ourselves when we could be out helping other people. That would be a view and opinion of the worldling.
To others, meditation is a way to become inwardly free, not dependant upon outside circumstances at all. This is not saying that injustices (where harm comes to someone) are passively ignored, but acted upon from a standpoint of freedom - not bondage of opinions and ideals - but from a standpoint of clear observation and understanding. This is how the meditator helps the world, by setting an example of how to become free from conflict and limitations.
We live in ideals.
Atheism is an ideal. Religion is an ideal. Both ideals rely on intellectual opinions based on either shallow observances of life from the limited perspective of the senses, or what is read about or heard about as second hand information. And because of the limitations of each view, there will be constant bickering between the camps based on nothing but opinion. Therefore there will never be a solution to the conflict of beliefs that cannot be proven .
There is another way to live, however, without opinions and views, and that way is a constant letting go. When we learn to do that, we become free from all the limitations and conflict that has plagued us forever. This is a new way of life, a freedom that few experience.
And it is all possible by going inward instead of outward, by going toward freedom instead of bondage.
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Top-level comments on this article: (2 total)It is much more acceptable to change the demons in others than to change the demons in ourselves, that after all would require work and much scarier quite frankly.
The witch hunts never ended they simply took another form, as demons tend to do, and this is the antithesis of freedom.
Until we discover that it is we that we need to change and not others, we will never be free.Great comments David. Thank you so much.
Beautiful Argument Raymond and well communicated."Well communicated." That comment means a lot to a writer. Thank you.
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