Given that my practice focuses on the attainment of a freed soul, both for myself and my clients, you may be asking yourself what exactly is such a thing? Why would anyone want a freed soul? And what’s the difference between a ‘free’ soul and a ‘freed’ soul?
These questions thrill me and I hope they’re of interest to you too. Not because I can answer them well, as I sincerely doubt any mortal creature walking the earth can do that, but because addressing them requires stepping into the messy, confounding, slippery nature of our existence, which is my favorite territory to explore.
So let me begin by first sharing some wonderful news. You already are a free soul. And I am too. Isn’t that incredible?
In fact, should you wish, you can stop reading right here and rest assured with every fiber of your being that there’s absolutely nothing you need to do to achieve freedom, aka enlightenment, aka nirvana, aka moksha. You’re a completely free soul just as you are and no further spiritual work is required of you. Job done. Hooray.
Where it gets a bit dicey, however, is in the understanding of what ‘you’ are. For some folks, this might be the part of my message that sounds like bad news. Because you are most definitely not your body. Nor are you your mind, your thoughts, or your emotions. You’re not your accomplishments either. As much as it may seem so, none of those entities have anything to do with the actual you—and none of these entities enjoy sustained freedom.
What you are is the witness of these entities. That’s it. All day and night, the you that is you watches over your body, mind, thoughts, and emotions. No matter what your body, mind, thoughts, and emotions do, you simply witness them. Other than that, you do nothing. Ever. The bodily vessel you’re attached to is a doer, no question about that. It is doing, doing, doing all the time. But you are merely a witness.
Another way to think about the profound circumstance of your existence is that you are pure, ordinary, limitless awareness. That’s precisely what you are. As am I. Each of us is a drop of awareness, much like a drop of water. Nothing more and nothing less. Simply awareness.
The water analogy is powerful because, as with molecules of water, every witness watching over a human is identical. We are all the same. And just like the fact that each drop of water on the earth ultimately comes together to form the ocean, so too do all the drops of awareness ultimately merge into one pool of consciousness.
It’s worth noting, moreover, that since you are simply awareness, you don’t have to take troubling thoughts and worries seriously. They’re not about you. Nor do you have to take the irritating behaviors of others seriously. They’re not about them. Since we’re all merely drops of awareness, we’re all free souls and absolutely nothing can encumber our essence no matter what. Everything we experience on this funny plane of human existence—including that which bothers, annoys, and upsets us—is a big cosmic illusion, not to be sweated.
How do I know this to be the case? What proof do I have of such a curious condition? And why am I able to assert it with such certainty?
As unsatisfying as this may sound, I know it to be so because after spending hundreds of hours pondering the possibilities of what I might be, awareness is the only answer that resonates with my innate wisdom. I might offer as support that countless humans meditating ceaselessly in caves thousands of years ago reached the same conclusion. And furthermore, no human who has ever rigorously set out to uncover the truth of his or her actual identity has ever reached a different conclusion. The deepest thinkers of the Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian traditions, and many other disciplines, all came to the same basic understanding about our essence.
So going forward, for the sake of clarity, when I use the word ‘you’ I’ll be referring to the drop of awareness that witnesses your body, mind, thoughts, and emotions. As for the vessel that contains your body, mind, thoughts, and emotions, I will call that the ‘apparent you.’ This distinction will help us to stay clear about who we really are and what we’re referencing.
Of course, I don’t expect the apparent you to take my word for any of this. In all honesty, I wouldn’t want that. It would do no good whatsoever for it to agree with me without performing its own serious inquiry into the subject.
Quite frankly, if the apparent you is content with its life’s path just as it is, such an inquiry might not be fruitful, at least not for the time being. The journey to full acceptance of who you are tends to be an arduous and uncomfortable one, requiring the abandonment of many preconceived notions. Why undergo all that if the apparent you is satisfied with its current experience on earth?
On the other hand, if the apparent you feels like it’s growing more and more weary of chasing objects for temporary fulfillment, if it’s starting to recognize that relationships and accomplishments never seem to quell our deepest longings, then perhaps the apparent you may be ready to begin lifting the veil.
What do I mean by lifting the veil? I mean, experiencing the same insight that all the great mystics have—that duality is an illusion, that there is no true separation between the perceiver and the perceived, that the boundary between subject and object is imagined. All is one. You are me and I am you.
Or to put it in a slightly less metaphysical way, the experience of human life is purely a thought-based one. Everything that appears before us on this plane of existence is merely a representation of the mind, as filtered by the five senses. There is no objective reality, just the subjective ‘reality’ that the apparent you creates.
And this is where things get really messy and slippery. Because other than for Christ, Buddha, or Krishna, it’s simply not feasible to go through life with the veil always lifted. The illusion of duality is immensely powerful and the mind is churning out thoughts continuously—thoughts which keep seducing the apparent you to believe the images laid out before it.
The apparent me forgets all the time that I am pure, ordinary, limitless awareness. Every day, the apparent me catches myself behaving as if I am my body or my mind or my thoughts or my emotions. No matter how hard the apparent me tries to burn into my essence that I am merely the witness of my funny little meat puppet, it forgets. Again and again and again.
What’s more, all the seasoned practitioners of the Three Principles—the approach I use with my clients—will freely admit they have the exact same experience. In fact, nothing solicits a bigger belly laugh from them than when novice practitioners complain they can’t hold onto their insight throughout the course of the day. That’s exactly like complaining that we can’t hold our breath all day! The limitation is baked into our physical makeup.
Sydney Banks, the founder of the Three Principles, famously said: “Remember – and this is very important – you’re only one thought away from happiness, you’re only one thought away from sadness. The secret lies in Thought.”
This one quote contains pretty much everything needed for complete spiritual fulfillment. All the answers are in there. But for our purposes today, the key message is that our thoughts will get us on target and take us off target over and over and over again. Rinse and repeat.
So what’s the point of spending time and effort pursuing an understanding of who we truly are, if we are just going to keep forgetting the fruits of all our hard work? I get it. I really do. And it concerns me quite a bit too.
But I think I have a pretty good answer, maybe one that will intrigue the apparent you. Because what I have landed on is that it’s perfectly okay to forget that you are pure, ordinary, limitless awareness. It’s perfectly okay to get caught up in thoughts and attach significance to them.
What’s important, what’s vitally important to reduce the amount of sorrow, pain, and suffering in life, is to recognize when this is happening—preferably sooner rather than later. Because when the apparent you recognizes it, then it can remember who it really is. And when you remember who you are, it becomes impossible to take life too seriously or remain in a low mood.
After all, how could you get bent out of shape about anything once you remember that you are just pure, ordinary, limitless awareness? It’s absurd, right? Automatically, without making any big deal about it, the apparent you will gently laugh at the situation, shrug off any low mood it started to take on, and get back to enjoying this funny dance on earth. Because even though everything in front of us is an illusion, there’s no point in not enjoying the ride while we’re here. That’s the only thing that makes any sense to do!
And it’s precisely this approach to life that will allow the apparent you to make the transition from a free soul who doesn’t know who he/she/they is to a freed soul who does. In fact, that’s precisely the difference between being a ‘free’ soul and being a ‘freed’ soul. And that’s precisely what I offer my clients. A freed soul knows how to climb out of its low moods. A free soul doesn’t have the slightest clue.
In my book, that’s the greatest gift any apparent you could possibly hope for. What’s better than being able to extract all the nectar we possibly can from this curious ride called life rather than being in permanent bondage to it? So to all the apparent yous wandering this earth, I say game on!