FEARING OUR FREEDOM

I hope your work on the path to freedom and liberation is bringing more space and acceptance into you life. As I have said before, it’s unrealistic to think that we are going to become liberated once and for all through some incredible, nearly magical event such as happened to the Buddha. It is much likely that our capacity to rest in unconditioned awareness will grow slowly over our lifetime. We should never become disheartened.

Even though we can hanker after a state of permanent realization, it’s also important to see how the concept of unconditioned awareness can elicit both positive and nega¬tive associations. In many ways, it’s attractive as a concept because it comes bundled with ideas of freedom and liberation. But it can also trigger fear¬ful projections.

When some people first encounter the idea of unconditioned awareness, they may think that it’s black, like a vacuum where nothing is happening, like the dissolution of the universe, or like death. They may think that by cultivat¬ing unconditioned awareness, they’ll lose interest and connection with their physical existence. These fears are familiar to many seekers, and it’s important that they be acknowledged and contained within the path that cultivates un¬conditioned awareness.

For example, some people may think that they’ll lose touch with the real world and become less capable of fulfilling their daily commitments. If they transcend their needs and desires and just accept “what is,” they fear life might become bland, boring, and uninteresting. They might even lose their desire to act in any way, and end up starving to death!

Other people may think that be¬cause unconditioned awareness is described as being empty of structure and content, it must resemble a vast, barren expanse of darkness empty of life or humanity. Clearly, there’s a tendency for people to develop an automatic aver¬sion to an experience like that. As psychotherapist Jennifer Welwood (2003) writes, “Rather than recognizing emptiness as our own nature, we see it as an enemy that we have to avoid or defeat.”

These projections have nothing to do with the experience of uncondi-tioned awareness. In unconditioned awareness, nothing changes. At the empirical level, nothing drops out of our experience and nothing unusual enters it. We continue to think, feel, see, and touch. In fact, all the senses are as active as they’ve ever been. Yet everything is totally different. The uncondi¬tioned is not what we think!

Peter Fenner, Ph.D.