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FREEDOM!
Nevermind
Bitter & Hateful Veteran
Berserker sensibilities aside, what does freedom mean to you in a spiritual sense? Can we be free?
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I'll see your freedom berserker and raise you a beautiful flower garden.
Physical freedom - having the ability to live how ever we want to live..
And
Mental freedom..
Realistically, physically we will never be free! We are all in chains...
But mentally, we can all be free!
Freedom...I don't think we can be free until we die, for good. We can be more free than most of us currently are. We don't have to be the slaves to our emotions and our material goods and our attachments that we are, for sure. But no matter how unattached you are to many things, there is still pain. There is still the loss of a mother, a father, a great teacher, and so on, and we're still bound by those connections which to me means we aren't entirely free.
I think a buddha can give dharma teachings just like I put bread in my mouth. It becomes them.
Freedom to me in a spiritual sense means being able to head in whatever direction is appropriate for that moment. My conditioning is the curtailment of freedom but in conditioning's absence, only freedom remains.
My fiance swears that this music video made her realize she was gay... which is a certain form of freedom...
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. author of ' The Myth Of Freedom '.
For some reason that is the definition of freedom for me.
If your "How so?" question was about my previous post..the answer is best demonstrated by simply asking you "What limits your spiritual freedom and what frees it?.
Can meditation give me the freedom from heart ache when mourning for a loved one who is no longer around?
I wont 'last' forever, i know... (So theres no 'abiding self' ... But im still here NOW!
I can't quite understand your point but I can elaborate on my comment. The need to conform to heterosexual society can be very damaging and sometimes deadly for homosexuals in that early stage of realization. They often say that the most important person you come out to is yourself. Pretending to be straight, as many of us do for varied lengths of time for varied reasons, can feel very suffocating. Once you take that step and admit to yourself, and then admit to others that you're gay, it does feel like freedom. Basically, you're finally letting go of all of the self-imposed burdens and facing society head on with the courage to be yourself.
Meditation is the process of allowing all phenomena to ebb and flow free of our conditioning. Meditation is where we stop habitually feeding the conditioning which binds us to phenomena, which is the experience of spiritual freedom, as opposed to indulging our identify with a buffet of what we do or do not want, which brings about our loss of that freedom..
Roy said it best...
If one is unable to abide as a meditative observer in the presense of such phenomena, then I think that could just be called a moment that you were unable to meditate. Until
one can allow the fear to just be what it is, then enslaved you remain.
In non-duality we do not save our countrymen from enslavement, because we're too busy meditating. :-/
http://buddhism.about.com/od/basicbuddhistteachings/a/genesis.htm
Perhaps you are talking about the dangers of being a Precheka buddha.
Personally I think such a state is actually more akin to a directed concentration practise as opposed to meditation.
I have no experience of being too busy meditating to help others as this would be the description of a personally directed practise with the possibility of exclusion whereas what I think of as meditation is directionless and thereby applies everywhere.
Listen to Titiyo. Make a statement, take a stand... be a thorn on the rose.
Let me apologize in advance if I've got this wrong (I only seem to get the audio from NewBuddhist.com)
But are you explaining freedom by highlighting the movie script read by an actor who's forever apologizing for repeatedly spouting derogatory racial epithets in real life?
:wave:
Listen to Wallace, he says "they may take our lives but they can't take our freedom." What does that mean?
A person dead is no longer spiritual, unless hoping for a 'get out of dying' reincarnation as a kilt.
Let us suppose that we are an eagle in a cage perched on the edge of a cliff. That we have been dressed up in clothes, we have a coat on, we have a hat, we have big mittens over our wings, we have boots over our feet. And we have come to believe that this is who we are. We're weighed down with all these dark coverings and we don't even know what our wings look like, we don't know what our claws look like. When we look in the mirror in our little cage all we see is these haunted eyes and this rather disfigured creature all dressed up in a kind of comical way. We think that the cage is the normal situation, our normal situation. That its our world, its how things are. Meantime, we can see through the bars and we look out and see this vast open space ahead of us. It goes to infinity and during the day we see the sun riding through the sky, we see the clouds and at night we see the stars and moons. And we feel such incredible longing in our heart. We almost want to throw ourselves into that space, we want to drink the sky, we want to touch the sun. We want to smell the moon and hold the stars. But of course we know thats not how things are. We're this weighed down, cloaked being in this cage. And even when we feel that longing we think we're insane. We think we're crazy. And if there were other similar eagles dressed up they'd be telling us no, no, no you can't do that, that's not what it means thats not what life is for. And then all of a sudden somebody throws open the door, somebody pulls the door of the cage open and without even thinking we throw off our boots and we throw off our gloves and we throw off our hat and our coat. And as we're doing it there's some kind of huge surge this kind of absolutely irresistible longing and urge to leap into the space. And we do. And we leap from the cage and there's a little part of us that thinks we're insane and we're leaping to our death. But then our wings open and they're huge and we feel the updraft and we spread our wings and we ride up on the wind. And we ride up into that beautiful huge sky. Up and up and out and out. And we look ahead and we see nothing but infinity. And we see the clouds and we fly up among the clouds. We feel their moisture and up higher we feel the warmth of the sun. And there is such joy in our being. We feel so free and suddenly our life feels so good. And we feel finally for the first time we actually know who we are and we know why we are born. To fly like this through all eternity. To enjoy and taste and touch all the things we meet on the way. And pretty soon those dark clothes and that tiny cage just seem like a distant memory. "
-Reginald Ray from "Mahamudra for the Modern World"
You have asked about spiritual freedom. Perhaps freedom is the capacity to free ourselves firstly and interdependently others . . .
This is not the way:
http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/dharmadata/fdd30.htm
Nor is aggression. Or replacing one set of oppression with another. Perhaps you can answer your own question, I am confused by what you are asking for. What does spiritual freedom mean? It is nothing to do with berserkers or bazookas as far as I know . . .
:wave:
Pretty flowers, Person!