We are already free. Seekers seeking liberation, seeking to be free, sadly don’t realize that they are already free, because the mind does not permit them to think that they are free. The mind uses the ego, the sense organs and itself to make them feel imprisoned; prisoner to pleasure, power, possessions. The mind wanders. It distracts. The senses attract, create desires, cravings and a sense of freedom, which in its true sense is lost.
We don’t need to acquire freedom; we are already free. We only need to drop the imaginary chains that chain us - the imaginary chains that become a part of the illusion samsaar. The illusionary maya, mythiya make us feel that we are prisoners. Therefore, it is not that something needs to be done to be free, to be liberated. We just need to acknowledge, realize who we are. We are that. We are not this. The moment we feel we are this, we are the body imprisoned, but the moment we feel we are that - in a moment, the freedom is realized and we don’t have to do anything to acquire liberation.
Therefore, it is up to us to drop this feeling of bondage, this feeling of seeking liberation. Why seek liberation when you are already liberated?
It does. How the book came about is quite a strange story: a mature, curmudgeon Jewish woman and a gay man. From my recollection, she was homophobic and he didn’t like her much either so they argued so much they finally agreed to look for a solution. At this time, she started automatic writing and didn’t know what to make of it. She showed it to her gay boss who encouraged her to keep doing it. Over the next year or two, they put the book together.
It’s even stranger that a Jewish woman would channel (?) a spirit she called Jesus and that she would automatically write text dripping with Christian, rather than Jewish, language. Anyway, she remained a bitch and he remained gay but they seemed to get on a lot better.
I was living on a spiritual/hippy commune in the late 70’s when I first came across ACIM. The people who set up the commune were the Australiasian distributors. I was still in my Christian phase so much of the book came across as blasphemous; other parts, however, made too much sense to dismiss the book in it’s entirety. I bought ACIM for my (broadminded) Catholic mother. She loved it.
All of the concepts in ACIM can be found in the Vedas – ACIM simply expresses them using flowery Christian concepts.
After all this time, one of my favourite quotes remains the very first passage in ACIM:
“Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.”
This is so simple, so fundamental and so powerful, that virtually all other spiritual knowledge rests on top of that statement.
My dear Chakra Superstar, the ‘they’ are the seekers and the ‘we’ are also the seekers. Therefore, they and we – all are seekers and the post itself says this. Then where is the question of acquiring liberation when in truth we are already liberated? It is like we are looking for a treasure that is right in front of us, but it is buried underground. We don’t have to go searching for it. We just have to unearth the ground, remove the soil, and see the treasure beneath.
No, there is no question of taking people down a path of futility because the whole world calls this realization. It is called realization and not invention or discovery because realization of something means that it already exists. We just have to realize it! Unfortunately, we don’t realize it because we don’t open our “real eyes” to see it. To elaborate further, if you have noticed optical illusion pictures, at first, the picture may seem as something else – may be as the face of a person. But when you look closer, you will be able to realize that the artist has drawn two horses in such a way that it appears as a human face at the first glance. It is the same when it comes to realization. You realize the truth later when you see it with your “real eyes”.
I’m OK with God, just not with the society on which I must depend in order to survive. None of this “enlightenment” is going to give me my daily bread or fix the sickness of my mind.
The seeker – aka the person*/ego/false image etc. – is a psychological construct. The seeker doesn’t exist, and that which doesn’t exist can never be free.
The seeker (ego), by definition, is someone who lacks something and is seeking to fulfill that lack. The one who is already liberated lacks nothing, therefore the seeker cannot be the one who’s already liberated.
The one who is liberated (enlightened or awakened) is the Self (i.e. Consciousness). As you suggest, one doesn’t need ‘do’ anything to attain liberation because the true Self is already liberated but one has to allow the false image he has of himself to fall away. He has to die (psychologically) to be born again.
The vast majority of religious/spiritual people don’t get this – or don’t want to. They assume that they - the ego/seeker - are the ones who enter a state of nirvana or heaven. They want to take their ego with them; they don’t want to let it die so most seekers spend a lifetime of frustration and disappointment because they feel the same as they always had even though they do all the right things.
Another way of saying this is: the character an actor plays can never ‘wake up’ and realize he’s the actor. The actor, on the other hand, can wake up and realize he’s not the fictitious character he’s playing. As soon as he realizes he’s not the character, he’s liberated, he’s free, he can drop the charade and walk off set or he can continue to play the part free from the dramas around him because he now knows that whatever happens to the character, is not happening to him. This is liberation.
NB: * The word ‘person’ comes from the Latin ‘per’ = through and ‘sona’ = sound. A persona was originally a mask stage performers put over their face and spoke through when playing a character. In Vedic terms, the ‘person’ is a psychological mask or identity that someone wears on top of his true Self.
