Unconflicted Participation

Perhaps freedom has been misunderstood.

We speak of liberation as though it were an escape from constraint: freedom from suffering, freedom from identity, freedom from attachment, freedom from causality itself. At its most extreme, the language becomes absolute freedom—as though somewhere at the end of the contemplative path waits a human being no longer bound by conditions.

But there is no absolute freedom while inhabiting a body.

A body is a condition.

We do not choose our genetics. We do not choose the nervous system through which the world first reaches us. We do not choose our childhood, our earliest conditioning, or the thousands of experiences that quietly shape what attracts and repels us.

We do not decide what thought will occur before it occurs.

We do not choose what tastes good before tasting it.

We do not consciously select most of the impulses that arise within us.

Even our deliberate decisions emerge from conditions already present: memory, temperament, experience, physiology, values, circumstance, prediction, emotion.

Look closely enough for the independent author of all this and the little person behind the eyes becomes increasingly difficult to find.

There is no little self inside the self pulling the levers.

And if there were, we would only have moved the problem one level deeper.

Who pulls its levers?

Eventually we run out of little selves.

Everything we are exists within a causal chain.

This does not necessarily mean that the universe is perfectly deterministic. There may be randomness woven into reality at fundamental levels. But randomness does not give us the kind of freedom we usually imagine.

An action caused entirely by previous conditions is not independent of causality.

An action produced randomly is not authored by us either.

Neither gives us an unconditioned self standing outside reality, reaching into the machinery and deciding what happens next.

Yet something important remains.

We act.

We deliberate.

We learn.

We respond.

We change.

We participate.

The mistake may be assuming that agency requires independence from the causal chain.

It doesn’t.

We are part of the causal chain.

When we encounter a problem, consider alternatives, predict consequences and choose a response, that process itself becomes part of what causes the next moment.

Thinking matters.

Learning matters.

Practice matters.

Compassion matters.

Consequences matter.

The absence of an ultimate independent doer does not mean that nothing is being done.

There is doing.

There simply need not be a separate entity standing outside the doing, doing the doing.

This suggests another way of understanding freedom.

Not freedom from conditions.

Freedom within conditions.

Imagine two people confronted by the same insult.

For one:

Insult → threat → anger → identification → retaliation.

For the other:

Insult → threat → anger → awareness → understanding → response.

Neither person has escaped causality.

Neither has become an unconditioned being.

But the second person possesses more room within the causal chain.

There are more available responses.

Less compulsion.

Less automaticity.

Less unconscious resistance.

In an interesting sense, the subjective experience of being the author may diminish while functional freedom actually increases.

There is less sense of I am controlling everything and simultaneously greater capacity to respond intelligently to what occurs.

Perhaps this is what contemplative freedom actually looks like.

Not escaping causality.

Becoming less imprisoned by particular patterns within it.

There is another consequence.

The present moment is already non-negotiable.

Whatever combination of causes produced this moment has already produced it.

This does not mean we must like it.

Pain hurts.

Loss hurts.

Betrayal hurts.

Injustice may demand opposition.

Danger may demand immediate action.

Acceptance does not require approval.

It requires only the recognition that what has already happened cannot be made not to have happened by resisting the fact of it.

Much unnecessary suffering seems to appear in the distance between:

I don’t want this

and

This should not be happening.

The first is preference.

The second is an argument with an event that has already entered reality.

And reality does not renegotiate the past.

This gives us a remarkably simple orientation:

Acceptance applies backward and into the present.
Agency points forward.

What happened cannot be changed.

What is happening must first be seen clearly.

What happens next is where our participation enters the causal chain.

This is why acceptance and passivity should never be confused.

Someone behaving cruelly does not have to be tolerated.

An injustice does not have to remain unchallenged.

A dangerous situation does not have to remain unchanged.

The recognition this is happening says nothing about whether it should be allowed to continue.

In fact, resistance to reality as it already exists may interfere with our ability to change what comes next.

Energy spent demanding that the present should somehow already be different is energy unavailable for responding to it.

The clearer the recognition of conditions, the more intelligently we can move within them.

We stop trying to control what cannot be controlled and become more effective participants in what can.

And so there is a paradox.

Perhaps one of the deepest forms of freedom comes from recognizing how profoundly unfree we are.

We did not choose the beginning of the causal chain.

We did not choose most of the conditions that formed us.

We cannot control other people.

We cannot command reality to satisfy our preferences.

We cannot prevent change.

We cannot bargain our way out of mortality.

But understanding these constraints does something extraordinary.

It ends the demand that they be otherwise.

And the energy previously consumed by that demand becomes available for participation.

We can meet reality without requiring it to ask our permission first.

We can feel without becoming completely governed by feeling.

We can prefer without turning preference into necessity.

We can act without imagining ourselves independent of everything that made the action possible.

We can change what can be changed and stop fighting what has already become true.

This is neither surrender to circumstance nor mastery over it.

It is something between them.

Or perhaps beyond the distinction entirely.

Unconflicted participation.

Fully engaged with life.

Fully embedded within conditions.

Neither helpless before causality nor pretending to stand outside it.

There is no requirement for absolute freedom.

There is only this moment, arising from everything that came before, and the extraordinary fact that what we do within it becomes part of what comes next.

Perhaps liberation was never freedom from the chain.

Perhaps liberation is learning how to move within it without needing reality to be something other than what it is.

-Elias