The Freedom That Was Never Lost

I’m launching a monthly longer read for our Paying Subscribers, something you can engage with, ponder, ask me questions and I will answer them in the comments. I really hope we can build something special here together to explore, and understand more deeply our inherent truth. So let’s get into it! (Also due to the nature of Substack, if you’re on my list and don’t pay, you will receive this annoying preview of some of the Letter. I am sorry, there’s no way around this. So I have tried to include a little of the Letter for you, but yes, it does truncate!).

Here’s a question that, once you really sit with it, dismantles a lot of what you thought you understood about suffering: if we had genuine, unconstrained free will, wouldn’t we simply choose to be happy, and be done with it?

Not the philosophical version. The visceral, honest one.

Right now, is any part of you choosing to be anxious, to replay old arguments, to feel inadequate, to brace against an uncertain future? Of course not. No one wakes up and selects suffering from a menu. And yet here we are, all of us, experiencing it in varying degrees, all the time. That’s the crack in the wall. Once you notice it, everything you believe about personal agency and identity starts to shift.

I want to be clear about what pours through that crack, because I meet a very present fear in people when we get here: “but I’ll just turn into a jerk, a blob, I’ll disappear!” The opposite happens. What pours through is the possibility that the self doing the choosing isn’t what we think it is, that the will we consider so free is far less free than we imagine, and that this insight, properly understood, is liberating rather than terrifying.

I had so many juicy conversations these past few weeks preparing to face myself fully in a ten day silent, self led, don’t leave my property retreat. No reading, no journaling, no teachers, just me and me (and the tender company of our senior dog). Meditation, meals, exercise, gardening, a schedule tight enough that my mind can’t build escape hatches while it implodes on itself. These chats have circled free will, choice, and what draws the soul into alignment. One friend told me, “I decided enlightenment can go kick itself,” then explained that once he stopped trying to be a good spiritual person and focused on personal freedom instead, his life found more flow. Less trying, more becoming. I asked him who exactly decided that. We had some laughs.

Non-dualism claims that the division we experience, between self and world, between “me in here” and “everything else out there,” isn’t an accurate description of reality. Vedanta calls this maya: not illusion in the sense of unreal, but misperception, a case of mistaken identity. (I get a little activated when someone says “it’s all a dream!” in a smug, Very Spiritual Person tone, so let’s actually unpack it.)

In 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three researchers who confirmed what Einstein dismissed as “spooky action at a distance”: particles remain instantly connected no matter how far apart. The universe isn’t locally real, which is the quantum physics way of saying what the Upanishads have said for thousands of years. Maya isn’t a trick humans cooked up. It’s the movement within Brahman, pure undivided consciousness, through which the One appears as many. If everything arose from one source, everything stays connected at the deepest level, however separate it looks on the surface. The particles never stopped being the same whole. Neither have we.

Adi Shankaracharya’s Advaita tradition describes the individual self, the jiva, as Brahman misidentifying as separate and bounded, like a wave believing itself distinct from the ocean. The wave has its own shape and momentum. It’s still never anything but ocean. We identify as the wave and miss the ocean that makes us, us.

Zen gets to the same place faster. A monk asks Zhaozhou, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Zhaozhou answers, “Mu” which means ‘yes/no’. The point isn’t the answer, it’s that the question itself is the trap, trying to box something that can only be experienced directly. We do this constantly: think our way toward something only felt directly. Taoism calls the aligned version of this wu wei, effortless action, not laziness but operating from the natural current of things instead of the effortful position of a self trying to control everything.