The Sacred Process

free-by-alicepopkorn

To be blocked, to be held back, to be thwarted, is what teaches us freedom from wilfulness and freedom from wilfulness is the ultimate spiritual blessing. It is all the spiritual blessings rolled into one. When we are free from wilfulness we are as light as thistledown floating on the breath of a summer breeze.

 

When we are free from wilfulness we are free from ourselves, and this is the only real freedom. All other freedoms are illusions, traps baited with the honey that we can enter with ease but leave only with the greatest difficulty. The self is an illusory freedom, sweet-tasting at first but as bitter as ashes later on. The self is a trap baited with honey which we construct with urgency, vigour and persistence but regret at our leisure. The cultivation of the self is the end of joy and the beginning of our misery, which we then proceed to deny to the best of our ability, and pretend that ‘all is well’. The cultivation of the self is our ‘marriage to the unreal’, it is our ‘marriage to illusion’.

 

To be blocked, to be held back, to be thwarted and yet be joyful about this, not resentful or bitter about this, is what teaches us freedom from wilfulness. This is the sacred process – to suffer consciously, to suffer joyfully, to suffer with good heart. This is how we are transformed from being heavy and laden with sorrow to being light and suffused with joy. This is how we are freed from the trap. This is how we become again what we truly are, which is free. The sacred process is therefore the process by which the apparent lack of freedom (the lack of freedom for the self to obtain what it wants) teaches us the ultimate freedom, which is freedom from the self…

 

 

 

 

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