Late Night Chat with Jeff: Inner freedom, June 16, 2024, live on Baba Zoom

We have some informal chat after every arti, the "post-arti party"! But once a week, Jeff Wolverton joins us for some serious mining of the spiritual depths. Join us for conversation, more readings, songs, quotes - you never know what treasures will be uncovered!

Topic: Inner Freedom

Dear folks of Baba,

We have an inherent longing to be free. Prophet Mohammed once spoke about a newborn child, “This child may cry out in its helplessness, but it doesn’t want to go back to the darkness of the womb. And so it is with your soul when it leaves the nest and flies into the sky over the wide plain of a new life. You would not trade that freedom for the warmth of where it was. Let loving lead your soul. Make it a place to retire to, a kind of monastery cave, a retreat for the deepest core of your being. Then build a road from there to God, your Beloved.”

Darwin Shaw would give the metaphor of the unlimited world of awareness (or consciousness) on the one side and the limited world of our thoughts, emotions, desires and deeper feelings on the other. Our awareness is like an octopus whose tentacles are always trawling for something in this limited world, getting enmeshed in thoughts, emotions, desires and even our deeper feelings. Our consciousness is always bound by this activity, and we do not enjoy that inner freedom which is our birthright. Darwin would say: what we have to do is withdraw our tentacles of awareness from being enmeshed in the limited world of our sanskaras (impressions) and turn toward the unlimited realm of our soul, Baba Himself. We need to become detached from our thoughts of right and wrong, good and bad, gain and loss, and become deeply aware but not enmeshed in our emotions, desires and feelings which continually pull us into the racing river of our sanskaras. We cannot capture the soul in the net of these experiences. It is not so much willpower, but love, that helps us to withdraw our tentacles so we can live in our soul. Some of this detachment can be helped by psychological methods, but in the end the shortest path is by bringing love into all that we do, infused with Baba's love, and in doing so, we will enjoy the intrinsic freedom of our soul.

One day Baba conveyed these words to me here at the Center that defined freedom in a most surprising and seemingly paradoxical way: "Freedom is having no choice but to love.” When we are prompted by love, there is a feeling of freedom in spite of our having no choice. Reflecting Baba’s words to me, Eruch would often say, “I exercised my free will to become His slave.” At the deepest level, it is not what we want, but what love prompts us to do that matters. Ideally, this requires the incredible patience and inner surrender to wait until love inspires us, rather than being prompted by good, or right or duty—the infinite variety of “shoulds". Unfortunately, we often don’t have the luxury to wait for love to be the doer; but eventually and gradually, with Baba’s grace, love will win out. Freedom is the capacity to respond wholeheartedly to the unpleasant demands that life often places on us. It is about wholeness and self-acceptance, and the loss of freedom is wanting something different from what is.

What has been your experience of withdrawing from identification with thoughts, desires and emotions? What pulls you most powerfully into the world of Illusion? It could be, for example, something like demanding what we think of as justice and fairness. Darwin would talk about creating inner space by giving the contents of our heart to Baba, to make room for Him to live in us. He would say, “The deeper the feeling, the deeper the healing.” Through this inner work, we can enjoy greater freedom in this moment without always being lured into the finite world. It is possible to be fully aware of the world of time and space, everyday life, without being enmeshed in it. This is real freedom!

In His love, Jeff

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