Freedom

Bodhidharma sat facing the wall.
   The Second Patriarch stood in the snow.
   He cut off his arm and presented it to Bodhidharma, crying, “My mind has no peace as yet! I beg you, master, please pacify my mind!”
   “Bring your mind here and I will pacify it for you,” replied Bodhidharma.
   “I have searched for my mind, and I cannot take hold of it,” said the Second Patriarch.
   “Now your mind is pacified,” said Bodhidharma.

   Have you seen the face of freedom? Shivered against its feathery touch? There’s a cultural mythos of freedom not far removed from eating grapes on a lilo, authority on all matters you care to be and beholden to none, but when we go into our idle imaginings of what would satisfy our requirements of freedom; trouble in paradise.

  One, if freedom has to meet requirements, is it freedom? Two, our visions of freedom are counter to the forces that make us feel trapped, such that our ideas of freedom are biased by the avoidance of pain —but is not the pain we feel but a symptom of freedom? If you are free you can hurt yourself, and if others are free, they can hurt you. So we find on that account that our depictions of freedom invariably fail, because they are depictions that necessarily exclude. If freedom is truly free, it cannot be limited to the particular, but it includes the particular too. How can one imagine something not particular? Impossible. Unknown. Undefined. Unbound. All-inclusive, and sometimes exclusive. Trapped, pain, wishing things were different, any scenario. But look around. Does whatever is happening truly make sense? Is the current predicament divinely designed? If you are honest, you will see it has no author, no solidity, no reason to be. Is it not then already free?