liberation

What do I want?  I want to be free.  I don't know what that looks like but I know that this ain't it.  Can you be free in this life?  Or is that the fundamental illusion that keeps us pinned to the karmic wheel?  Is the only freedom in death?  That would suggest the best course in life would be an ascetic, yogic style of purification and preparation for final rites.  Cast off from this temporal life, you know, the entire trip of eastern civilization, turning away from all of this Maya.  I don't know, I've spent a lot of time following that idea, half-heartedly of course…. it's hard to stick with it unless you really have death fully in mind, all the time, overshadowing everything.  Otherwise you end up feeling that you are just letting your life slip away, which is exactly what you're doing of course.

Maybe that view is the ultimate deception?  All culture stemming from the 60's would say so.  Live life now, this is all there is, be wild.  That's the freedom of Hunter Thompson and Keith Richards.  You know, I've done that too but also half-heartedly.  I've gotten a lot of good out of it.  Certainly got a lot of misery and headaches too.  Besides, it's terribly expensive, which explains the culture of Lawyers Guns and Money that grew out of the 60's-style freedom.  It also requires a very harsh, atheistic, chaotic cosmology that in no way seems to correspond with what you feel when you are really connected to nature.  It also creates this never-ending need to escape, which is such an obvious male thing that it makes me cringe to think I could participate in it.  My rule tends to be- if it's what men do, it must be wrong!  The 60's acid nihilism is total male-dominator style dressed up as feminism, which makes it all the more appalling.

That Dionysian, no-thought-for-the-future thing is the way of the bottle, of staying up all night and talking, talking, talking, of dissipation and rebellion, of infidelity, of self-absorption.  In Christian terms, it's the devil.  As usual, this makes me feel very conflicted- on the one hand, I feel that all Christian metaphor systems must be basically correct; on the other, the pagan in me feels exactly the opposite.  This is one of the big issues that I can never make heads or tails of.  

I don't know, maybe both views are wrong and there is no freedom to be attained.  There's just…. this.  I don't know what this is but freedom, it ain't.  Freedom from what?  From social constraints?  You could defect, lots of people do but I'm not sure they have achieved a sense of liberation.  The nature of being human seems to mean having some kind of chain around your soul that you can't shrug off by changing your external circumstances; you are just as likely to achieve liberation in a jail cell, a car accident, an ashram, a nudist colony, a convent, a wine bar, or just sitting on a cushion for years and years and years.

Maybe the problem is that both paths tend to become forms of self-absorption, which is the real prison.  If I spend all my time meditating and fasting and purifying, I tend to increase the distance between myself and others, become ungrounded and judgmental.  If I spend all my time reveling and rebelling, I tend to lose sight of the interests of those around me and my goal becomes my own hedonic pleasure, which is a never-ending spiral.  Maybe that's not true of either path…. it's so hard to really see clearly when you are being self-absorbed.  One thing looks like another all the time.  And that is the damned problem with this stupid life, always casting you one way then another, all in ignorance, vanity!  Which makes the case for the acid-nihilism party-on thing.  

No matter what I do or have done in my life, what completely divergent strategies I follow, everything is always half freedom and half slavery, half heaven and half hell.  So then the question is- why get out of bed?  Why leave home?  Why grow as a person?  The ratio of heaven and hell is immutable and you're gonna get both no matter what.  That's what I truly feel; surely it can't be right.  That's what people call "depression".  Of course, when you feel that way, non-depression seems like what people call "self-deception".