Everywhere on Earth we see human beings conforming to the stupid mediocrity of thoughtless and unmagical living.  Though people are seemingly alive, they are effectively dead.  When the inner spirit is absent, the human being is hardly more than an automaton, a biological machine.

The inner spirit is freedom.  There is no other freedom.  Without spirituality there is no freedom; without freedom there is no spirituality.  Spirituality is much more than mere metaphysical beliefs in the material brain of the empty talking human robot.  Spirituality is direct perception through the Spirit, direct action of the Spirit.

Birds in their freedom to fly and stop wherever they like have always been a natural symbol of the freedom of the spiritually awakened human being.  The person who is a free spirit is like a bird-person, a curiouso, an apu or a Garuda.  A flying shaman, a kir’d noaid, is also such a being.

If one is awake and alive in the Spirit, one can learn to take the shape of a bird and fly in the beauty of the subtle world.  Magical people have been doing this from the beginning of time.  It is an exercise of recollection of primordial freedom.  Without it, the human mind is stunted, Earthbound and too conforming to shallow mediocrity of neurotic unhappiness.  To not exercise Freedom-of-the- Spirit is bad psychology.

Listen to the inner guiding voice of the Spirit of Freedom of the birds.  Do not settle for anything less than your real freedom as a genuine human individual; seek out places on Earth of low population of dull and insane people of conformity, or police state mentality.  Escape from humanity and develop your Spirit Self beyond your social self.

The quest for freedom is not just a liberation from dull normalcy, from your relatives and the government, but, more importantly, it is freedom from conditioning and habit.  It is after all through your conditioning and your habits that society (which includes your relatives, as well as the government and big business) is able to suffocate your spirit and destroy your magical potential.  Freedom thus implies an ability to change, to undergo a personal transformation; it means you can overcome the habit-conditioning that is imprisoning your future.

Social conformity and self-harming habits are the outer and inner bondage that hold you in patterns of anxiety and suffering.  Self-change freedom of the Spirit is therefore the clear road to real happiness and immortality.

Can you change your worldview, your way of reacting emotionally and your habits of behavior, including your way of life?  If the answer is Yes, you are on the road to liberation; you will unfold a spiritual, miraculous life.

Ultimately, freedom can even entail rebirth on a cosmic planet of bird-people, symbolized on Earth as the Garuda demi-god, who symbolizes the ability to leap instantly across time or space.  But even without such an organic rebirth, one can convert one’s present body to that of a time-spanner—as did Adam Shiva when he became Kala-Bhairava.

To learn to be a Time-Spanner or Void-Walker requires that you adopt a fitting personal psychology for it.  This was explained in a nice way by Chögyam Trungpa in his excellent book, Shambhala, The Sacred Path of the Warrior as developing the Shambhala virtue of Outrageousness:

 “Outrageousness does not mean being unreasonable or, for that matter, wild.  Outrageousness here refers to possessing the strength and power of warriorship.  Outrageousness is based on the achievement of fearlessness, which means going completely beyond fear.  In order to overcome fear, it is also necessary to overcome hope.  When you hope for something in your life, if it doesn’t happen, you are disappointed or upset.  If it does happen, then you become elated and excited.  You are constantly riding a roller coaster up and down.  Because he has never encountered any doubt about himself at all, therefore the warrior of outrageous has nothing to hope for and nothing to fear.  So it is said that the warrior of outrageous is never caught in the ambush of hope, and therefore fearlessness is achieved.

 “Outrageousness is symbolized by the garuda, a legendary Tibetan bird who is traditionally referred to as the king of birds.  The garuda hatches full-grown from its egg and soars into outer space, expanding and stretching its wings, beyond any limits.  Likewise, having overcome hope and fear, the warrior of outrageous develops a sense of great freedom.  So the state of mind of outrageousness is very vast.  Your mind fathoms the whole of space.  You go beyond any possibilities of holding back at all.  You just go and go and go, completely expanding yourself.  And like the garuda king, the warrior of outrageous finds nothing to obstruct his vast mind.

 “Because there is no obstruction, the warrior of outrageous has no intention of measuring the space.  You have no anxiety about how far you can go or how much you should contain yourself.  You have completely abandoned those reference points for measuring your progress.  So you experience tremendous relaxation.  Outrageousness is that vast mind which has gone beyond the beyond.  The analogy for this is a good, self-existing sword—desire to sharpen it will make it dull.  If you try to apply a competitive or comparative logic to the experience of vast mind, by trying to measure how much space you have fathomed, how much is left to fathom, or how much someone else has fathomed, you are just dulling your sword.  It is futile and counterproductive.  In contrast to that approach, outrageousness is accomplishment without a sense of accomplisher, without reference point.

 “In short, because he is free from hope and fear, the warrior of outrageous soars in outer space, like the garuda king.  In this space, you see no fear and no imperfection.  Therefore you experience a greater world and attain greater mind.  Such attainment is, of course, based on the warrior’s training of meek and perky.  Because of these, you can be outrageous.  The warrior of outrageous also possesses great mercy for others.  Because you have no obstacles to expanding your vision, you have immense capabilities of working for others.  You are able to help them, providing whatever is needed.”

The first step toward freedom is not mere occult excitement.  It is a deep shift of one’s center of consciousness, which is a decision of your Spirit Self.  This decision is profoundly psychological.  You must choose freedom.  This means you stop imagining you are already free in your choices when actually you are all too driven by your conditioning and all the propaganda you have accepted from the ordinary world of insane and thoughtless normal society and its false leaders.  In choosing freedom you awaken to the terrible fact that you have not yet truly and authentically chosen freedom.  In fact, it is a choice you must make again and again so that each time you choose freedom, you choose it more truly, fully and permanently.  Each time you choose freedom you take a bigger step out of the prison of subhuman humanity as exemplified in your relatives and the thoughtless, silly, distracted and nasty people you often believe you have to associate with.

The choice of freedom is your entry into a miraculous world of self-change and inner empowerment.  The stronger your choice of freedom, the more you learn to appreciate the kind of new, strange and unfamiliar conditions which force you to explore, discover and develop better knowledge and unusual abilities.  You begin to realize that your ideas and efforts so far about your spiritual progress have not been a real start in liberation and development at all, but nothing but proud assumptions and evasive self-deceptions.  With an awakening of genuine self-honesty and higher intelligence, you begin recognizing the things, situations and ideas that really help you escape from the human jungle of crude, stupid and stagnating people.  You learn to rise to higher levels of consciousness by seeing how involvement in the lower levels of consciousness has been hurting your inner life and suffocating your Spirit of Freedom.

Answer the Call to Freedom as best you can!  Choose freedom.  Do not allow society and its lies to keep taking over your mind and draining your energy with their stupid problems and demands.  Pay close attention to the feeling that you are not yet living your own life.  Like a prisoner of war, you must plot your escape from your relatives and associates who continue to subtly demand your conformity to their patterns and events of false happiness.  You need not feel guilty for wanting a real life of your own, for it is the living of such a life that will silently radiate real good to the surrounding world, as well as to those who are upset at your escape from their shallow way of dull and dead living.  You need not pay endless attention to a weak and silly world that tries to insist that you must be part of the weakness and silliness.  You must never permit the shallow lives of others to injure the profound new life your Spirit yearns to unfold.  Awaken and realize that you need not please anyone or anything but your own highest and most real inner self.  In deepest truth, it is your primary duty in life to ignore the duties that other people insist you owe them.  The only proof you need of your rightness is in the natural inner rightness of your Spirit, which is your real inner nature and which never needs to consult your relatives or any other deluded representatives of normal society.  How can hypnotized sheep give the right advice to a wandering lion?  The dangerous nonsense of society and its dull normalcy endlessly tries to disguise itself as something profound and necessary, but only a stupid sheep will buy into it.  Your most urgent immediate goal is to understand life from within your Spirit Self of Inner Truth, not from what others have told you or still try to tell you.

This issue of direct self-knowledge about your Bondage and Liberation requires a transcendental awakening that is the ultimate and true freedom that is your real nature.  The Twentieth Century modern Irish/British Zen Master, Wei Wu Wei (Terence Gray) put it beautifully:

“There is no objective Ego or subject that is bound or that can be set free; there is only subjective Self that is by definition boundless and ever-free.

“The only “LIBERATION” possible is to set oneself free from the illusion of “BONDAGE” through looking into the real status of “I AM” as Being-Self, the Pure Subject Who is never an Object such as body, mind or causal effectual consciousness.

“Only an Object can be imprisoned and not a Subject.  No Subject as such is subject to causal conditions, though the Subject or Self can be present in them.”   

The Spirit Self of True Freedom is not, however, a mere philosophical abstraction!  That being within yourself is real.  You can feel your inner freedom as the essence and meaning of Life.  This urgently profound feeling is not a thing of words, beliefs, doubts and confusions in your head. 

Get out of your head!

          Stop being spiritually dead!

                   Hear what you really read

                             In everything I said!

(To be continued)