Already Free (Quote of the Week)
by Andrew Cohen
Scientists tell us that when time began, fourteen billion years ago, something came from nothing. When you awaken to the ground of all Being, in a deep meditative state, you realize that when something came from nothing, the nothing didn’t disappear. That unmanifest, unborn dimension is the ever-present ground out of which everything is still arising in every moment. It is what the Buddha called “the deathless,” and what others call “eternity consciousness.” When you awaken to this dimension in your own awareness, you will find yourself always already resting in the eternal moment before time began. This is the recognition that liberates: Prior to everything, I already am. The experience of this recognition is not one of becoming liberated. It is of being already liberated. What you realize when you awaken to that ground is that there is a part of each and every one of us that is already free—from everything. That part of yourself, which is the ground of Being, has never been bound, trapped, or limited in any way. That’s the part of yourself that I want you to discover. It’s not the part of yourself that needs to become free. It is already free, right now.
In spiritual evolution, there are no guarantees. Life is unpredictable. So this path requires both an unconditional commitment to victory and enormous patience. If we are very serious about this endeavor, we have to become the exemplars ourselves. It has to start with our own unconditional commitment to victory, knowing that there are no guarantees. The very fact that there are no guarantees underlines how urgent our commitment is, because we don’t know how much time we each have to do this. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here. So the worst thing we can do is to waste time. Traditional enlightenment is about going beyond time, but Evolutionary Enlightenment is about doing something in time, because evolution can only happen in time. Therefore, don’t waste time. From the perspective of evolution, time is the most precious commodity. Time is all we have to develop. Many of us have been culturally trained to spend an enormous amount of time worrying about our psychological needs and desires, our ego’s fears and concerns. And this is understandable, but the problem is that it robs us of time that could be used to participate in life in a much deeper way. If you have the strength and clarity to look at your own life from this perspective, you won’t want to allow yourself to waste time, because you will realize you are wasting the precious chance you actually have to evolve.
