Individual Liberation: Epilogue

 SUFFERING: We will all lose what we love. Our family, friends, our very lives. Our shared experience of this suffering invites us to put aside our self-created conflicts with “the other” and join together in recognition of our common sorrow.. When we become large enough to hold our suffering, expressive enough to sing it out, compassionate enough to help children, we come closer to the sense of shared humanity that gives hope for a future worthy of our better selves. 

 

FREEDOM: Despite all the back-pedaling, the arc of the universe indeed seems to bend toward that most profound of human longings—freedom. Though there’s constant negotiation at the political bargaining table and those with power and privilege seem to have the loudest voices, the people’s deep hunger and thirst for the freedom to define themselves, to be themselves, to live the lives they were born to live, will be satiated, one way or another. 

 

Yet the outer freedoms don’t automatically grant us the more difficult inner freedoms. These only come through our own deliberate and tireless efforts to unshackle ourselves from our own narrow notions and crippling habits, to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of our own egos, to move beyond our limited identities into the larger world of expanded consciousness, unified with all sentient beings. Zen, Jazz and Orff, each in their own style, offer some of the available tools that help dismantle the machinery of our confinement. 

 

DISCIPLINE: There are few finer feelings than the sense of progress made by our own efforts doing something we care about. It gives us the exhilarating sense of being in charge of our own accomplishments. No longer a piece of flotsam being battered about by chance experience, we take charge of our own growth, our own life. The very word for various fields of endeavor, including our by-now familiar family of three, is a discipline. It should be no surprise that to master a discipline requires discipline. In addition to the welcome feeling of self-empowerment, engaging in an ongoing discipline provides a connecting thread between the days. Whether we look forward to it or dread it ( Muhammed Ali confessed that “I hated every minute of training but I said, 'Don't quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”  it bears fruit that we  eventually savor. Each day becomes an opportunity to both refresh oneself by doing what one loves and at the same time, to improve and to note one’s progress.

 

Music, athletics, meditation are all obvious examples of the need for focused and relentless practice, but the ideas and ideals can apply to all fields of study, including some that have no obvious program of technical exercises. I’m thinking of Thoreau’s quote, “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

 

PURPOSE: Purpose is the glue that holds it altogether and as noted earlier, a purpose larger than one’s own personal profit, power, privilege or indeed, happiness, is the only one that counts. Outside of the Dalai Lama’s residence in Dharamsala is a sign that says:

 

“All the happiness one finds in the world comes from wishing happiness for others. 

All the suffering one finds in the world comes from wishing happiness for oneself.  

 

So much of the pain and suffering in this world, the breaking of our spirit that requires our healing attention and intentions, comes from following a false purpose. The one obsessed with hoarding more than our fair share of wealth, of creating an identity based on a false sense of superiority, of listening only to the ego’s “I’m number one!” voice instead of our true nature’s “We are all one” voice.

 

So the Zen student takes the Bodhisattva vows to re-direct intention. The jazz musician puts in the long hours of practice to refresh the world with life-affirming music. The Orff teacher works far beyond the job description to make a daily vote for the future through loving work with children. Would that all walks of life create the vows that recalibrate the purpose of every profession to include the health and well-being of all people—and natural systems— everywhere.