Reflection 100

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Placing Your Human Nature

At the centre of my life is this Awareness whose very nature I find is freedom – freedom not only from thinghood but from thoughts and feelings of all kinds. Certainly from problems of all kinds. As the source of those things, the origin of those difficult things, its business must be to leave them alone, free to be what they are. Who I really am doesn’t in itself change what I like to call my human nature. What it does is to place it. This difficult and sometimes heart-rending stuff is not denied. In fact it is far more honestly reckoned with and cheerfully taken on board, from the state of freedom at the centre, than ever it was from that illusory person. Now there’s no necessity to deny and every reason to acknowledge these troubles in so far as they persist – loneliness and depression etc. It is part of the price of involvement in the world to have these feelings, some of which are agreeable, some of which are disagreeable, some of which are tragic. I can’t exist, can’t express at all, without this dualism out there. The dualism of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, black and white, etc. is the inescapable condition of expressing into the world from the place that is free of those dualities. So it’s not a case of being free from these things, in the sense that one abolishes them, but of being free from them in the sense that one locates them. They are no longer central. This awareness not only removes one from them – without removing oneself from them - but in the long run and when persisted in, it changes them. (1983 Interview with Douglas Harding)


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