Tender Love

"Liberation is the realisation  of the obvious yet unimaginable reality that the experience of life does not include a personal self. What is assumed to be at the heart of all experience, namely that I have to be there experiencing it, is not what’s happening. It’s not you who is experiencing reading these words,  the experience is of you reading.  The sense of self is part of the experience, part of what’s happening.

Thoughts, emotions, a sense of physicality and especially muscular contractions support the illusion that there is a personal self, located within a body. I seem to be in my head looking out and experiencing life from this perspective . This is  the experience of apparent duality.

There is no ‘I’ aware of itself and conscious of being alive and
embodied, making choices and initiating action. There is only
consciousness, being, awakeness, the non-personal Self. It is timeless, silent, lucid spaciousness. It is not me that is awake and conscious of my experience. It is consciouness in which the sense of me and my experience is appearing. Me and whatever I perceive is the familiar experience of life. Or seems to be. But there is no self, only Self, consciousness, in which the sense of me and my experience appears.

  Seeking is driven by a  sense of incompleteness, of something  missing, a longing to feel at ease and at home in ourselves.  Finding a sense of meaning and purpose can certainly seem to  help, as do practices like meditation. Yet despite many benefits, they don’t fully satisfy. This is because they cannot alter or remove the compelling assumption that there is an I experiencing them.

Liberation is the complete and permanent evaporation of any sense of a separate self. It‘s not an intellectual appreciation or an intuitive insight into the nature of reality. It’s like the breaking of a vacuum seal or the bursting of a bubble. It is the end of seeking and the realisation that there is only wholeness. What remains is silent, spacious awakeness, consciousness, within which the wondrous, translucent immediacy of life is appearing. And the experience is tender, peaceful joy, it’s love."

~ Roger Linden is a psychotherapist and teacher of meditation and the Feldenkrais method. He has been leading groups exploring the nature of liberation in Great britain since 1999.