Freedom in This Lifetime

Jīvanmukti is a beautiful Sanskrit term that means “freedom in this lifetime.” Let us understand, celebrate, and explore how this state can be realized in our own lives. If someone said to you, “Unconditional freedom is the divine right of every individual; to live in that state is to live in Divine Presence,” how would you react?

If we want freedom, we must feel, “That is my right. I believe that.” Unfortunately, for most of us, this is not something we truly believe is our right—and therefore we do not seek it. We are not prepared to become a professional at spiritual work in order to achieve it.

Realization can be described as the complete immersion into Unity, a state in which the only experience is one of unconditional joy and love. These words hint at the nature of true freedom, but words cannot express the reality of living in God’s Presence. My teacher Rudi once said that so much of the challenge to our realization is our inability to imagine it.

If you try to imagine extraordinarily profound joy of freedom and then multiply your vision one thousand times, you will not even come close! Yet there is some part of us that knows and seeks to make that dimension of life a living reality.

What it Takes to Actualize Liberation

It is important to understand that although awakening can happen at any moment, it takes a lifetime to actualize our enlightenment—for that transformation of consciousness to permeate every layer of our lives.

Even when we have a profound experience of our own Divinity, there is still the need, every day, to make the conscious choice to reinvest and internalize that awareness back into ourselves. This is how we transform our experience into a state we always live in and function from. It’s due to Grace that we have this experience, and then we have to integrate that new awareness and allow it to express itself in our life.

We seek to be free of the limitations of our body, mind, and emotions, but we want this to be a living reality, not something we attain after death. In fact, if we don’t attain freedom while we are alive, we won’t gain it after we have died.

We must find liberation in ourselves and then express our freedom in the world. Living in freedom means flowing with every moment, accepting everything we encounter and letting go of the need to change the conditions of our lives. But to live in Divine Presence, we must choose to not live in our own tensions and limited self, and that does mean developing the ability to change our inner reality.

One of the significant tenets of Kuṇḍalinī Sādhana, as part of the Tantric tradition, is that while freedom happens from within us, there is nothing in the outer world that needs to be rejected in order to find our realization. Freedom is the rejection of nothing, and the inclusion of everything. Because there is no duality, there is no ultimate difference between our inner and our outer experience—and perhaps, coming to that understanding is the true meaning of freedom.

Getting Past the Trap of the Ego

When we look at what keeps us from our freedom, we find that the ego seems to be as powerful as Divinity. It has a firm grip on us. The ego thinks it is real and the center of the universe. Its belief in its separate status is an illusion that dominates our awareness to such a degree that if we wish to transform ourselves, we must consciously choose to do so.

We must proactively choose freedom and Grace, because we are otherwise allowing our limitation, tension, and ego to reinforce the hold they have over us. Einstein said, “You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.” The problem of the ego is its misunderstanding. We get stuck in our mind and emotions and can’t see beyond that.

So often we are unwilling and unable to deeply open our hearts and feel love pour into us—and then we never find a different place in ourselves from which to combat the boundaries and the prison of the ego. God’s love is the only thing that can penetrate this density. We must allow the Divine Force within us to emerge. When that happens, the ego can be dissolved.

If we try to change the ego from the outside, we will not be able to do it. Even if we are successful at changing some of our patterns or our personality, we are just modifying something superficial, like the clothes we wear. Although this is where most people want to focus, it really has nothing to do with the ego.

We can say, “I will change, I can behave differently.” We can—but the dissolution of the ego, the immersion into our own Divine Self, has nothing to do with personality. In the deepest sense, it has nothing to do with our day-to-day behavior. It has to do with the complete dissolution of the misunderstanding that we are separate from God, and more importantly, with the actual experience of our unity with that Divine Presence.

Let the Self Emerge

Once this transformation begins to happen, the Self emerges from within us, and the core attachment the ego uses to bind us begins to dissolve. The ego falls away. This process of dissolution is inherently painful, especially if we only focus on it from the point of view of what is dropping away. But if we focus on what is emerging from within, we are joyous about the process.

As we start to experience the profound fulfillment and infinite space within us, we are motivated to strengthen our commitment to growth. We are trading up—trading in our ego for a Divine Life.

The paradox we face is that both freedom and binding exist within us. What part of us gets expressed is our choice. God invested a power in us to create whatever life we want, and this includes the possibility that we cannot remember our Source. We get caught up in one level of manifestation, thinking it is the only reality and miss the fact that life is infinite.

Spirituality is gaining freedom from our mistaken separate identity, and we accomplish that not only in meditation but through the celebration of our lives. Creation dances on the field of Consciousness, taking the form of everything in the universe, including our individuated lives. Form is Consciousness pulsating into manifestation. That is how we got here and became part of the play and the beauty of God’s creation. How wonderful!