Unexpected Freedom

Unexpected Freedommean we are supposed to feel guilty for having personaldesires, or embarrassed about who we are. We all havepersonalities; we had to work hard to attain one! Buddhism istelling us that personality is not all that it appears to be, butthis doesn’t mean we have to start apologising for ourexperience of being a particular somebody. We need toconsider this carefully. The precious ‘pointing to reality’ thatconstitutes Dhamma teachings becomes dangerous whenturned into dogma. By this I mean that the concept of anattashould be understood as just a concept; the experience towhich it points is something completely different.Our personality is what we experience ourselves as, andwe welcome and value it. The last thing to do is attempt to getrid of it. Should we be foolish enough to try – and some of ushave been that foolish – then a lot of our personality goesunderground. When it’s not out in the open but relegated tothe shadowy underworld, all that is dark in our charactergrows larger. Sometimes we get hints of its undergroundactivity, and if we are sensitive to its rumblings we would bewise to welcome it back into the light of day before it growsinto too much of a monster. We can be sure it will come tolight some time. Perhaps it might wait until we have becomewell-known; one day somebody might criticise us in public –and full-blown repressed vengefulness raises its ugly head foreveryone to see.If our practice is not driven by wilful ambition, cautionwill guide us and we will learn from the lessons of lifenaturally. There will be no need to try to get rid of what wedon’t like about ourselves. From his perspective of perfectlyunobstructed vision, the Buddha pointed out the delusivenature of the feeling of ‘I’. From our perspective we take upthis invitation to enquire and, remembering whatever degreeof awareness we have access to, we examine the very dynamic150