Unexpected Freedom

Unexpected Freedomappearance of suffering, not by ignoring it, but by lookingever more fully and bravely at the reality of it. The Buddhasaid, ‘If you want to see the Buddha, see the Dhamma.’ Seethe reality, see actuality. To come to see reality clearly, justas it is, is to realise that it is the most valuable refuge thatwe could have.To take Refuge in the Buddha is to cultivate the potentialthat we all have for living out of an awareness that isn’tlimited by our reactions to our experience. The historicalBuddha was certainly a human being. He sat and he ate; hewalked and he bathed himself just as a normal person does.He suffered the experience of ageing and would sit in themorning sun to find relief from pains in his back. What wasdifferent about him was that his awareness wasn’t limited.We, on the other hand, experience limitations of awarenessall the time. A clear example of this is when we come upagainst the reaction of, ‘I can’t take it any more.’ Now,whenever we experience this reaction, if we have developedawareness, there is a part of us that knows that this feelingof being limited is not the ultimate truth. We have all attimes endured past the experience of ‘I can’t take it any more’and found that we can take it. Perhaps we have been onretreat and begun to experience an excruciating pain; orperhaps some fear or other emotion arose, and we felt unableto bear it. Instead of simply giving up, inspired by faith wehave been able to breathe through these experiences,remaining focused on their reality, and what we havediscovered is that the pain dissolves or we experience arelease from the overwhelming emotion. We realise that theapparent reality of ‘I can’t take it any more’ was just that – anappearance, an apparition; it was the apparent reality. If wehad been completely fooled by the world, or by the waythings appear to be, we would have grasped at that apparent192