Thinking about freedom versus walking the path to freedom
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Is this it?
Is this really all there is?
As archaic as our drive for food, we appear to have a deep intuition that there is more to the world than meets the eye. Reality is hiding something from us. We wish to perpetually increase the scope of what’s intelligible — in hopes of arriving somewhere. There is a fundamental discomfort with the world and we are trying to do away with it. In Zen, when you begin the Search, it is said:
“Inspiration for this first step is feeling that things are not wholesome, something is lacking. That feeling of loss produces pain”
In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth is the truth of the existence of suffering. This is an acknowledgement that this sense of lacking brings us pain. So we search — we look for what is missing, and I believe there are roughly two classes of people looking: seers and thinkers. Both of these classes are concerned with making sense of this strange world — yet the means they use are radically different. Both of…
