On Freedom: Reflections on Obligations and Worship
"Freedom" is a word central to our lives, but we rarely talk about what it means to be free or what its implications are.
There is an idea that I have read in the works of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: that the first (minor) liberation is the liberation from internal influence and that the second (major) liberation is the liberation from external influence. Now, why is this idea important?
Liberation is the act of stepping into freedom - when one is liberated, one is freed from some form of bondage. So, this idea of liberation is about freedom - it is about framing what it means to be free. So, we need to talk about what it means to be “free”.
For those of us in America, we take deep, deep pride in being free - many will brag that at no point in world history has any group of people been so gosh-darn free. We eat freedom for breakfast. Freedom has never been as free as the freedom in America.
Despite this, we rarely (if ever) actually talk about what it means to be free. We understand that literal physical enslavement is not freedom and we have a penchant for talking about the ways people in other countries are not free (what with those communist countries and their authoritarian, suppressive regimes). We talk about how police and the troops support our freedom. Politicians talk about the importance of our freedom… but, what does it mean to be free? We never really talk about what freedom is, but we base everything on it.
Are you free if you have to work 40 hours a week to barely get by? Are you free if the only viable leaders you are allowed to choose from are all unpalatable choices, cycle-after-cycle? Maybe you respond by saying, “at least in the US, we have a choice!” So, choosing between a bunch of options that don’t really suit what you need is freedom? Is it freedom if there are options that actually suit what you need?
The truth of it is, none of these things are what freedom is about. Freedom is not a matter of the marketplace or of politics, it is a matter of the soul. To be free, is to be free from influence, and this is where we get to the idea I started with - the idea that the first liberation is from internal influence and the second liberation is from external influence.
Freedom is not the ability to choose from 78 kinds of pasta sauce at the grocery store, nor is freedom the ability to vote once every couple of years. Freedom is the ability to maintain your center, to maintain your peace, no matter what you encounter.
What does this look like? Let’s look at an example. Let’s say someone walks up to you and they say something that makes you angry - in fact, beforehand, you were having a nice day, but, now, you are angry. Later that night you are still angry at what this person said.
We may be inclined to view this as an example of external influence, since someone outside of us made us feel angry. But, this is an example of how we are not free from internal influence. Many of us are controlled by certain emotions - some of us are more prone to anger, some to self-pity, some to self-loathing, some to greed, some to jealousy. When such an emotion rises within us, we are not free, for we are still controlled by our emotions.
External influences don’t actually come into play until we’ve freed ourselves from internal influences, such as emotions we can’t control or ideas that alienate us from our own selves. So, for now it is enough to talk about internal influences.
Ideas can also represent powerful ways we are not liberated from internal influence. We have many ideas about what it means to be a “good person” - we set up an entire judicial system within our minds to enforce these ideas. There are police officers who patrol, looking for violations. One officer may notice the desire to cry welling up inside of you, but the law states very clearly that “MEN DON’T CRY” - so the officer fires his weapon, arrests the feeling, and throws it down into a cell, locked deep within the body.
Freedom is not an economic or political matter (though, certainly, both economics and politics can shape our ability to seek true freedom). It is a spiritual matter.
I asked before, are you free if you have to work 40 hours a week to get by? Well, you could be…it’s possible. See, it is the nature of existing that there are things that must be done - this is our karma. Certainly we must eat and sleep, but we may need to feed others, to pay our bills, to follow through on our obligations, to pay our taxes. The obligations of life can feel suffocating, they can feel like bondage. How can we be free if we have so many obligations in this life?
We may look at a bird flying in the sky and think, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” - but what makes a bird free? Birds don’t migrate because they are simply free and may do whatever they wish. No! They are obligated by the changing of the seasons, by the cold winter and the hot summer, to travel so that they may survive.
It is the nature of being alive that we are obligated to many things. We all have various ways of coping with this reality. Some of us have visceral emotional reactions to this - we get angry or become filled with self-pity, because we must fulfill our obligations. Some of us create intellectual justifications to this - we say, “I am a good person” when we fulfill our obligations, even when our spirit (or the spirit of our loved ones) suffers. Regardless, we find ourselves at the whim of internal emotions and ideas that keep us from true freedom.
In the Bagavad Gita, the principles of karma yoga are explained by Krishna to Arjuna. Arjuna is about to fight in a great battle and he feels that it is not appropriate to fight his fellow man - he asks Krishna for guidance, so that he may understand the path forward. He asks Krishna, essentially, “why do you want me to fight?” and within his response, Krishna says, “Not even for a moment can one remain without activity; One is forced to take action, moved by the forces of nature”.
Here, Krishna is telling Arjuna that life is defined by obligations and, therefore, life is define by the actions required to fulfill our obligations. Even the need to breath comes to us as an obligation. If you try to stop breathing, the obligation to breath will rise up in you - your body will shake until you breath again. Further, even the idea of “not doing anything” is a form of doing something. We are always constantly in a state of obligation and action, just as a river is constantly obligated to flow - should it stop flowing, the river is dead.
When we understand this, we can see that we are obligated to act. This is the nature of karma. The river of life is flowing and we are caught in it - there is no place we can go where we can remove ourselves fully from obligation, just as a fish cannot make its way outside of the water.
Fundamentally, this is to say that we are never truly free from the forces of the world we live in, because we are a part of it. Just as a branch is not free from the tree, we can never be free of the Universe. Yet, the branch finds its purpose in service of the tree. The branch, unable to do other than it is obligated to, fulfills its obligations in service of the greater body it inhabits - the branch grows towards the suns and captures light on its leaves, offering sustenance to the tree.
We, too, find ourselves like branches of a tree. In this case, the tree is not a tree - the tree is the Universe, the tree is the Truth, the tree is God. In Judaism, we refer to the Torah and our temples as a “Tree of Life” (Eytz Chaim). When the Torah is returned to the ark at the end of service we say, “It is a tree of life to those who hold fast, and those who support it are fulfilled and happy. It’s ways are ways of pleasantness and all its paths are peace. Cause us, then, to return to you, O God, and we shall return; renew our days as of old.”
This is our fundamental condition - we are each like branches on the Tree of Life. We are obligated to this position. We find our purpose in life when we accept this condition and when we fulfill our obligations, when we fulfill our karma. For, we come to know that by fulfilling our obligations, that we nourish the Universe, we nourish God - just as the branch nourishes the tree.
Now, we all, generally, remain unliberated from our own ideas. We may read this and think that this sounds good, but then when we go out-and-about, we start to notice all kinds of people not fulfilling their obligations (as we perceive them). Maybe this feeds feelings of superiority, frustration, or pity in us - yet, to feel these ways is still to be controlled by inner emotions. We let our ideas of what it means to be a “good person” consume us and such ideas obligate us to judge others, to see the differences between each other, to other each other. Yet, if we are all branches on the same tree, how can we be “other” to one another.
All major religions seek to navigate the sort-of inherent imprisonment we all find ourselves within. Just as a branch is “imprisoned” upon a tree, we find ourselves locked into a certain situation in life. This is nothing to be sad about, but it does ask us to consider than what it means to be “free”. For a branch is not free to leave its tree - if it does that, the branch will die.1
The branch’s greatest freedom is found in being a branch, living in service of the tree. For, if the branch tried to refuse or neglect its duty to the tree, the branch will suffer as the tree suffers. There is no path by which a branch can seek freedom by not being a branch. Likewise, there is no path by which a person can seek freedom by not being their own self.
As Krishna explains to Arjuna, we can pay for freedom by performing our obligations as a service to the Truth, to God, to the Universe. For, when we perform our obligations without attachment to the fruit of our labor (i.e., we are not attached to the results) and when we perform our obligations as an offering to the Tree of Life, then our reward is the gift of being who we truly are. This is freedom.
Krishna explains to Arjuna that when we perform our obligations as an offering to God, this eliminates karma. Let’s imagine that you see a homeless person and you give them $5 to help them out. If you give them $5 because it is in service of making you feel that you are a “good person” or because you feel superior or because you pity them or because they make you feel sad, then you create the obligation (further karma) within yourself to continue being superior, to continue pitying, to continue treating your own sadness, for this is the source of your “good person”-ness.
Yet, if you give the $5 as an act of worship, without attachment in an egoic sense, then no further obligations are created. The branch does not give the tree sunshine because it wants to be a “good branch” - the branch gives the tree sunshine because it is a branch. When we become liberated from the ideas that control us (the most powerful being the idea of what a “good person” is), then we return to our inherent nature. It turns out that our inherent nature looks an awful lot like being a “good person”, in practice.
And so, in a sense, the more karma we quiet, the freer we become. We are all constantly creating obligations for ourselves and we are battered around because of it. We tell a friend we will pay them a visit over the weekend, but when the weekend comes we do not want to. We tell our boss we can take on a new project, thinking it might lead to a raise, yet we don’t have any time for a new project.
Karma Yoga is the practice of completing our obligations as an act of worship. This is why there are prayers for the bread, the wine, the food, for waking, for sleeping. Because everything can become an act of worship. Every breath can become an act of worship.
If you do not quite understand what I mean, it might sound like making everything an act of worship is very constrictive. How can living in service in a spiritual sense offer up more freedom? Well, it does take work, that’s for sure. You are, of course, free to do many things, but you will quickly discover the ability to do those things takes a lot of work. You are free to play music, but it might take many years of diligent practice before you actually can exercise that freedom. Or is freedom still just about what we can have delivered to our homes with free next day delivery by Amazon Prime?
Karma Yoga is one path (of many) to becoming liberated - first from internal influence, next from external influence. For, to make our actions acts of worship, we must become liberated from our own internal ideas, emotions, and habits. For those of us who live in secular society, we likely have to liberate ourselves from our own ideas that make spiritual life seem “weird” or “hokey” or “strange”. We likely have to liberate ourselves from fear of judgement by other people. Our judgements also control us, just as our emotions and ideas do.
I will start to conclude this way - we live in a time of great anxiety. We are all constantly thinking about things not present within us. We are worried about finances, we are worried about a school test coming up, we are worried about talking to our boss, we are worried about wars, we are worried about politics, we are worried about what other people think of us… when we live this way, we are trapped by our own internal world.
What we can discover is that, by offering our obligations as a sort of sacrifice to something greater than ourselves, we can quiet these anxieties and even become liberated from them. Maybe you love sports but you’ve never really understood why all the athletes say something like, “I just wanna thank God for putting me in this position to be here.” Maybe this rubs you the wrong way because you think, “it’s not God that did that, you did that, you worked hard, you made it happen!”
Yet, if we understand that we are not free, that we are a branch on a tree, that we are a part of something greater than ourselves, then we are able to provide ourselves the grace to understand who we truly are meant to be and who gave us this opportunity. For me, the obligation to be a musician lived inside me just as strongly as the need to breath does. When I resisted this obligation (often as a result of self-doubt and anxiety), I did not feel free to be myself. Now that I no longer resist this obligation, I feel closer to myself and to whatever higher power there is - I don’t know where this obligation came from, but I know that I am grateful for it.
Every time I play music is in service to something greater than me. I can tell you that when I pick up a guitar and the worship is missing, I gain little joy from playing and I put it down. Every time I write, it is in service to something greater than me. When I begin write and it is not in such a state of worship, I close my laptop and I walk away. I used to get frustrated when I couldn’t get myself into this place of worship - but, now I know that if I complete my obligations in life, that this sacred feeling will return to me in no time (or, maybe, that I will return to it). When I don’t complete my obligations, my music and writing both feel emptier as a result.
You may hold ideas that it would feel very hokey or awkward or just weird to think of doing things as an act of worship. It may be helpful to know that in modern secular lingo, we have a name for this type of worship - it’s called being in “flow”. Like, I could watch Steph Curry play basketball every day because when that man enters his flow state, you can feel that he is playing with the Power of God on his fingertips.2
We achieve “flow” when we allow ourselves to be ourselves as we are. For me, this means creating space to write and play music. For Steph, it means hours working on his shot and his handle. Of course I’m going to practice music for hours and hours and hours - I’m going to play until my fingertips blister and crack. Of course Steph is going to hit the gym early and stay late - he’s going to work and work and work and work.
It was my karmic fate from the start to be a musician. To resist this would be to only create more karma for myself and for those around me. It appears from over here that it was Steph’s karmic fate to be a basketball player. It is a branch’s karmic fate to be a branch. When we liberate ourselves from both internal and external influences, we are able to see our own karma, our own obligations in this life, clearly. When see our obligations clearly, we see ourselves clearly. This is freedom - to be able to fully and completely be ourselves. When we can come to this place, we are more than glad to offer each moment to something greater than ourselves. For that is the price we pay for our freedom.
To finish, let’s return to an example I offered earlier. Let’s say someone walks up to you and they say something that makes you angry - in fact, beforehand, you were having a nice day, but, now, you are angry.
What if this person had no power over you? What would be different? Why would you get angry at them if they had no power over you? What would happen instead? Well, instead you would still be present, you would still be in control of yourself (as opposed to your anger). From this place, you would look at this other person and you might wonder why they did what they did. You might even notice that what they did makes sense.
Maybe it was someone at the grocery store who said something mean because you were in their way - if you are free to continue just being yourself, free from anger, you might notice that person is having a really bad day, they were controlled by their anger, and they were trying to transmit that anger to you.
This is to say and conclude that our personal liberation is the source of compassion within us. When we are truly free, outside influences do not control us. This means we are in a position to see things and to accept things as they are and this is the source of compassion. Karma Yoga is one path, of many, to get to this place. It is a place worth striving to get to.
Alright y’all - thanks for going on this one with me. Let me throw out some readings here at the bottom of this in case you either are a) intrigued enough or b) baffled enough or c) something-else enough by all this to learn more. These are books I’ve been reading over the past many months, among others:
The Bagavad Gita - Chapter 3 explicitly addresses karma yoga
Mishlei / The Book of Proverbs - Old Testament
Genesis - Old Testament
Be Here Now - Ram Dass
The Heart of Buddha’s Teachings - Thich Naht Hahn
The Fourth Way - P.D. Ouspensky
In Search of Being - G.I. Gurdjieff
Unless, of course, it is one of the willows in our front yard and the branch just becomes a root and continues to proliferate - let’s assume I am talking about other kinds of trees lol. The metaphor is not about willows.
I didn’t see a basketball analogy coming ha!