Which Life Do You Live?
A question was asked about the conflict between occupation, making a living, generating resources that support the material aspect of living, the daily necessities, and a life dedicated to the exploration of inner freedom.
“Is there a conflict? And if there is a conflict, what is it?” (This is my reply.)
because often the question is the conflict.
It presents the wrong observation.
If it’s asked without careful examination, it carries with it the seeds of that conflict, with the assumptions that the question is based on.
So let’s break it.
What is occupation? What is making a living? What is life in freedom?
Occupation, you can see very clearly, is a state of mind.
You can be sitting in your room doing nothing, yet completely troubled and occupied in your mind, and you can find yourself in a flow of activity that is creative, natural, harmonious, and manifests the freedom itself, the joy of life.
You can see it.
So the occupation and the activity, there is no link between them.
There can be, but it’s not one thing.
Then “making a living”, obviously it’s a term, very twisted, you don’t make life.
But supporting the material necessities in life is very clear.
That too is a rainbow, a scale without end.
What is it that needs to be supported? For everyone it’s different. Often you see very rich people that feel and actually live in a state of constant debt, and relatively, I don’t know if poor people, but definitely people without resources that sustain their living humbly without lack.
There are edges, extremes, and the fear amplifies the extremes, but in life the measure of sustainable life in terms of resources is very subjective.
But let’s take it as a relative function that needs to be met. There needs to be some resources to support some level of materialistic sustainability in life.
So it’s not making a living. It’s meeting the resources-need to sustain life.
And then there is ‘inner freedom’, And you have to ask yourself why it seems that inner freedom requires time and effort to be met, to flower?
Why it’s in competition with any time allocation to something else which is not it?
Can there be a life that is guided, is flowing out of, is expressed as free creative flow?
Can this life manifest in activity the essence of freedom?
This is one question. It has nothing to do with money making, occupation, and all that.
And then there is the other question, can this life also provide the means to support the material need?
You need to ask the question, and as you ask the question, as it becomes very clear to you, you need to see what is your natural movement.
Don’t fake it, don’t force it.
If you are driven by fear, no matter how you call freedom and flow and life, the fear will always be the factor by which you make your choices.
And making a living will be the priority, creating revenues, resources, or any mean of sustaining the material need will be the priority from which you will hope one day to have the capacity within to approach the question of inner freedom.
To me this is a fact.
It took me many, many years to admit that fact, but it was always the fact.
The other fact that revealed itself in the last few years in my life is that free creative flow can only come to be to the extent that fear does not exist.
Not ‘controlled’, not ‘avoided’, ‘suppressed’, and all that; does not exist.
Where fear is, free creative flow is not.
As long as you have to choose between the two, fear is trying to make the choice. It’s always negotiation. It’s always a compromise.
When free creative flow, flower, expresses itself in your life, the question of choosing between that and anything else does not exist.
And then you start, for the first time in your life, to learn what is it, a life lived by itself.
You see the beauty of it, you see the quality of truth, and you see the immense activity that it comes with, it generates, it’s the most active thing, it’s life.
Then you are left with the question of resources supporting living, and I recommend you to admit the truth before you try to answer that question.
Because if fear put the choice in front of you, wrapped as a conflict, hidden under the notion of conflict, then to address the question of how to sustain life that are originated by free creative flow, it’s totally theoretical.
So it can never lead to a real answer.
And if you live a life, very active life, very – in a state of constant creative flow, that leads to this freshness, freedom, happiness, when that is the reality in your life, the question of resources will take care of itself, yes or no.
But that question has no force over you.
In fact, it becomes a beautiful thing to look at, because you learn the nature of that quality of freedom in reality, not in theory.
When you come upon that which is unconditional, and cannot be bought, cannot be bribed in the mind,
the more challenging it is, the more clear you see what is the quality of your free will.
In fact, you see that the free will is not yours. It’s prior to all your ideas about life.
2 responses to “Fear-Driven Occupation vs. Choiceless Flow”
It definitely is a good thing to ask oneself: Is my happiness conditioned, dependent on the advantages that’s been granted to me ?
It’s also a question which I think is good to leave on an echo for a while. And to see, what does this question bring into surface. Rather than immediately looking for an answer.
“And you have to ask yourself why it seems that inner freedom requires time and effort to be met, to flower?”
We’ve been conditioned to see improvement as a gradual process. We take this same principle to what we’d call ” inner freedom”. But in there, this gradual process by thought & time, really has no place at all.
Looking more closely into it, what caused this idea in the first place? Going back to the start of your post, ” often the question is the conflict. “. Same in other words; thought invented the conflict. We don’t see the danger of conditioning, as it partly is necessary and useful for navigating in the world, and partly because we’re identified with thought! As that’s our self-image. So it is very difficult for one to see all this, and remain with the underlying awareness, when all this is taking place. It’s reality for oneself.
Putting all into this into surface now, makes it evident that there is another ‘way’ of living.
Everything that has a beginning has an ending.
/ Thank you for this post. Infinitely valuable facts.
I wish people would hear more about these things. I also hope the message would then be conveyed in a nonauthoritarian manner, and in plain language.
I feel like the essential reason why people do not care about philosophy or meaningful conversation like this, is that we’ve forgotten how priceless communication is. It relies on shared understanding. Many have had enough of talking and listening, and do not see any importance in doing so.
Truly appreciate the time you took to look into it and the detailed sharing of your view.
As long as there is a reason (for Philosophy / conversation), it is the ideas that drive the flow.
A free creative flow, is unconditional, and knows not its “purpose”.
It is just flowing.