This stood out to me yesterday and has been on my mind since. Indeed Peter was correct when he named his journal, freedom is when there is nothing left to lose ie when ‘I’ have given up all of ‘me’ so that there is nothing left to protect or fight for. Waking up today this flavour that I experienced yesterday is still present, this quote from Geoffrey summarises it well :
Geoffrey: Feeling like a child (more precisely: naive) is different than acting like a child obviously.
Imagine Richard going to the supermarket and being completely amazed at the profusion of colors and shapes, at the potentiality of a cornucopia of delicious experiences, walking around the supermarket like a child looks at a butterfly hanging on a flower, on a sunny afternoon that seems to never end…
That last bit is particularly wonderful to me, it’s this sense of being ‘lost’ in this eternal moment. ‘Lost’ is a unusual word to use in the context I mean but it is not negative, it’s where ‘my’ frames of reference between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’ no longer apply, it’s a very wonderful thing to be ‘lost’ in this manner.
So the wide and wondrous path is an incremental freedom, of progressively having less and less to lose until ‘I’ am enticed enough to give up all of ‘me’. That is what caught my attention when contemplating Peter’s words, that indeed freedom is having nothing left to lose, which means that the way to an actual freedom is by ‘my’ extinction, that is the way.
It is quite a peculiar situation, to be looking at the door marked “extinction” and to be enticed to walk towards it, that this is what ‘I’ want. It’s been a very potent question to continually ask myself, what do ‘I’ still have left to loose? Whilst holding in mind the fact that it is precisely that which ‘I’ have to loose which is the reason for suffering.