...liberation can only happen NOW, it may also take time
Tom Dietvorst
The freedom I’m pointing to isn’t about arriving at a permanent experience of feeling good all the time, nor is it fundamentally about ending any of those things that feel problematic or troubling. It’s ultimately about waking up to being the wholeness, the openness, that includes every experience. It is the end of needing life to be other than how it is. That doesn’t mean we can’t still address relative problems such as depression or addiction, but it’s the realization that everything is included in this ungraspable openness of being. In that sense, everything is perfect just as it is, even the relative imperfections. In the absolute sense, this freedom is never absent, even if it is unrecognized. But in the relative sense, it can certainly feel absent.
The only time waking up from a painful delusion can happen, and the only time an addiction or a compulsion can stop, is NOW. But when a delusion or an addiction stops NOW, that doesn’t mean it won’t pop back up again. And that’s why, paradoxically, although liberation can only happen NOW, it may also take time.