Prisons of the Spirit

Prisons of the Spirit — Set Yourself Free Series

This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Set Your­self Free


Pris­ons of the Spir­it — we are bound both by the pull of our indi­vid­ual voca­tion and by how we stop our­selves. A word about let­ting go.

An excel­lent guide to life and liv­ing.
Learn to focus your atten­tion of who you real­ly are.


One of the places we can get stuck here is by thinking of the spirit or the soul is being some otherworldly gift.

Being a Zen guy, I don’t actu­al­ly believe in such a thing as a soul. I’m not sure what to call the “cen­tre of self,” and real­ly, such lan­guage is quite weighted.

I do, how­ev­er, think that there is some inher­ent , innate capa­bil­i­ty in human beings – some­thing that brings out the best in us. Per­haps we could describe this as our “bet­ter natures.”

In Zen, we would call this Buddha nature

This unpacks as the core abilty of every human — to recog­nise his / her Bud­dha nature. This nature is:

  1. com­plete­ly present — awake
  2. free from attachments
  3. feee from karma
  4. free from sam­sara (the cycle of life, death, rebirth)

I think this basically means that being fully alive is possible for everyone, and being alive looks like a calm, centered state of walking one’s path, without drama or complaint.

My sense is that there is an inter­nal, strong, some­times over­whelm­ing pull in a “pos­i­tive” direc­tion. Of course, what I mean by “pos­i­tive” and what you mean by “pos­i­tive” is like­ly two dif­fer­ent things.

The thing is, I don’t want to get into any kind of dis­cus­sion about whether this pull comes from some celes­tial being, or is just hard­wired into our DNA. Need­less to say, I vote for the lat­ter option, but what­ev­er you think is fine by me.


I’ve often described voca­tion as a pull, a force some­where between a nudge and a drag. Once you start think­ing voca­tion­al­ly, it becomes pret­ty obvi­ous to you what you are pulled to be or to do. This sense, this pull, is intense­ly personal.

Spirits in chains

It seems to me that there are sev­er­al spir­i­tu­al pris­ons — and they all seem to have to do with whether we are will­ing to let go of our need to pick at, resist, or get agree­ment (per­mis­sion) for what­ev­er we are being nudged to do.

We get spir­i­tu­al­ly locked up when we, rather than sim­ply deal­ing with the urge, beat it to death either through inat­ten­tion, overem­pha­sis, or through wacky demands for proof or assur­ance of success.

This cre­ates a dis­so­nance – we can feel the pull, and we then get caught in mind games. We refuse to unlock our­selves to live our pas­sion — to live out of what Taoists call the heart-mind. This dis­so­nance is “fight­ing against our bet­ter natures.”

What does “better” mean?

I start­ed putting the word in quotes sim­ply because I have no sense of what “bet­ter” means. When peo­ple use qual­i­fiers like that, I will often ask, “Bet­ter com­pared to what?” I do this know­ing that some­times I’ve opened the door for quite the conversation.

One direc­tion this can go is for the per­son to point to a list sup­pos­ed­ly cre­at­ed or writ­ten down by some­one out­side of them­selves — a reli­gious text,” God,” their guru, or some myth­i­cal fig­ure. Fun­da­men­tal­ists of all stripes have amaz­ing­ly long lists of “goods and bads.” Or, take Trump. No. Really. 

Great are the num­ber of reli­gious wars that con­tin­ue to be fought over dif­fer­ing lists.

The rea­son that this is a prison is that an argu­ment about “good, bet­ter, best” has noth­ing at all to do with actu­al­ly doing some­thing. It’s a diver­sion. So long as I can point my fin­ger at anoth­er and declare him wrong, I am off the hook, and get to be bla­tant­ly, emphat­i­cal­ly, self-righteous.

Skipping this prison — by taking responsibility for living out your vocation — is the mark of wisdom.

Trust­ing your “bet­ter nature” takes immense courage. You’re basi­cal­ly let­ting it all hang out, with­out any ref­er­ence to any exter­nal per­mis­sion or per­son. You’re the source of your own per­mis­sion.

This irks the hell out of judge­men­tal peo­ple; it is real­ly annoy­ing to peo­ple who are stuck in inac­tiv­i­ty. They know they ought to be get­ting on with their own lives, they see you get­ting on with yours, and they try to get you to cut it out.

Opening the prison of the spirit means standing on your own 2 feet

skater
Skate to your own music


There is no ques­tion that your mind and your body might just get involved in slow­ing you down.

  • Your mind has been con­di­tioned to seek approval, to be on the “right” side, and doing what you are drawn to do, oth­ers will tell you, is just plain self­ish. Your mind fears such criticism.
  • Your body will ini­tial­ly tight­en down, your breath­ing will get fun­ny, and you’re just going to feel uncom­fort­able. This is con­di­tioned — it goes back to our child­hood. We learned to make our­selves uncom­fort­able when oth­ers around us were uncomfortable.

So, ever again, you get practice watching yourself — watching your mind, watching your body — as you attempt to shut yourself down. Then you have a breath, take a step, and do what needs to be done.

You have to trust yourself enough to believe that if it makes sense to you, it makes sense.

The eas­i­est way to do this is to keep your eyes, ears, and mind focused on the here and now. Right here, right now, all there is, is the next step.

There’s no,” I won­der how this will play in Cincinnati?” 

And because your focus is on the next step, cor­rec­tions are easy. There’s no way to get ahead of yourself.

Real­ly work hard at get­ting a sense of what pulls you. Rec­og­nize that you are going to resist what pulls you, human nature being what it is. Rec­og­nize that there’s no way to deter­mine in advance the “good, bet­ter, best-ness” of what pulls you. You can’t real­ly get a con­sen­sus, and even if you did, it’s still going to come down to you doing your thing and get­ting it done.

So, rather than mak­ing a song and dance out of it, calm your mind, relax your body, and ask your­self, “What is the next step in the direc­tion I’m choos­ing to go?”

Then, step.


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