Lately I have been experiencing some strange stuff with regard to my views on relating to other people and existential freedom. For one thing I have been noticing how I have most of my spiritual practicing life held some ideas about how I should ideally relate to others. There has been this idea that I should find some way to be totally expressing myself without any embarrassment or awkwardness. I should be totally without any defensiveness or any deceptiveness.
Something that has been happening lately is that I see how every interaction I have ever taken and everything I have ever said has actually met these standards in a strange way. Like no matter how false and embarrassed and reserved and non-open I am, it is as though I am still fully expressing myself. Even if I am just quietly standing in the corner judging everyone who is being open while myself being un-open I am totally expressing my fear of being open. I am always totally open and innocent no matter what I do.
Also there have been some ideas falling away about making "awakening" or "freedom" happen. For one thing I am really without a clear idea about what awakening and freedom are, and for another the process itself seems to have totally stopped being in my control, at least in one sense. There is just this natural 'unraveling' of the cognitive/perceptual process i.e. beliefs and preconceptions and expectations. Something is seen through, slowly or quickly, and then there is an opening and some freedom. Then there is this inevitable grasping of the freedom as "mine" and a creation of a strategy and theory about how to maintain it, and then that grasping tires of itself and there is more freedom and so on.
All of this has been making me think about the notion of "innocence" and it has started to appear to me that I have always been unavoidably innocent in a sense. With this insight there is a sense of "wholeness" whether I am feeling depressed or fearful or joyful. Whether I am interacting with others in a way that lessens or improves my self-image.
As soon as I write this there is a sense of contraction that inevitably comes with my free stream of thoughts being hardened into some theory. I start being concerned with how people will see this and whether it is the right thing to be thinking and saying and what I should do about all of this to resolve it. Weird! When there is no attempt for resolution there is no contraction.
