This generation has the greatest amount of social freedom—more than any generation in the past. But this generation hasn’t yet figured out how to use this freedom for real liberation. Identities of gender, culture, religion, economics, etc. have opened up since the 1960s, but people don’t yet know what to make of this tremendous amount of freedom—In fact, they may even be afraid of it. People don’t seem to have a confidence and comfort in freedom from limited identities; instead they avoid a sense of possibility and immerse themselves in distractions.

Here is a place where the Buddha meets the contemporary mind, with the goal of finding the greatest amount of real freedom. But what is freedom? How do we free ourselves? What does freedom feel like?

So, what does freedom feel like? A sense of infinite possibilities. And every time your mind dwells on something or attaches to something, you collapse the infinite potential by tying up and limiting your conscious awareness with something. From spaciousness, conscious awareness can collapse onto an object of desire. Freedom is conscious awareness that has not been limited to one focus. Freedom exists in the degree to which conscious awareness has that spaciousness. Freedom is conscious awareness unattached.

So, what are some of the other ways we lose this freedom of mind? One way is through the various kinds of determinism that we are taught: that our conscious awareness is determined by culture, gender, biology, and so forth. In fact, we have very little reinforcement for our potential for real freedom. We give ourselves over to these determinisms or ideologies and we lose the place that conscious awareness could see freedom and pay attention to what’s actually happening. We are unable to watch the mind and see the emotions and thoughts that arise as a causal process within ourselves, without interpretation. Instead we overlay it with social structures of interpretation.

To give power to anything outside of conscious awareness, for example through determinism, avoids responsibility and lets society control you. The moment of determinism is when truth is given to a theory, which avoids responsibility for every choice or action taken. Absolute freedom requires absolute responsibility. If you have given any aspect of your conscious awareness over to some other theory or structure, you’ve lost exactly that amount of freedom. Your karma is your responsibility. Any place that you do not take full responsibility you cannot have freedom. To have a sense of your conscious awareness without these overlays is not easy. But it is right here you need to apply effort to get truly free.

Good and Wise Friends, if you can cultivate a mind that does not cling to anything inside or outside, and comes and goes freely, such a mind that can get rid of all grasping gains unhindered understanding.

We lack confidence in the conscious awareness that has freed itself. And modern “fun” often consists of alleviating the anxiety from the lack of confidence in our own nature. Fun covers up our doubts, which really comes from a deep fear. In some ways we are afraid of the limitless freedom that we actually have.

How do we experience ourselves all the time? Does our conscious awareness have the space to settle and reflect? Are we comfortable in it, or do we look for distractions? Here is a marker. Can we simply exist within our conscious awareness in solitude for extended periods of time? If we can, then we will relate to people much differently. We would not relate to them from a place of “lacking” or “neediness.”

In fact, from this place of solitude, we can truly listen and care for others. We would stop letting our needs and desires impinge and create projections onto others. Solitude is not being not social, but re-entering the social without projecting onto others and having someone share your projections.

There is only one reason for my lack of freedom—me. I have bought into a whole bunch of theories about the way things are.

The natural state is that human nature is good, whole, complete, not missing anything, not sinful. The contented state of solitude is already there if we could just relax. In fact, we do not have to work at all to realize it. We have to work really hard to avoid it.

We have to put effort into our confusions. We are attached and invested in our own stupidity. Wherever we attach to a story about ourselves, we are limited by that story. Our completely free conscious awareness now has a small, narrow narrative through which it interprets the world.

There is a way out, a way to escape from the confusions we have created for ourselves, and that is by observing how our minds move and not attaching. If we do not attach, then we have that much more freedom. One less habitual thought has power over our freedom of mind. Every time the mind moves, we reinforce habit. If we do not return to the mind ground, there is nothing to rely on.