A Leap of Faith Into Liberation.

 

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A Leap Into Liberation: Skeletons, Smoke, and Selfhood

Now that I’ve lost most of your attention, as I had lost my own over the past few weeks—I am once more stepping into the deep recesses of my unconscious, opening those hidden closets where the skeletons hide, where the secret of secrets lies dormant.

Yes, I dare to take this next step—and I challenge you to take it with me.

Let us leap into the unknown, over the precipice and into the abyss—not as an act of despair, but as a leap of faith, of liberation. Not suicide, but surrender. Not an ending, but the closing of one chapter and the opening of another.

You ask: Liberation from what?
I say: liberation from your conditioned thoughts and inherited patterns. From your addictions and attachments, your faded dreams that still flutter on flagpoles long forgotten. Liberation from arrogance, sloth, indulgence, apathy, and that subtle sense of superiority we wear like perfume. Liberation from the idea that we are our thoughts, our names, our past.

Liberation from the "I" itself.

From the moment we learn to say Ma, Dada, or whatever early word first emerges, our fate begins to calcify. Our parents take the lead, shaping our future. Then come the neighbors, uncles, aunties, and classmates, the teachers, and the postmen. The ice cream man chips in. They all leave their fingerprints on our psyche, helping us become a "wholesome entity." And still, the shaping goes on—through college, society, and endless “education,” until there's no more space left in our minds, just a cluttered attic of secondhand knowledge.

Then, one sunny Indian summer day, you're sitting quietly by the shore of Lake Michigan in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Lost in thought, you spot a dead lake trout—its flesh picked away, its bones bleached by the sun. The world halts. Time ceases. Even the ripples on the lake surface go still.

Epiphany.
Everything decays. Everything dies.
And knowing this is what causes suffering.

That’s the curse of being human—we think.
Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”
The Buddha replied centuries earlier, “So long as there is an ‘I’, life is suffering.”

Remove the ‘I’? Simple to say, hard to do.

Since the dawn of time, we’ve asked: how do I liberate myself from myself?
Even in Scripture, God tells Moses, “I Am That I Am.”
A declaration, a mystery.
A paradox.
A jealous God? Jealous of whom? Of what?

And thus began my journey—my estrangement from religious orthodoxy, my endless questioning, my yearning for a deeper truth. I followed religions, yes, but I never stopped asking. Eventually, I declared:
I am spiritual, not religious.

So now that I’ve glimpsed what I must liberate myself from, the next step is: how?

It’s taken me over forty years, and I’m still not sure I’m any closer. My compass spins. I head east and find myself facing west. I climb, only to fall. I surrender, only to cling again. A rollercoaster of awakenings, ego deaths, delusions, and occasional flashes of divine silence.

But I keep walking.
And with every utterance of the word "I", I know—at least more than ever—who it is I speak of.

Not a name. Not a past. Not even a body.
Just presence. Just witness. Just the breath of God passing through the hollow reed of this l

---

A Leap Into Liberation: Skeletons, Smoke, and Selfhood

Now that I’ve lost most of your attention—as I had lost my own over the past few weeks—I am once more stepping into the deep recesses of my unconscious, opening those hidden closets where the skeletons hide, where the secret of secrets lies dormant.

Yes, I dare to take this next step—and I challenge you to take it with me.

Let us leap into the unknown, over the precipice and into the abyss—not as an act of despair, but as a leap of faith, of liberation. Not suicide, but surrender. Not an ending, but the closing of one chapter and the opening of another.

You ask: Liberation from what?
I say: liberation from your conditioned thoughts and inherited patterns. From your addictions and attachments, your faded dreams that still flutter on flagpoles long forgotten. Liberation from arrogance, sloth, indulgence, apathy, and that subtle sense of superiority we wear like perfume. Liberation from the idea that we are our thoughts, our names, our past.

Liberation from the "I" itself.

From the moment we learn to say Ma, Dada, or whatever early word first emerges, our fate begins to calcify. Our parents take the lead, shaping our future. Then come the neighbors, uncles, aunties, and classmates, the teachers and the postmen. The ice cream man chips in. They all leave their fingerprints on our psyche, helping us become a "wholesome entity." And still, the shaping goes on—through college, society, and endless “education,” until there's no more space left in our minds, just a cluttered attic of secondhand knowledge.

Then, one sunny Indian summer day, you're sitting quietly by the shore of Lake Michigan in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Lost in thought, you spot a dead lake trout—its flesh picked away, its bones bleached by the sun. The world halts. Time ceases. Even the ripples on the lake surface go still.

Epiphany.
Everything decays. Everything dies.
And knowing this is what causes suffering.

That’s the curse of being human—we think.
Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.”
The Buddha replied centuries earlier, “So long as there is an ‘I’, life is suffering.”

Remove the ‘I’? Simple to say, hard to do.

Since the dawn of time, we’ve asked: how do I liberate myself from myself?
Even in Scripture, God tells Moses, “I Am That I Am.”
A declaration, a mystery.
A paradox.
A jealous God? Jealous of whom? Of what?

And thus began my journey—my estrangement from religious orthodoxy, my endless questioning, my yearning for a deeper truth. I followed religions, yes, but I never stopped asking. Eventually, I declared:
I am spiritual, not religious.

So now that I’ve glimpsed what I must liberate myself from, the next step is: how?

It’s taken me over forty years—and I’m still not sure I’m any closer. My compass spins. I head east and find myself facing west. I climb, only to fall. I surrender, only to cling again. A rollercoaster of awakenings, ego deaths, delusions, and occasional flashes of divine silence.

But I keep walking.
And with every utterance of the word "I", I know—at least more than ever—who it is I speak of.

Not a name. Not a past. Not even a body.
Just presence. Just witness. Just the breath of God passing through the hollow reed of this l

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