On Letting Go
Spirituality is always on some level or in some way related to letting go. In the materialistic society we live in we have little training in how to let go of anything.
“I have one car, but i sure could do with one more.”
“That’s an interesting shirt out there, i got to get that.”
We have come to consider ’more’ as better. People get to see you as being ‘cool’, having ‘arrived’ when you have more. Once we truly see how all of this traps us and keeps us from freedom, we should see the need to let it go. As Meister Eckhart said, “the spiritual life is more about subtraction than it is addition.”
Letting go is not quite like the spring cleaning of your wardrobe. It is but a spring, summer, autumn and winter cleaning of all the emotions we have been carrying with us over many moons. Emotions, we have suppressed and buried deep within us as the world kept throwing new ones at us. These untended emotions have caused great diseases in us. Yet, we are scared to face them, let alone talk about letting go. The pain of facing them outweighs the process of letting go.
Freedom is letting go of our need to control and manipulate God and others. It is letting go of our need to know, our need to be right and our need to be perfect all the time — which we only discover with maturity. We become ever more free as we let go of our three primary motivations: our need for power and control, our need for safety and security, and our need for affection and esteem.
This was a powerful realisation for me, a realisation that shifted something deep within me. Healthy spirituality leads us to true liberation by naming what’s real, what’s true, and what works — now and in the long run. This Ultimate Reality, the way things really work, is quite simply described as love. The wise ones recognize that without a certain degree of inner freedom, we cannot and will not truly love. Spirituality is about finding that freedom.
Most of us didn’t grow up thinking of religion as a path to freedom. Instead, we were taught a set of prescriptions, dos and don’ts, musts, and shoulds — against which we pushed back, like children always do. When we’re young, we think rebellion is the only path to freedom! Some amount of structure is important, but it is first-level growth. Far too much religion stays right there.
Authentic spirituality, as opposed to mere rebellion, is about finding true freedom. It offers us freedom from our smaller selves as a reference point for everything or anything. This is the necessary revolution wherein we change reference points. We discover that we are not the center of the universe any more than the Earth is. We no longer feel the need to place our own thoughts and feelings in the center of every conversation or difficulty.
Although we have to start with self at the center to build a necessary “ego structure,” we must then move beyond it. The big and full world does not circle around any one of us. Yet so many refuse to undergo this foundational enlightenment, which leaves them much less free than they want to be.