Why do you want what you want, do you want what you want? Why do you find what you find? Why do you interpret what you feel the way you do, and also: how do you know it’s right?
As you read these questions, answers well up in your mind. reactions. Liber learns: give them space. Let what you think express itself, what you feel, make it feel. And be ‘only’ present for that. Experience it, question it if necessary, but find nothing about it, don’t want anything with it. Just like a sieve on sand reacts no differently than it does on salt.
What do you get from that? Liberation from an I-concept that is itself a legislator, executor and controller at the same time. And so by definition is at odds with itself. I want, I find, I feel, I desire? The Liber student starts to see: every sentence that starts with the word ‘I’ reduces my living space, unless… I learn to see with an uncovered eye who is saying it.
To this end, Liber teaches you to shift your energy. In order not to make the realization, but the most objective possible evaluation of what you want, feel and desire your main activity. The exercise: not to base your existential center of gravity in your thinking and feeling, but in your single awareness of them. Learning to become all receptive to what lives in you.
In concrete terms, you do this as follows: in ‘word clouds’ you write down what is happening inside you. As if you are the note-taker of your own feelings and thoughts. Then you read this back out loud without finding anything about it. You do this until the expressiveness of your word cloud starts to lose energy and you notice that the roles are starting to turn. That the highest word is no longer reserved for what you think and feel, but for your potential to be completely empty and receptive to it.
A power you didn’t know you had becomes new ground under your feet: your ability to be powerless, like ‘nothing’, for all the ‘something’ that stirs within you.
What happens next is as puzzling as it is fruitful. Invited to share unreservedly with your unconditional interest – your ‘nothing’ -, what you find, feel, want and desire – your ‘something’ – begins to cleanse and organize itself. Fear of being attacked by the unknown gives way to a desire to become acquainted with it. What is outdated can be replaced by what is relevant. Your thinking dares to evolve and harmonize with place and time.
Freed from a floating self-construction, you come to stand with both feet on the ground and you start to coincide with who you are and what you can do.
After which nothing but milk and honey are your portion?
Liber won’t kidnap you from your life, as if it were an illusion. And do not detach from your experience of life, as if it were not real. Sorrow remains sadness, joy remains joy. The big difference: they no longer control you. Freed from your identification with your interpretation of things, you learn to discern their meaning. Not what your ears want to hear, but what life has to tell you becomes your guide. Wishful thinking becomes coming home to the ratio of things, large and small.
Life is now becoming another word for engagement. Dissatisfaction gives way to the realization that they are as indispensable as they are desired. The question of encounters or events is no longer whether they serve your agenda, but how to unleash the fruit they carry within them.
You discover: life is not a must but a lover who wants to love me.
