Liberation – Always Being, Always Becoming

On the anniversary of the emancipation of black slaves in the United States, Sensei Kodo and Sensei Kozan inquire into the meaning of freedom. For black people and many others in this country, freedom is not an event, but a continuous project. The work is never finished. Likewise, our personal liberation is never finished, we continuously practice it. And what is this liberation? For Kodo, “I think freedom is seeing reality as it is. Freedom is being in touch with what’s arising in the moment.” If life is a rainbow of unbounded color, we bind ourselves by drawing lines between colors, seeing only “blue”, “green”, or “red”. Our practice is not necessarily to stop making these distinctions, but to hold them lightly, seeing them for what they are so that we may begin to see others more clearly and compassionately. Sensei Kozan discusses the relative and absolute truths of freedom. On the one hand, we are always already free since “everything is everything”. However, when things appear as separate, everything around us can become binding. Kozan closes: “How do we live freedom, knowing that there’s no arriving, that these two truths will always be the stuff of the road we walk?”