Mayday 3: Choose Your Obligations

Yesterday I could literally feel the difference between supposing that existence is a task to be completed on time, versus existence as a game that we play for enjoyment. The former definitely felt to me like a burden. There seems to be added pressure. Even a degree of performance anxiety can be felt arising in just holding this notion that 'existence is a task... a job... a duty... that we aboslutely MUST fulfill... or else.

Or else what? Else we go to hell? Else we get sent back to the tail-end--the literal ass--of the Great Chain of Being. 'End of the line you loser, back to being a slug. Sorry, you failed... sucka!'

To me there is all sorts of added pressure placed upon us just in terms of what we perceive to be the fundamental direction and goal of existence. If it is a duty or a responsibility then we can fail. If we fail... then we can lose. If we lose... then we are somehow made lesser in some way, or we are deprived of something that we once had, but now have no longer. For example, maybe our eternal status is taken away. Maybe our soul is put on probation. Maybe we are burdened with increasing unconsciousness. Maybe we are reborn as Paris Hilton.


Your Duty Is

For those of us in the West, when we look at something like the Hindu caste system, where people are born into specific roles--roles that come with a social obligations and a set of prescribed duties--there often arises a sense of judgment as to how backwards and archaic that all is. I mean, how pre-modern is that! To not have the freedom to be and do as you choose. To not have autonomy.

Yet, when you look closely at our own lives you find that for all of the freedom we seem to have in the West to choose our own course and plot our own destiny according to the shape of our desires and dreams there is still this matter of our assuming some role or duty. In short, even in the West there is a conspiracy that asserts you must assume some sort of duty, i.e., that you have certain obligations that you must fulfill... (once again, or else!).

The only real difference, it seems to me, is that in the West you might seem to choose your obligations (to what or to whom) while in the caste system there is/was an inheritance of obligation.

What I am getting at is this: Is one really free if one only has the freedom to choose his or her obligations? Doesn't life still have the flavour of a task that must be performed? Doesn't existence still feel like a weight that must we carry to some destination (who knows where though)? Are we really free if the only difference is that we get to choose the cross we bear rather than being given that cross through genetic descent? is that freedom?


Behind The Mask Of Freedom

If we strip off the mask of apparent Western autonomy (though I acknowledge that autonomy is not strickly Western anymore) do we not find that there are still brutal burdens that reside beneath the surface of apparent liberation? Are we not still obliged socially and culturally? Do we still not find that there are rules and roles that we must fulfill (again, or else!)?

In many ways, one could say that the Western predicament I am describing here is worse in that it is hidden, concealed... much subtler a bondage. As people only see the slick surface of apparent choice there is little to no awareness brought to the question of how in our stepping free of a set of social obligations, in the guise of genetic descent, we have stepped into a whole new set of social obligations and roles. As The Who sing it in the song Won't Get Fooled Again:

Time for the new boss...
Same as the old boss...


Does Freedom Exist? 

I'd be willing to bet you that most people assume freedom exists in ways that are not actually practiced and embodied in the culture of which they are a part. In other words, people---especially in the West, and America specifically (as this is the culture I am most familiar with)--are not nearly as free as they think they are. In America you hear talk about freedom so much. It is pumped over the airwaves of talk radio and the TV news shows so much that you, like me, might begin to wonder how a free people would ever spend so much time talking about freedom. I am reminded of the opening lines of the Tao-te-Ching here... which I'll paraphrase for the purposes of our discussion here:

Those who speak of freedom
Don't really know freedom.

So the more you talk about freedom, does it mean the less you actually know freedom? Are the freedom-obsessed the least free? Does an obsession reveal a lack or deficit? Do we focus on freedom so much because it is a) slipping away, or b) non-existent in the ways we imagine it actually does exist?

To ask these sorts of questions is to ask, 'What freedom is?' What is real freedom? How would it look? Would we recognize it? Do we believe in the radical freedom and liberation put forth by the Saints, Sages, and Mystics of past, present, and future? Or do we only believe that freedom is relative, is conditional--only a part and not a whole?