What Is Liberation?
When people search for enlightenment, they are very rarely interested in finding truth for its own sake. What they are almost always looking for, consciously or unconsciously, is relief from pain and suffering. But, aside from the pain of any physical ailment or disability, most of their pain is spectral and unnecessary and arises from false identifications. Relief from that kind of pain is called Liberation. Liberation, of course, means freedom. Although it is often referred to interchangeably with enlightenment, it is mainly an aftermath, a separate process of gradual release from the many kinds of social and personal conditioning and identifications that build up over a lifetime and that act as forms of resistance to the natural ease and flow of consciousness. The understanding which is called Enlightenment acts like a yeast, deepening release. But Enlightenment is not deepened; liberation is. It is a process of the mind learning to trust and relax and get out of its own way. It is
