Honoring the Path To Liberation in Modern Times
Addressing three key challenges on the journey to alleviate suffering and embrace love
In most Eastern ancient philosophies of spirituality, the path to liberation stems beyond simply the freedom from suffering caused by one’s external circumstances. Instead, the dharmic, or true, path to liberation is the journey to freeing ourselves from the suffering caused in the mind and the body. That path is an internal path and is often fraught with a lot of challenges sustained by the structures in our modern society.
Instead of nurturing a path towards self-liberation and love, that can be shared with others; we are socialized to prioritize external validation and material acquisition. We are taught to prioritize a linear path to achievement, entrapping us on a hamster wheel of restricted thoughts and emotions, with little consideration beyond our next goal.
Ultimately, following the “modern path” can lead to a sense of emptiness, leaving us unfamiliar with our true selves and lacking self-love. This, in turn, hinders our ability to authentically create connections with others, depriving us of the compassion and love we all need, to be able to free ourselves from our own internal suffering.
Many may never realize the dharmic path, finding its challenges overwhelming. It’s crucial to acknowledge and honor these difficulties. However, within every challenge lies a solution, providing a means to break free and discover internal freedom from suffering.
Becoming a better person to oneself, not only fosters personal growth but also extends to others, inspiring them to embark on a similar journey. Such collective efforts contribute to alleviating our collective suffering and enhancing the overall frequency of the world towards more love.
Adaptive solutions to confront modern challenges on the path
Challenge #1: This journey is fraught with solitude and confusion
In our capitalistic society, there is less of an emphasis on tending to and finding peace within ourselves, as it is not inherently aligned with the greater political or economic interests of the elite class. Frankly, it would be very difficult for the elite to maintain systems of oppression and control if everyone found solace in themselves and not in arbitrary things that keep them compliant and obedient to the pursuit of external happiness.
Therefore, it is in the elite classes’ best interest to keep people striving for a limited set of “values” to divert their attention from the reality that their minds, bodies, and souls are being controlled by forces outside of themselves; with little to no autonomy.
Once a person realizes that this is happening, the path to liberation begins. However, upon realizing that external circumstances are beyond one’s limited control; the journey starts to deviate into the unfamiliar.
We are conditioned to expect immediate rewards for commitment in paths like career advancement or financial growth. However, the journey towards internal liberation may unfold over years before manifesting its unique “rewards.” In the meantime, one could lose relationships, jobs, or all that they know to be of value in their external world because their attachments no longer align and are actually contributing to their suffering. What may have been enjoyable distractions and indulgences may no longer be, which can lead to confusion, perhaps disillusionment, and loneliness.
Solution: Embrace the crumbling
Usually, when this work starts, it begins with feelings of disillusionment, where the external world isn’t reflecting the happiness, love, and peace that one thought they would have or would like to have. Therefore, the external world already isn’t aligned. If things, people, and places fall away it’s because they are supposed to, in order to make room for what is.
The path to liberation is about finding a path to inner peace, harmony, and love. What does not reflect those virtues in the external, will naturally have to leave. Clinging onto the familiar isn’t necessarily what will support inner growth.
Albert Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” Walking the path to liberation requires a different set of values, i.e. behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, that will naturally create new outcomes in the external world. Sometimes this will lead to better results, sometimes it will not. One has to keep sticking to the path to find what aligns best with them that relieves them of their suffering.
This means achieving alignment with one’s highest good may involve a prolonged and challenging waiting period, often feeling endless and more grueling and lonely than persisting with the familiar but unsatisfying aspects of life. But, it is truly worth it.
Unfortunately and often challengingly, one must embrace the period of confusion and rapid change to eventually find the external circumstances that can reflect one’s own internal light. This is a continuous journey of growth and the most aligned things do eventually come.
Challenge 2: Polarity begets more suffering
In the Western world, we are often taught the world is binary. When one side has been determined to be good, the other side is evil, which can inherently make it harder to honor all parts of one’s suffering, and oneself, more generally.
We all have a shadow side. The Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung defines the shadow as: “[an]unconscious mind composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings.” Our shadow side can be the crux of a lot of our suffering especially when we reject it.
Through binary ways of looking at our own lives, we are often taught to reject our “bad” traits and hide them from others and ourselves. Suppressing these aspects only intensifies suffering.
Solution: By embracing all facets of ourselves, we alleviate suffering and foster more love.
“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” Carl Jung
We are whole people with various traits that fall somewhere on the spectrum of good and bad. Embracing and being honest with all parts of ourselves, allows us to unpack our suffering. We start to address where each of those traits may derive from and either work to improve upon ourselves or accept where we are. This process alleviates suffering by fostering honest self-reflection and enabling more compassion, kindness, and care in our individual lives.
We begin to show up in spaces with others where we are simply being our true selves instead of projecting false narratives; which therefore drives us to project this “ideal” onto others. This shifts us away from a mindset of love. Instead, we clash with our environments, perpetuating more hate and division in our external worlds.
When we eliminate the tendency to hide, reject, or perpetuate shame, guilt, or ignorance of our shadows, we can foster genuine self-love and extend our capacity to love others in the same way.
Challenge 3: Our society favors a linear, outcome-focused roadmap for success.
Our current societal structures typically follow specific, sequential markers for “success”. At the heart of capitalism, it encourages production and consumption and follows that pattern consistently. We, as members of this society, are meant to follow similar linear patterns toward achievement.
Even in Christianity, the prevailing and favored spiritual philosophy in the Western world, a similar linear narrative persists. The general belief is that if a person engages in good deeds, they are rewarded by entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Linear paths to “success” stifle expansion and cause more suffering. They set a person up to be at the mercy of an external set of rules and values that may not align with their own. If they fail to follow the external linear path to achievement, they are vulnerable to punishment, further justifying their scarcity of resources.
In addition, a linear path can cause a person to assume that once they reach a certain peak, their suffering will be abolished. It is limiting because it does not allow a person to understand their suffering and have compassion for it, in order to grow from it. Instead, it encourages a mindset that in order to replace feelings of disillusionment or unhappiness, one must continuously seek the consumption of external things. But as The Beatles eloquently expressed, “Money can’t buy me love.”
Solution: Cycles are a part of this work, acknowledging the reoccurrence of suffering is crucial to ending it.
The path to liberation does follow several ancient well-defined cyclical blueprints to achieving moksha, or liberation. One which is aptly articulated by Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.
According to the Four Noble Truths, it follows that the path to liberation is the acknowledgment of suffering, a cause to suffering, an end to suffering, and the truth that one’s path leads to the end of suffering.
It follows that in order to commit to this path, one must take the steps of the Noble Eightfold Path which is a set of actions, behaviors, and mindset that reflect wisdom, purity, and mindfulness to alleviate suffering. There is a similar blueprint in Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga, which can help guide a person to live a meaningful and purposeful life, limiting the harm in their lives and the spread to others.
Ancient Indian, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism philosophies acknowledge that this path isn’t linear, but follows the concept of reincarnation or samsara. Samsara refers to the cycles, or a process for the soul, the spiritual essence of a human, to release its karma, or past deeds, in order to alleviate suffering on the path to dharma.
Acknowledging the cyclical nature of our lives, and mainly the reoccurrence of our suffering, we come to expect it and therefore address it, in order to release it. Through this approach, we also have more autonomy to devise our own cyclical process for overcoming suffering, aligning to our individual standards that best serve us, rather than conforming to the expectations of others that ultimately lead us to disappointment.
Disclaimer: In this blog post, I mainly focus my perspective on the Western world as that is where I have been socialized and most familiar with. However, I imagine some of the points raised are global in nature.
