What's It All About?

Notes from What’s It All About? - by Joan Tollifson

Waking up is:

• discovering how we do our suffering;
• being liberated from the idea of free will;
• the freedom to be as we are;
• the freedom for everything to be as it is.

This freedom seems paradoxical if we think about it.

Waking up isn’t over there, it’s here and now, always and already.

• Waking up is noticing, awaring, recognizing, seeing and seeing through habitual ways of reacting to pain and painful circumstances that only make them worse—i.e., discovering how we do our suffering. Waking up is also being liberated from the oppressive, guilt-and-blame-inducing illusion of being an autonomous person with free will who is (or should be) in control of our life.
• Waking up is the freedom to be as we are and for everything to be as it is—including our urges and attempts to change it.
• This is where it gets very paradoxical—but only if we think about it.
• the great paradox is that the path isn’t going somewhere else—it’s waking up to here and now, where we always already are—and the one who seems to be on the path is a movement of the whole, not a separate, autonomous entity

Added 2024-06-14.