The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 104 of 125
Always already free
It was late at night, and the young Adi Da wandered through the streets, intoxicated by what he had glimpsed: I saw that we are, at any moment, always and already free. I knew that I was not lacking anything I needed yet to find, nor had I ever been without such a thing. The problem was the seeking itself, which created and enforced contradiction, conflict, and absence within. Then the idea arose that I am always already free.2 [my italics] This is totally at odds with all traditional approaches to religion. Only Zen—Zen with its denial that any practice can ever be of any ultimate help—reflects the same intuition, that there is nothing you can do to find God because God is not an object that was ever separate from you in the first place. God is an understanding, not an experience. God is simply That Which Is. “Truth is always already the case,” as Adi Da tried to sum up his understanding in a phrase . . . Yet the paradox running through The Knee of Listening—as through Osho’s The Mystic Experience—is that the unchanging can only be revealed through change itself. “There’s nothing you can do about it,” as they put it in Zen with customary helpfulness, “but you can’t do nothing either.” Adi Da’s “prior sense of an absolutely unqualified reality” that ends all spiritual seeking can only be discovered by understanding the mechanics of seeking itself. As the old proverb has it, “If you want to find yourself, get lost.”