Read time 4 minutes. Absolute Freedom is a stand alone article in our series regarding Acceptance.
Our last lesson on radical acceptance turned toward the subject of authentic experience. With it comes a freedom that cannot be manufactured by the ego. This entire series has been pointing us toward that realization, and guiding us along the way has been Charlotte Joko Beck. Let us return to her words and consider how relative freedom, lived authentically, opens the door to Absolute Freedom.
“What does it feel like to be freer of the need to control? What is our experience when it is not motivated by fear, anger and guilt? It’s terrifying because we have given up all illusion of control. And it’s glorious and wonderful to feel the freedom of a truly experienced human life.”
Absolute Freedom: Accepting uncertainty
Here Beck names the knife’s edge of practice—what it means to live without the illusion of control. On one side, terror. On the other, glory.
Control, after all, is a word that carries its own limits. To control is to regulate, to restrict, to confine. The ego takes up this task with the best of intentions, but it is not capable of what it claims. The result is a life driven by fear, anger, and guilt. We ask the ego to carry a burden it cannot carry, and we call that living.
Beck reframes the matter simply:
“Whatever choice we make, the outcome will provide us a lesson. If we are attentive and aware, we will learn what we need to do next. In this sense, there is no wrong decision. The minute we make a decision we are confronted with our next teacher.”
In this light, radical acceptance of what is does not paralyze us with indecision. It frees us from the obsession with right choices. The lesson is always here. The teacher is always here. The task is awareness.
Accepting what is
An authentic life grows lighter when we are not weighed down by overthinking or the burden of perfect outcomes. Presence is what matters—not what happens, but how we meet it. Right or wrong, good or bad—these are only relative afterthoughts.
Awakening is the priority. Life itself is the teacher.
“Even though we think of the goal as some future state to achieve, the real goal is always the life of this moment, this moment, this moment.”
The practice, then, is not about controlling events or achieving future perfection. It is about allowing the immediacy of now to reveal itself.
The knife’s edge of practice
Which brings us back to Beck’s line:
“It’s terrifying because we have given up all illusion of control. And it’s glorious and wonderful to feel the freedom of a truly experienced human life.”
This is the precipice, the edge of the cliff. Terrifying in its uncertainty, glorious in its freedom. The work is to jump—and to jump again, and again. Transformation is not one leap but a willingness to keep stepping off the edge, to return to presence in every moment.
“Once we see underneath all the thoughts we have covering up our experience, what does that feel like? That unknown place is where the practice is, not the endless analysis of our thoughts.”
In summary
Here is the thread: radical acceptance leads to authentic experience. Authentic experience opens to presence. Presence loosens the grip of ego and its imagined control. From there, awakening is revealed as freedom itself—freedom from the false self, freedom from illusion.
“Freedom is the name of the game. Freedom to be nothing.”
Explore more:
I have spoken a lot about paradoxes within these pages. Unsurprisingly, as Greg Bustin discusses in this article, there is a paradox that arises with the pursuit of freedom. “We must be willing to make tough choices in order to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves.” In our case, particularly early on, we must be willing to choose and prioritize peace and freedom. We must then be consistently willing to turn to the practice. This decision to choose relative freedom, again and again, is the cost that we must pay in order to realize Absolute Freedom in our lives.
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