Something I heard a few years ago stopped me in my tracks.
The ego would rather be right than be free.
It maintains itself through fear, resistance, belief systems, and identities.
We can learn a lot about suffering by looking at where we justify what we feel. Justification is how the mind preserves the belief that something outside of us is responsible for our suffering.
Probably the most relatable example is anger. It’s easy to justify our anger by blaming someone or something outside of us. By telling ourselves we were wronged.
They shouldn’t have said that.
They shouldn’t have cut me off.
They don’t care about anyone but themselves.
They never listen to me.
Things never go my way.
When we feel angry, the mind quickly builds a case for why we have every right to feel that way.
And sometimes, we are right. Someone may have acted carelessly. They may have lied or crossed a boundary.
But being right doesn’t necessarily make us free.
The ego even likes to share its justification with others. We try to get them on our side. To agree with us and support our ego’s justifications.
But it doesn’t make us free. It makes us feel righteous. It’s an attempt to make us feel better after we’ve been hurt. It gives us a false sense of power by making others wrong.
When we want to be right, the details are everything. We cling to what happened, what they did, and why we feel justified.
When we want to be free, the details don’t matter.
Not because nothing happened. But because we know that what happened isn’t what’s causing our suffering. Our attachment to the story is.
Much of psychology works within the content of the mind. It tries to understand what happened, why it happened, and why we feel the way we do. That can be helpful. But freedom is a different game. Freedom comes from seeing that the story is only a story and no longer believing it.
When we justify what we feel, we mitigate our responsibility. We give our power away to those we are blaming. We are subtly saying, “You have the power to manipulate my feelings.” But we can’t afford to give our power away to others when we want to be free.
These are the reasons I’m angry.
They made me feel this way.
It isn’t my fault.
As long as we believe something else is responsible for our inner experience, our freedom depends on it changing.
Justification blinds us to the opportunity of freedom. We begin to open up when we can see anger as a reaction to life bumping up against a belief—often unconscious—that we hold.
Freedom is beyond right and wrong.
Often, beneath the anger is something more vulnerable. Hurt. Fear. Shame. Rejection. Abandonment. The story and justification keep us at a safe distance from feeling it. But what we refuse to feel often continues to run us.
And as long as we refuse to feel life, we aren’t free.
Because getting free requires total ownership of how we relate and respond to what we feel. It doesn’t excuse or condone another’s behavior. But it releases us from the notion that we need things outside of us to be a certain way before we can feel OK.
Not self-blame, not being a victim of anything, just total ownership.
We taste freedom when we slow down enough to separate what happened from the story we are telling about it. When we allow ourselves to feel what is present without immediately blaming, suppressing, or reacting.
We may still need to speak up. We may still need to set a boundary. We may still decide to remove ourselves from a situation.
But now our response is no longer controlled by the wound.
Freedom isn’t found in proving that we are right.
It’s found in the willingness to drop the story altogether. No longer needing to protect ourselves from what we feel.
-Tim
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