Part I

A manifesto of that which calls for my attention to clear a path towards a full-body address…

What do I want? What do I need?

I need to know what I want, and I want to know what I need. My current circumstances are causing me a great deal of suffering, and I’m unsure how to proceed.

I know that ultimately I seek freedom; liberation from the colonized mind, liberation from daily regret, the freedom to curate my experience, and the freedom to live life through unconditional compassion. My highest goal is to align my inner world with my outer world, to reach a state of being where every decision and every action embodies love, kindness, and compassion.

I don’t know if financial, social, or political freedom truly exists in the real world; I suspect  we’ll always be forced to meet the demands of a capitalist society in one way or another. 

Regardless, I still find myself wanting to be free.

 

Free from unjust laws. 

Free from financial unrest. 

Free from expectations. 

Free to be myself.

Free from the self.

Free from pain and suffering. 

The truth is that desire is the root of all suffering. In a world where suffering seems to be an innate part of life, letting go of a desire for life to be a certain way  opens up the space to detach from expectations and come face-to-face with the colonized mind: the generational programming of trauma, memories, and experiences that shapes our perception and ultimately self-perpetuates suffering and our own complicity within the global suffering experience.

Meeting life’s challenges, gifts, and surprises without any expectations or prejudices seems to yield the only freedom that truly exists: inner, spiritual freedom; freedom from the colonized mind.

Unlike other forms of freedom, the paradox of spiritual freedom (liberation) is that it’s not something that can be sought or taken – it’s not something that can be desired. Spiritual freedom (liberation) already exists within us, and grasping for it will only distance us from it.

So what does that mean for me? How can my highest goal be a goal at all if it’s unattainable by nature?

Unfortunately, the English language falls short of what a goal means in this context, and I’m not sure if I can explain it any better in Spanish, for colonizers did not possess the vocabulary to explain the natural paradoxes which give meaning to our nature. Contradictions, ambiguity, and abstractions are threats to the colonized mind. 

Spiritual freedom (liberation) can be defined and attained by abstracting it into an undefinable, unattainable concept that flows like liquid and assumes the shape of whatever container it finds itself in. 

Spiritual freedom (liberation) is not a finish line nor is it a fixed destination.

If my goal was punctuation, it would be a space. The spaces between these words are given form and definition by the characters, punctuation, structure, silences, and other spaces around them. Liberation is to exist in the spaces between moments such that every subsequent word, phrase, and statement are deliberate actions, habits, and routines that flow from one to the other with intention and authenticity.

Sacrificing the term spiritual freedom (liberation) for non discriminatory freedom, it follows that freedom is a poem; a structure of elements whose meaning can only be understood through non-description. Poetry is felt just as freedom is felt.

Freedom therefore cannot be described, it can only be sensed. Whether freedom can be sensed for long periods of time or only during brief, fleeting moments of enlightenment is an irrelevant distinction since the perception of time only arises where there’s a concept of a finish line to be crossed.

Poetry free from meter.

Part II

If I can exist freely in this moment and every moment thereafter, then why am I still suffering? Why do I allow this deep sense of dissatisfaction to stand in the way of replacing my reality with another?

Being intellectually aware of freedom does not manifest liberation, because intellectualization arises from the colonized mind.

Intellectualizing my pain when it came time to make life-impacting decisions such as the decision to go to university, to study engineering, to accept an engineering position five hundred miles away from where I grew up – from the people who love me – made it such that fear was at the core of every choice I made, rendering it nearly impossible for me to escape the colonized mind. Attempting to “solve” my pain through carefully strategized investments only accumulated interest in the form of suffering. Maybe if I had chosen to embrace the pain of being a brown, queer, undocumented immigrant at an earlier age, I would’ve awoken sooner to the courage, self-love, and self-forgiveness that invisibly carried me through the adversity I faced as a young person. 

Regardless, time only exists in the colonized mind. Embracing the pain now is embracing the pain back then. I accept myself for who I am now and the decisions I have made in honor of a younger version of myself who didn’t feel empowered enough to live out their own dreams. By resigning myself to the events of the past, I offer forgiveness to anyone or anything that made me feel as though I had no control over my life. I offer forgiveness to my younger self for choosing survival despite the suffering inherent to surviving capitalism. 

In a lot of ways, I am still choosing survival by choosing to forgive; my heart can no longer bear the crushing weight of this shame. The corporate job that I thought would save me and my family’s social status and end our suffering has only prolonged it. I am not sure how much longer I can hold out.

The desperation has made me the same; has made me another.

Part III

I cannot continue to work a job whose business model relies on under-experienced, exploitable labor to handle an infinitely revolving door of  unrealistic deadlines. No amount of company-provided alcohol, validation, or fruit baskets will make up for the life sacrificed to long hours in the office or excuse the abuse and the brainwashing perpetuated in good faith by middle-management enforcers who are too entrenched in the rat race to realize they’re carrying out their own oppression.

My job is currently to participate in the infrastructure design of a jail. How did my life’s choices culminate into this? Was my karmic path so spiritually corrupt that I was inevitably to land in a role so far unaligned with my values?

I got into building design to work on data centers; I never envisioned myself working on the development of a corrections facility.

Perhaps I’m not so important that the trajectory of my company was the manifestation of a spiritual vendetta against me, but part of me can’t help but feel as though the universe had other plans for me than to work as an electrical engineer for the rest of my life.

Neitzche’s demon of eternal recurrence gives us the option to perceive our darkest moments as either existential curses or heavenly gifts bestowed with the blessings of change, detachment, and growth. There’s a timeline where I designed data centers for the rest of my life, fully aware of the dissatisfaction that lingered underneath the surface but comfortable enough to avoid the persistently nagging feeling that this isn’t what I want for my life. Instead, being forced to design a jail ironically revealed the spiritual prison I’ve been trapped in for the greater part of the last ten years. 

 

Realizing that I possess the key to my own cell is simultaneously the happiest and most painful moment of my life.

I learned back in 2021 that there is no coming to consciousness without pain during a crisis that introduced a lot of change into my life but no doubt made me a more conscious and aware person. I spent a lot of time hiding from the fear of the future’s potential at the expense of several people’s feelings. I selfishly believed that I had control over other people’s lives and their emotional well-being. Of course, the stories I told myself were always much more well-intentioned: I was mostly sparing people from unnecessary pain, but really I was only sparing myself from highly necessary pain that I was too afraid to experience and denying others their right to take responsibility for their own experience.

I learned to describe my experience in three different ways:

1. What you resist, persists.
2. Pain times resistance equals suffering.
3. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.
   
   

Awakening to the role that I played in resisting my own suffering, albeit incredibly painful, allowed me to reclaim my own agency over my emotional well-being and restored my right to choose my experience, a liberating feeling that goes beyond even the highest levels of pleasure or happiness. It also helped me understand all beings are inherently entitled to their own assertive right to choose how they relate to their perception, pain, and suffering. Our experience is uniquely ours, but mistaking our experiences as separate from each other is the illusion created by and for the colonized mind. To respect and celebrate our differences means to acknowledge our nature as human beings, the only cohesive experience we can rest a collective identity upon.

My awareness of the collective has slowly inflated over the past five years to a point where my sense of self sits uncomfortably at the edge of my perception, unable to settle into a position where it can amicably share space with everything else. The love and loss I’ve experienced in the last ten years have broken my heart open over and over to the pain, joy, discomfort, and pleasure of connection that I find myself unable to reseal it off to the collective experience. Viewing these connections and experiences as interdependencies reveals a vast network of causes and effects that transcend time and links us to our ancestors and descendents to remind us we are all one. As one, we are therefore responsible for our role in the one; we are responsible for taking care of our here and now.

And in the here and now, I am reified by a consciousness that expresses and experiences itself through me over and over and over with each passing moment, simulating a cycle of life within a cycle of life. What choice do I have but to surrender to it? Is it not happening whether I want it to or not?

Suffering alchemized into comfort; resignation alchemized into resistance.
     

Part IV

How will the next ten years follow the same cycle? How will the next ten years spiral into newness?

Identifying my values, philosophies, and spiritual alignments was not the hard part; envisioning how they actually translate into real-life circumstances is what I can’t wrap my head around sometimes. Selling off all of my possessions and joining a spiritual community sometimes feels like the only outcome that makes sense, the only way to live consistently with what I believe. Occasionally I have the urge to leave my home in New York and return to my parent’s home in Indiana without looking back, effectively leaving behind the life I’ve created as an independent adult. However, I know that neither option will satisfy the breath of experience I truly seek and would only serve as another escape from facing the terror of taking my life into my own hands.

The colonized mind resorts to destruction when conquest is no longer a viable option; a default destruction of my current life in order to create the illusion of a new self. Severing my ties to New York, to the friends I made here, to the places I’ve exchanged energies with, would be impossible, as their effects have already begun to ripple through time and space outside of anyone’s control. It would be unrealistic, dishonest, and irresponsible to deny the impact I’ve had on my surroundings and, equally, the impact my surroundings have had on me. I must therefore take care of them as they have taken care of me so many times in the past. 

Abundant gratitude and compassion for my New York experience inspires me to heal the parts of it which feel impaired, to approach change with slow, nurturing care.

The next ten years will likely be just as painful as the last ten years. Eradication of the colonized mind will be a violent act of love – a breaking of an inner world that leaves behind an empty crater in its place. And upon its killing, newness and the unpredictability of the future awaits alongside the tempting allure of sameness, habit, and convenience. Every situation becomes an opportunity to slowly and intentionally rebuild, redefine, and rebalance. 

My job and the way I generate income can no longer come at the expense of my emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. The next ten years must include a transition out of my current industry and job and into a role where I am happy and proud of the work I’m doing, where I feel connected to those around me and the world at large, and where I feel free and encouraged to question routine for the sake of growth. The way I make a living must feel in some way a service to others and an opportunity to leave the world a better place. The only wealth I care to obtain is inner wealth. I will constantly oscillate between being a student and being a teacher; experience, knowledge, and company will be what I generously share best with others. I will settle into a flow of detachment that renders comfort and convenience powerless over my own agency to live the life that I want to live.

With love and community as a new focal point of my life, the way I choose to make a living cannot exist separately from how I choose to relate to others. The cognitive dissonance that now comes from wanting to see my coworkers as real people but resisting sympathizing with them too deeply out of fear that they’ll be either hurt by my attitude towards our job or that somehow my vulnerability will hurt me is incompatible with the empathetic person I want to be. The colonized mind thrives on disassociation, and I will not live a double life: my values and beliefs at work must be consistent with my values and beliefs outside of work. 

Detaching myself from the idea that work and my personal life are two fully independent and separate worlds frees me from any rigid ideas about what a career should look like, how much money I should make, and how my daily life should be structured. There are no rules unless you believe there are. That doesn’t mean I don’t exist within certain modern systems such as rental housing or private healthcare, but every confrontation with modernity is an opportunity to make what I want of it. The freedom to calibrate my perception is the freedom to exist boundlessly.

My life will be filled with love and all its expressions: music, art, writing, reading, laughter, learning, nature, poetry, and connections. An active practice of love and joy reminds me to meet the impermanence of life with gratitude and reverence.

Relationships, platonic or romantic, will be free from expectations, codependency, and any semblance of possessiveness and instead shall be abundant with support, gratitude, and a listening attention. Any connection is the result of a random dice throw; how lucky am I to have gotten to know someone deeply? How lucky am I to accompany someone on their life journey? I offer my deepest gratitude to anyone willing to share their time and energy with me with zero expectation to receive anything in return.

My family is an ever-evolving pillar of support for me that I can allow myself to guide and be guided by. Here is an opportunity to shed my identity as the hero son of immigrants (despite being an immigrant myself) and restore myself as simply a son and a brother. I can let go of the unrealistic expectation that I am somehow responsible for my parent’s or my sister’s present and future wellbeing and embrace them for who they are so that they may also embrace me for who I am. I know that I cannot defeat the colonized mind alone, therefore I must allow myself to trust in the guidance of my elders and release the grasping need for isolationist independence. I will be there for others and allow others to be there for me.

To complete the reciprocal cycle of care, I commit to being there for myself. Someone once told me that you cannot pour from an empty cup, but that every passing moment is an opportunity to refill my own cup. Living mindfully in the present moment requires resignation to whatever is happening right now – the mindful skill to pause… 

Good things take time; liberation was never meant to happen overnight. 

Part V

The Dual Change; words by Sun Ra

Things change … 

There is always change in the air …….

But the change is different now 

From any ever felt before … 

The music is listening and waiting 

While sounding sounds of terrible silence .. 

Didn’t you hear the silence lately? 

Music is silence too …… 

They cannot stop the silence; 

They cannot compel the silence to cease ….. 

They do not know yet 

How loud the silence can become! 

There is always change in the air … 

But there is a different spirit in the wind .. 

A bold and daring soul from somewhere there: 

Somewhere out and yon! 

It is even beyond the time ….. 

Time is: 

……. Never-no-more …… 

Everything is space ……

. . . . . . .. It is the space of the dual change. 

The street is no longer a street …… 

It is the highway of the world. 

There is change in the air! 

Do you not hear the heavy silence there? 

It is the double space of dual change …… 

The spirit wind is in the air: 

It hovers above the street no longer there .. 

The street: A highway widened fare ……. 

The emergency decreed it thus ….. 

All at once, it was seen:

The road … the people ….. 

The wrong direction there . . . 

It is the right road …. 

They are going the wrong direction there! 

Some of the must turn and go the other way: 

The arrow points to pointlessness .. pointlessness. 

A two-way street affair….. 

An alter never-[no-]* more-again …… 

The people and the leaders walk hand in hand … 

They were on the right road all the time … 

But now there is no time . 

That is why they have to turn 

And walk the opposite-alter-way. 

They must go 

To the place of space 

For the celebration of the dual change.

This manifesto is equal parts a dictionary, a sextant, and a compass for navigating the nontime and nonspace of the next ten years.