JEFFREY CARR
MOKSHA: A Spiritual Journey
The ancient Hindu way of spirituality suggests that there are four goals in life. The first is Kama, the desire for pleasure, happiness and joy. The second is Artha, the desire for prosperity, success and abundance. The third is Dharma, the need for meaning, morality and purpose. We need to meet all three of these goals to feel we have succeeded in life. But for some of us, this is not enough.
The most subtle and mysterious goal of all is for Moksha. Moksha means release, liberation from bondage. Moksha is our desire for spiritual freedom. This is the desire to be truly free. Freedom is something that we all want in one form or another. All of us want freedom from fear, oppression and want. That’s obvious. But how to escape the tyranny of being ourselves? Many of us feel bound by our negative and repetitive thoughts, doubts, anxieties, beliefs, fears – even our desires. We feel the restrictions of our routine expectations, conventions, and habits of mind. We seem to be in a cage, bound by mysterious forces that we can’t quite understand. We realize, sometimes with brilliant clarity, the depths of our ignorance and bondage.
We want transcendence -- a greater knowledge and awareness of who we are and what we are meant to be. What is our life about? Why were we born? Who are we and where are we going? All of us feel this occasionally -- some of us more constantly. It can become a pervasive anxiety in our lives: a hidden doubt, depression, or inability to get with the program. Some very few of us come to want freedom, release, Moksha. We sense that there is something more -- a life of infinitude – and we become sadhakas, seekers.
In the Indian and Buddhist traditions, spiritual practice is referred to as sadhana. Those who pursue it are sadhakas. Sadhana can be a quite specific set of procedures and practices, like a regimen of chanting, visualizations and prayers. It can also refer to spiritual practice in general. Sadhana is a journey, a search. The goal is spiritual liberation. To become liberated means to rediscover our true identities as beings already free, limitless, perfect. What we suffer from is ignorance – delusion. We seek to wake up. We want to wake to our true selves. We begin the search in this life, or perhaps we pick up a search begun many lifetimes ago, in various guises and cultures, within this or that religion, and studying with this or that teacher. This is the spiritual search. For genuine seekers, it becomes the only search.