Retreat is Freedom

By Venerable Sumati Marut

Solitary walk
To equate retreat with freedom might seem a bit counterintuitive. It could appear that cutting oneself off from communication with the world, while locked up alone in a cabin for long periods of time – well, isn’t that the opposite of freedom?

First of all, going into retreat and remaining isolated and incommunicado is a voluntary act. Plus, it is an exercise of great willpower, a gesture of rebellion and liberation. By intentionally freeing oneself from the compulsion to be constantly busy, entertained, informed, and interacting with others, one is truly resisting the powers that be. In this day and age, to unplug and retreat, even for a little while, is a revolutionary and heretical act.

It is in retreat that one becomes truly free from external obligations and obsessions – free not only from the continuous data downloads, ceaseless communication, and incessant chit-chat, but also from our normal routines, patterns, and habits. We step off the merry-go-round of conventional life and enter into a sacred time. In retreat, every day is the Sabbath, every day a holiday/holy day.

But when one actually takes this emancipatory step, one quickly finds out how scary freedom is and how much we fight against it. There is a kind of security in the prisons of our own making. When the jailhouse door opens, we discover the extent and depth of what we could call liberphobia – the fear of freedom.

This apprehensiveness, I suggest, is the reason many people find the whole idea of silent, solitary retreat so abhorrent. “What would I do? I’d be so bored!” Most people ordinarily have only infrequent brushes of liberphobia, perhaps when on vacation or during periods of unemployment. At the first signs of its symptoms, most folks take swift measures to treat the disease. They get very busy with various activities – touring or shopping while on vacation, or puttering on projects around the house when without a job – all to avoid the dreaded abyss of having nothing that needs doing. Better to kill time doing pretty much anything rather than to have too much time on one’s hands.

In retreat, we unavoidably come face-to-face with how determined we are not to be free.  We encounter our attachments and realize, perhaps for the first time, how strong they really are. When we are alone we find out how much we miss family and friends; when we are quiet we discover that we long for music and TV and movies; when we are uncommunicative we recognize that we are indeed addicted to email, Facebook, text messages and phone calls.

It is precisely these attachments that keep us in bondage and in suffering. The Buddha identified upadana (“attachment” or “clinging”) as a critical component of the twelve links of dependent origination. It follows “craving” or “thirst” (tirshna) and leads to “becoming” (bhava) or the formation of new karmic tendencies, which in turn induces rebirth. The word upadana can also mean “fuel,” and it is indeed these very attachments that propel us into more unhappiness. Because of craving, we cling to the objects of desire, and this very grasping is the fuel for more of the same imprisonment and lack of freedom.

According to the Abhidharma texts, attachment or upadana comes in four flavors, all of which can be easily recognized while in retreat:

• The first is the general clinging to pleasurable sensual experiences and objects of desire (kama). This is the most obvious and easily recognized of our attachments. It’s behind the longing we have when in seclusion for everything from pleasant interpersonal relationships to entertainment, from rewarding work in a career to fancy food, from going to the beach to shopping, etc.

• The second kind of clinging is more deep-seated and complex. It’s called the attachment to a belief in a truly existing entity called a “self” or “soul” (atma-vada).  In long-term retreat, we discover the true strength of this one. In our ordinary lives, we create the illusion of an independent, unitary, and unchanging self through identification with our jobs, our relationships, our possessions and our hobbies. But in retreat, the props that support one’s persona are all deliberately kicked away. In retreat, we become nobody – and we find out how hard it is not to be somebody.
• Clinging to viewpoints or theories (dirshti) is the third type of  upadana. Most commentators interpret this as the attachment to wrong views, like the belief in self-existence or the view that insists there is no such thing as karma and rebirth. But in the wisdom literature of Buddhism, it is clear that the Buddha and his greatest interpreters warned against attachment to any view, any philosophical doctrine. Arya Nagarjuna, for example, says, “Emptiness has been taught by the Conqueror as the refutation of all viewpoints (dirshti). Those for whom emptiness is a viewpoint are said to be hopeless.” (Mulamadhyamakakarika 13.8)

Dogmatic viewpoints, opinions, philosophical positions and the sectarian identities they create – all of these exist only in relation to others. We hold our views and construct our identities only in opposition and by way of comparison. When there’s no one else around to define and contrast oneself against, one is left with the freedom to be anyone, to believe anything, to propound freely, without social or political consequence, any kind of “unorthodox” viewpoint – all in a vacuum of complete independence. Once again, one finds such freedom to be both unfamiliar and disturbing.

• Finally, the last of the four great types of attachment is identified as the clinging to moral strictures (shila) and religious practices (vrata). It is so great that in the religious texts of Buddhism themselves we are warned: Don’t get attached to Buddhism! The clinging to religion to protect and bolster our ego and our sense of superiority over others is just another attachment, and a particularly virulent one. As the Buddha said, "The Dharma is just a raft that must be discarded when it has served its purpose". The culmination of the quest for freedom is liberation from the very religious discipline and practice that brought us freedom from other fetters.

I believe this fourth attachment is the strongest for a serious practitioner. Our teachers know that our liberphobia extends to fear of freedom from the religious rules and regulations. This is why the novice retreatant is put on a tight schedule with plenty to do: four meditation sessions, sadhanas to recite, thousands of mantras to keep track of, altars to maintain. The lamas know that most of us are really not ready (or we think we’re not ready) for true freedom; we need (or think we need) more training and development. Faced with hours, days, weeks – or even months and years – with no job to go to, no relationships to maintain, and no media distractions, the retreatant adheres to the regimen in order to avoid immersion into the liberty we actually do have in retreat – the freedom of being totally unsupervised and having nothing that we must do.  

Relaxing at dusk at a retreat centerThe real point of a spiritual practice is to come face-to-face with liberphobia and learn how to let go of all attachments. In a retreat setting, we have an excellent opportunity to do this. We have a chance to preview our objective, to truly take the goal as a path. Because retreat is freedom – an exercise and experiment in liberation – we can use the time to confront, and to struggle with, our resistance and reluctance to relinquish the chains that bind us, in all the many guises those chains can assume.