In any conscious experience, true freedom is the ability to get in, engage, and get out. It is the ability to get the golden fleece: the truth, beauty, and divinity of the situation. We can get stuck at any one of the three points.
As we enter, our judgments or preconceptions may be too coarse to allow us to make it all the way through. We may be stuck spinning, caught up in our initial impressions, thinking we know something when in fact the only things we know are our own concepts. We know we have entered when we are a bit humbled or surprised, when there is an experience of “I never would have guessed” or “I had no idea” or “This is not what I thought it would be.” Things as they are always dissolve concepts. If we are not humbled, it is quite likely we are filtering perception to only take in information that supports our existing ideas. We are outside of the fullness of the experience itself.
The next level, engagement, requires a complete give-and-take with the experience. It requires we take on the experience as wholly and completely true and valuable. A knowing without a protective lens or filter. Allowing any existing ideas to be moved out and replaced. And a whole offering of ourselves and our ideas about how things should go over to the experience so it can change us. With this offering we can know what it is and how it operates, not as a distant observer but as an insider. We learn its language by speaking it, we learn how it moves by walking it. We fully inhabit it as true until we are living it. If we are not somewhat in love with it, whatever it is, we have not inhabited it. For inside of each phenomenon is love.
How do we know it is time then to get out? When we do not want to. To be clear, getting out is neither rejecting nor closing a door, nor is it refusing to ever return or making big dramatic exits. Those actions are in fact a way to remove our body while staying entrenched in an experience. This type of getting out is an act of reverence. In fact, if we do not feel a sense of reverence, even gratitude, it is not getting out. That is the golden fleece of each experience, along with the specific concentration of unique information that each world, be it person or faith or system, holds.
We get out the moment there are diminishing returns—when the next moment will be less vivid and concentrated than the last. Getting out should have a joyous aspect to it, like the moment we come up for a breath after a good swim. If we feel sentimentality, we stayed in too long. If we feel anything but love for the experience, we did not stay in long enough.