Rethinking Liberation: From Escape to Responsibility

We usually begin with a familiar frame: samsara is something to escape.

Life is marked by confusion, reactivity, and suffering, and the job of the practitioner is to get out. Liberation is often imagined as a destination somewhere beyond this condition, maybe even beyond this lifetime. Motivation becomes future-oriented. How do I free myself from this cycle? How do I secure a better rebirth? How do I avoid falling back into suffering?

That frame works. It is not wrong.

But it is not the only frame the Buddhist tradition offers.

Tantra and Dzogchen quietly turn the picture inside out. They do not deny samsara, but they relocate the problem.

The issue is not that phenomena are flawed or impure. The issue is recognition. When awareness does not recognize itself, it becomes trapped in its own display. That misrecognition is what we experience as samsara.

The “machine” of suffering is not the world. It is the habitual patterns, karma, and negative mental states that arise when awareness forgets its own nature.

From this perspective, liberation is not an escape from life. It is freedom from being caught up in the machinations of confusion.

And that changes everything.

If freedom and openness are the natural condition, awakening is not an exit strategy. It is a shift in posture.

The same world appears, but it is no longer experienced as a trap.
The same emotions arise, but we no longer need to act on them.
The same circumstances unfold, but they no longer define or confine us.

Nothing needs to be rejected. Nothing needs to be replaced.

At this point, the question quietly changes.

Instead of “How do I get out of samsara?” the question becomes, “What does it look like to live without being owned by it?”

This is where the bodhisattva ideal stops being abstract.

If you are not consumed by self-protective reactivity, your life naturally opens outward. Energy that was once spent managing fear, grasping for security, or rehearsing our actions becomes available.

Available for care.
For responsibility.
For creativity.
For service.

In this view, the world is not a problem to solve before awakening, nor a distraction from it. It is the field in which awakening expresses itself.

Culture matters.
Relationships matter.
Our work matters.

How we speak, how we listen, how we respond under pressure, these are not secondary concerns. They are the living edge of practice in the world.

Spreading wisdom is not about convincing others of Buddhist ideas.

It is about interrupting cycles of reactivity with clarity.
Meeting craving with sufficiency.
Meeting aggression with patience.
Meeting indifference with care.

A culture of awakening is not loud or in your face. It does not dominate headlines. It stabilizes. It de-escalates. It makes room.

Which reframes our motivation at its root.

Concern about liberation and rebirth is not rejected, but it is no longer the center of gravity. The center shifts to this life, what's right in front of us in this moment, this opportunity.

Freedom is not postponed to a future time or place. It is tasted here. And once tasted, it carries a responsibility.

Freedom is not the end of the path. It's the beginning of living a different question.

What are you going to do with it?

Will you use it to reinforce your own comfort and identity, or to loosen them?
Will you use it to withdraw from complex situations, or to engage without being entangled?
Will you add to the noise of the world, or help quiet it?

Seen this way, practice is not primarily about protecting yourself from samsara. It is about refusing to reproduce it. It is about living in a way that does not carry confusion forward.

The deepest aspirations of the bodhisattvas were not to leave the world behind, but to inhabit it without fear, without grasping, and without closing the heart.

That is not a lesser goal.

It is a much larger one.