Tell that the people freezing in the basements of Kiev.
“Be free from phenomena” becomes loudest precisely where phenomena are already tolerable. Heated rooms, time surplus, bodily safety, social insulation. There, boredom can be reframed as “suffering,” and mild dissatisfaction can be spiritualized into a heroic inner struggle. That is why the cushions are full.
Take that language to a place where phenomena are non-negotiable like shelling, cold, hunger, displacement and the phrase collapses instantly. Not because the people there are “less conscious,” but because reality is exerting force. You cannot attentively observe hypothermia away. You cannot linguistically reframe artillery. You cannot “disidentify” from a child freezing in front of you. At that point, any talk of transcendence is either obscene or delusional.
This reveals the quiet class bias in the discourse of acceptance. It is not neutral wisdom. It is a practice whose preconditions are stability, safety, and slack. That does not make it false but it makes it local, not universal. When teachers like Eckhart Tolle or Rupert Spira speak as if freedom consists in withdrawing identification from phenomena, they are assuming a world in which phenomena are already mostly benign. They are not addressing suffering that requires insulation, logistics, coordination, and resistance. They are addressing existential surplus discomfort.
What nobody preaches about is changing phenomena. Because that requires collective action, conflict, responsibility, and risk. It cannot be done on a cushion. It cannot be privatized. It cannot be monetized cleanly. Inner freedom scales beautifully; structural change does not. One sells retreats. The other destabilizes systems.
So the phrase “be free from phenomena” functions, in practice, as a sorting mechanism. It speaks to those whose lives allow inwardization. It silently excludes those whose lives demand outward intervention. And when exported to the latter, it becomes cruelty disguised as depth.
There is also a deeper Kantian point hiding here. Phenomena are not optional overlays you can step back from at will. They are the only interface through which anything shows up at all. To say “be free from phenomena” while remaining fed, warm, and safe is not transcendence but forgetting the scaffolding that makes the forgetting possible.
Put bluntly, if a teaching cannot say, “this does not apply under bombardment,” then it is not wisdom. It is ideology. Inner practices that ignore material conditions do not liberate humans; they select for those already buffered by them.
