More material that was not published in Being and Learning.
Here is a fragment distilled from the meditation written ten years ago today:
Freedom has many names: emancipation, liberation, releasement. We are not born with freedom. We are not born free. On the contrary, we are born into a world that awaits us with expectations and demands. We are born into culture, and we are born into history. Our arrival is a belated one. Freedom appears when we step back from this place where we arrive. This move is a retreat, but not a transcendence. If our birth represents our being thrown into the world, emancipation is the moment when we pick up and gather ourself and retreat from the world. This is also the moment when we diminish from the culture and history that has been thrust upon us. Emancipation marks our releasement into a self that is made, the moment when the artist becomes the work of art, when the singer becomes the song.
This fragment was prompted by the play on 'Nirvana' that happens in OPM 140, written this day, July 4th, ten years ago. The word 'Nirvana' is the first word of OPM 140, and I declared (ten years ago) that I wanted to borrow this term as it was inherited and reworked by the Buddhist schools when they developed the teaching of anatman (nonself). In turn, the fragment I distilled today from OPM 140 is an attempt to address the anatman as an achievement, and awakening of a consciousness, something like Hegel's self-consciousness that is achieved by the slave when he destroys the master by withdrawing recognition of his power. The emergence of this consciousness is the moment when emancipation happens, which the fragment identifies as the moment when we pick up and gather ourself and retreat from the world.
Now one might read into this fragment something of an anarchic ethos, which becomes quite obvious when we contemplate the fragment as a meditation on anatman, and are thereby thrown back to the awakening of Siddhartha. Perceiving that event unfolding under the Bodhi Tree, when Siddhartha has retreated from his family and friends, we understand why the consciousness of anatman is a retreat from culture and history, and a break (both rupture and interruption) from what has been and is demanding to be repeated, again and again. The break is the breaking of this cycle of tradition, and this consciousness is a liberation from the precinct of the parochial; one that does not leave this residence of the familiar and safe without some destruction being rendered forthwith. This is how the consciousness of anatman, like selbstbewusstsein, emerges anarchically: Siddhartha sits and when the Buddha arises a consciousness emerges that has been gathered from the fragments of his shattered former identity.
With this consciousness gathered from the fragments of imploded inherited identity we have the very phenomenological position that Heidegger embraced and made the centerpiece of his later thinking: gelassenheit (letting-be). The consciousness of the Buddha is precisely what Heidegger describes (in the quotation I cited in OPM 138) as 'being set at peace': "To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature." The Buddha accepts the order of things, and declares this to be the acceptance of the existence of suffering. To let things be is to dwell in the free sphere, to dwell in freedom, to be at peace and to forgo attachment to things, specifically family and friends. Liberation happens with detachment, through what the Stoics call apatheia.
I call this detached acceptance of the existence of suffering: the blues. Through the blues we are gathered into peace, the peace of freedom, the freedom that takes us beyond what has been and are shown what can and must be otherwise. This is why the musical roots of the blues, the spirituals, are rooted even deeper in the songs of the fields that sang of another time, another place, and another self. With the singing of those songs the slave was able to gather himself and draw back (swing) from the world he was thrown into. 
3.0 - (Thursday, Portland, ME) - In the 2.0 commentary I don't seem to appreciate that OPM 140, written this day 20 years ago, was inspired by July 4th, Independence Day! The riffs on Nirvana and becoming Anatman, culminating with the citing of Heidegger on being "set at peace." First I want to note that the decision to stop recording videos of myself reading the OPMs obviously reserved energy for the commentary, which have been robust. The fragment from OPM 140 cited above: "Emancipation marks our releasement into a self that is made, the moment when the artist becomes the work of art, when the singer becomes the song." Working on the same theme in the sabbatical book - the 'rebirth' of the self as student, which is also the emancipation from schooling as what my late colleague Ilan Gur Ze'ev called education as "normalization." The essence of the relationship of Being and Learning is the formation of a 'free' person. And this happens first and foremost in the encounter with the signifcant object, the work of art, the book/text that captivates the student and sets them free from schooling. Today, I presume the same ontological relationship is at work, but I am not writing from an ontological perspective. Rather, I am writing more from a phenomenological perspective, using some traditional language, and thus describing the philosophical education that sets a student free as Liberal Arts Education. So for sure a continuation of the thinking that was happening in 2004!
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