What is freedom?

by Drew R | May 29, 2020 | Society, Top Rated Theories, What is freedom

“Irvin Yalom (1980) “freedom: the responsibility and freedom to make our lives as we will, to be the sole authors of our lives, thus leaving us groundless with no one to determine our destiny but ourselves”

I believe the framework of “Freedom” being one of the four existential concerns of human existence is a good place to start. 

Freedom in the context of Yalom’s definition may ultimately drive an individual toward existential isolation. Overall freedom is having the ability to be the director of our own lives and not be burdened by responsibilities, which dictate the actions we take in life. Typically people may have freedom from various aspects of their life. For example a lottery winner who quits their job may have financial freedom, but  family responsibilities remain and as such they lack freedom from family. I don’t know if total freedom ever exists. With freedom from most conceivable factors in life we are, as Yalom states, left with ‘no one to determine or destiny but ourselves.’ I actually don’t know if the average person could handle being truly responsible for and therefore held accountable for each and every decision / action in their life. Which makes me think that perhaps a form of freedom is taking responsibility for your actions and holding yourself accountable, regardless of the outcome.  
This approach would allow you to still live a grounded, socially connected life (free from isolation) while having a sense of freedom. Knowing that your choices and the outcome were ultimately under your control.  
As Viktor E. Frankl says: ‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Yalom
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5553124/

Frankl
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2782.Viktor_E_Frankl

What is freedom?

by Yasha W | May 26, 2020 | Society, Top Rated Theories, What is freedom

“The discipline of self-mastery leads to true sovereignty: It emancipates the mind from being a reactive effect and instead empowers it to become a responsible cause. The key to social change (and the only genuine way to achieve a sustainable new paradigm of world peace) is through the psychological maturation of the individual and the spiritual awakening of the people. Therefore, the most beneficial, patriotic, and proactive form of participation in global human society generally involves the act of creating mutually transformative art, facilitating mutually transformative experiences, and sharing mutually transformative practices and traditions.

Even fighting to dismantle the military-industrial complexes of the world and the many other institutional symptoms of our disfunction (let alone just campaigning to disarm or medicate the masses) will never quite do the trick. This type of political activity can never eliminate the issues at their common root, which is the temporal ego’s divisive ignorance and blind propensity towards greed, hatred, fear, etc. Only understanding, insight, and the expansion of consciousness can address the ills of the world at that level. For “you cannot,” as Gibran writes, “erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges, though you pour the sea upon them.”

Most attempts to “fix” external systems actually end up becoming defense mechanisms that enable the root dysfunction of that selfsame system to continue, because those attempts become an excuse to exhaust energy and distract attention from the more crucial – although often uncomfortable – priority of sincere introspection and inner work. Instead of running from the perceived external threats or resisting the forces of tyranny, we must actualize our own potential and offer our gifts to the world – simply for the sake of offering those gifts, with or without further rewards. 

Abiding in a state of peaceful presence also produces greater availability, capacity or “know-how”, and motivation to find, follow, and fulfill our life’s purpose: one’s planetary mission or soul’s calling. By staying fundamentally peaceful and fundamentally present, we are not avoiding, evading or escaping the intense rollercoaster of life’s ups and downs. On the contrary, we are even more fully experiencing its excruciating pains and its wealth of pleasures – even more passionately engaging with the full spectrum of our feelings and sensations – but as a sacramental expression of, and sacrificial offering to, the divinely mysterious “beyond”. 

We are able to partake in life more fully, precisely because we are also able to maintain a sense of witnessing – a sense of observing our personal fluctuations from what is both an equanimous center and a spacious container for surfing the waves. The wavelengths are not “wrong” or “bad” – they are the very movement that makes the substance of apparent existence. But we can also get lost or trapped in the illusion of their primacy, if we forget how to take three steps back and see through their enrapturing drama to the theatrics that compose them. Our participation in the play is natural, primal, visceral and raw, because it’s based on the willfully free and informed decision to participate. 

Simply by educating oneself and leading a positive lifestyle of open-hearted care and clear-headed sobriety, transparency and lucidity, one will automatically gravitate towards healthy models of family and community, develop meaningful, authentic relationships, and make a positive impression on one’s surroundings. (*This “ripple” technique is what our nonprofit calls “Inner Work for Global Change”).

The only people who are fit to govern a nation are the people who are invested in cultivating wisdom and deepening their own awareness. These people must have enough spine, daring, courage, self-reliance, and tenacity to also have a strong sense of loving-kindness, empathic well-wishing, and universal compassion and to openly stand by those values. Such people must be willing to lead by direct example, as an inspiring role model, rather than by judgement and force. They must be relatively immune and impervious to insulting attacks and praising compliments and be able to abstain from the temptation to meddle, interfere, surveil, manipulate, force or control. These people must be sensitive to the guidance of their own intuition, have trust-worthy advisors, and know how to listen to the spirit of life itself. 

Even then, it will still be up to the citizens to cultivate in themselves all those same qualities that are required of a good leader. Obviously, there can never be a complete or collective enlightenment or transformation until the members of that collective become more enlightened or transformed. Voluntary changes can’t be forced, and – more importantly – no one else can make those changes for you, even if they are the messiah, a divine monarch, or the greatest president of all time. Making the actual changes is still entirely up to each one of us individually… As Marley and Garvey agree, “None but ourselves can free the mind”.

Our individual inner worlds are microcosmic iterations of our entire surroundings and an outcropping of totality. Thus, the fastest way to contact totality is in reverse: by going inwards to our origin, instead of reaching out towards our destination. It’s true that the outer forms we face and interact with are also expressions of the same co-arising mystery, and contain an essence that’s identical to our own essential identity. But the prerequisite for truly seeing others as such is first finding it within ourselves. The best way to find out why we are here and where we’re going is to remember where we come from. In the words of my teacher, “I’m always walking backwards … You get home faster that way.”

(The) all is (the) one and each one represents the all – the unnamable verb that alone IS everything that always was and will forever be. Each self corresponds to the overarching collective macrocosm, which in turn reflects our inner worlds. The continuity between the two is parted by nothing other than a thin veil of perception. Such is the fractal, holographic nature and dreamlike plasticity of the reality in which we are ensconced. How we think and what we choose to believe and to ignore directly impacts how we perceive the world and thus becomes the world that we’re perceiving. Until we realize who we are, we unwittingly assemble entire worlds and stories without noticing that we are their designing intelligence.

This is the more esoteric reason (“esoteric” relative to, say, “the ripple effect”) for why we can best effect change “out there” by changing what’s going on “in here” first. This is also one important interpretation of the Emerald Tablet’s famous claim, “as above, so below” – a teaching whose basic sentiment resounds across the alchemical aspect of all different traditions and is echoed and transmitted by all the mystery schools and initiatic lineages of magic and sorcery around the world.

Effective lies are built around and cloaked in partial truths. Ornate ideologies, contending factions, conceptual dogmas, complex opinions, sectarian theories and political views can never really provide the solution to our woes. No matter how much data supports our philosophy or perspective, it is ultimately still just a construct that we use in order to feel right about things – but it is worthless without a genuine shift in our embodied state of consciousness and way of relating to each other. Furthermore, once that deeper shift does occur, we have little-to-no use for those earlier conceptions and ideas. If any ideas are retained, they’re unlikely to be at odds with contradicting theories… and even if they are at odds, those differences are more likely to be recognized as valuable opportunities for curiosity and symbiotic growth, rather than causes for bitter rifts or warfare. 

The entire natural cosmos is conspiring in our favor, and we are its indispensable co-conspirators. Its evolutionary impulse paradoxically exhibits two simultaneous trends: one is contracting inwards towards total unity, formless singularity and pure original innocence, and the other one is expanding out in all directions towards absolute diversity and multiplicity of expression and coordinated form. On one hand is the urge to improve, perfect and refine our unique selves, to imitate our image of the infinite ideal, and to reach the highest heights of personal development, build character, be in service, create, achieve, and differentiate ourselves from the rest. On the other hand is the need to completely annihilate the bounds of our limited separate existence as an isolated subjective self and merge back into the timeless, nonlocal and eternal, primordial oneness from whence we came. 

Thus, to be good co-conspirators in the (un)winding of the cosmos, we must find a way to balance and connect these two extremes by working, step-by-step, to envision and manifest a maximally diversified unity and a profoundly unified diversity in the world. On a human level – this most likely appears as meaningful intercultural tolerance, solidarity, and harmonious exchange. Beyond that – on a broader scale – it implies the same sense of communicative reverence, respectful recognition, and relatedness with the whole ecosystem of other species of animals, plants, and minerals, the elements, the ancestors, the future generations, all beings and entities, the planets, star systems, galaxies, and dimensions beyond measure.”