You have to choose to change. If you don’t you’ll never be free.

Everyone who ever made progress on their inner condition had one thing in common. They decided to change. They decided to do the work. You have to choose change. If you don’t you’ll never be free. It’s astonishing how many people choose to keep the shackles on. How many people wander in the half light, rooting around in their minds and lives searching out the little pockets of relief from the fear and insecurity they feel, instead of doing something decisive about them, instead of standing up and putting their shoulder to the wheel. 

The slavery dance consists of side stepping the work, spending precious energy hunting out ways of avoiding what must be done. One sign of it is the knee-jerk denial that I could be subject to such slavery, the “I’m fine” argument. “It’s not that bad.” “That person has it so much worse than me, who am I to complain. I should consider myself lucky.” These are all arguments in favor of slavery. The hallmark is the refusal to choose deeper freedom. 

Inner slavery has built in mechanisms of self preservation. These mechanisms are there to kill anything that might induce us to take a chance. They are designed to protect us from pain and failure. The trouble is, it is through pain and failure that we grow and become free. Too often, after what seems an intolerable, crippling bout of insecurity, the resolve to change flares up, only to be gently stifled as the pain of the experience subsides. The march of numbness resumes until, inevitably, the pain flares again. People live in this cycle their whole lives, never taking the matter in hand and setting off on the journey to peace and freedom. 

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu calls the battle field “the ground of life and death.” This is a mythic perspective. Myth portrays the matters of life and death. It describes life in its most basic terms: to live or to die.  The same energy has to drive the search for inner freedom. There can be no room for half measures, no credence given to the excuses that dull the edge, numb the pain just enough, and make it so easy to stop. Chains are chains, however small they seem, and they are keeping us from something. Unless I break free I will never know what.

We are made for freedom but it is a mythic undertaking. It truly is and that’s the only way to see it. It never happens accidentally and it can’t be accomplished except with determination. Life is the path to freedom’s gate. This labor is the great task assigned to each of us whatever else life may bring. On this quest, each fear, each insecurity, each limitation is a monster lurking and each one of us who takes this road is a questing hero venturing the wilds of our own interior in search of liberation. 

Ever forward.

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