To Be Capable of Freedom

Most of us, however we claim to desire freedom, are simply not capable of it. Too easily, the responsibility required by true freedom shuts down the impulse to transcend slavery before it can become anything more than a vague dissatisfaction, or a passing wishful thought. But freedom is not a nicety. Freedom is not a pleasant state of being. Freedom is like wildness, and wildness is both utterly creative, and frightfully dangerous.

 

As human beings, we have the ability to harness our own wildness, to direct our creative power into solid, useful things that serve our well being. All motivation to power is driven by the need to be safe, or more directly, the need to eliminate threat. But the lack of safety, the presence of threat, is at the heart of freedom. Again, freedom is not the absence of enslavement. Rather, it is the constant reference to its possibility.

 

To live with that tension requires mental, emotional, and spiritual maturity. One must learn to be certain in uncertainty. Once the possibility of total ruin is embraced and factored in, it is possible to truly take responsibility for self, and not rely on power structures, protectors, religions, governments, even families or relationships—any of the constructs we’ve developed, whether healthy or escapist—for our sense of well being and security. That must come from the clarity of our own connection to the life giving-energy of reality.

 

Americans are not free, even in the political or economic sense. We think we are, we even insist that we are. We spend the greater part of our intellectual and emotional energy perpetuating the illusion of freedom, which amounts to energy spent on the refusal to take responsibility for our real situation. We continue to rely on power structures, protectors, religions, governments, families and relationships—whether healthy or escapist—to provide us, as individuals, with a sense of well being, and even our sense of our own worth. That we can continue to ignore, en masse, the political and economic dimensions of our enslavement, however fully they reveal themselves before our very eyes, is evidence that we are not, as a group, ready for the alternative.

 

A person who is not his own source of power, can be pushed around. It happens in the checkout line, it happens at the auto dealership, it happens on the job. It happens in far more obvious and ugly situations where people quietly allow themselves to be abused, or even brutalized. It happens whenever we are in the presence of a power we consider greater than our own, or worse, when we place the responsibility for our own power in the hands of another—a spouse, a boss, a so-called lover, a substance. And a society of people who are not the source of their own power can be pushed around as a group. It happens in congress, at the polls, and in the façade of the presidential campaign, where the sheer number of candidates is presented to us as evidence of choice. The fact that we continue to buy the illusion means that we are not ready for the alternative.  

 

But the real trouble is in every individual heart. It is the weak, fearful heart, seeking to eliminate threat that both perpetrates, and tolerates, injustice. We will never be free as a group until we are free as individuals. We live in a society of individuals who, for the most part, are not the source of our own power. The result is our current collective condition, which produces our current, collective situation. And there will always be individuals and groups ready to prey upon that condition for their own gain. Revolution after revolution has been fought all through history. That none has ever produced a lasting, failsafe environment is evidence that the one true revolution has yet to be fought—the revolution of self.  

 

We live in a world filled with people who are psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually blocked. That simply cannot yield a healthy environment conducive to general prosperity. It will always yield an adversarial situation in which someone tries to put it over on everyone else, and vice-versa. There will be no change in the system—at the top or at the bottom—until there is change in the individual. It’s just as important to stop tolerating crimes as it is to stop committing them. Until we claim the dignity we each bear as human beings, and demand from our world and neighbors the respect entitled to that dignity, nothing will change. There really is no other way to begin. Being satisfied with the ebb and flow of history is not acceptable. That is why it’s so important to wage the inner war, to seek the ways in which I sell myself out, and become capable—not worthy, but CAPABLE—of being free.

 

It’s the subtitle of this blog: If you do not transcend your own psychology, you can be controlled.

 

Ever forward.

 

 

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