Freedom
is desire, but felt in reverse
Freedom
is desire, but felt in reverse; the sense of being wanted by the world and then the ability to respond fully to that invitation without impediment, interference or self sabotage; the sense that I am being invited by the world beyond any present boundary I have made for myself. Freedom’s birthplace is a deep, spacious sense of interior silence in which I can hear invitations being made to me that will extend the outer boundaries of my sense of self. Freedom is the outcome of profound silence and the ability to pay attention in that silence. My individual sense of personal freedom is earned through the spacious allowing of silence which grants freedom to all those who come into my orbit. Silence is the key to freedom.
Freedom arises from seeing and hearing the essence of creation, of birdsong, of the heartfelt origin of another’s speech and then allowing that essence to speak back to us with its own particular form of invitation and in its very own voice. Freedom is a radical sense of letting be and being let be. As Antonio Machado said: ‘An eye is an eye not because you see it, an eye is an eye because it sees you’. Freedom is found in granting life to people and things other than ourselves that creates a mutually nourishing sense of seeing and being seen.
Our sense of freedom is always magnified by mutual allowing: a continual and surprising meeting of others and a release of all the ways we hold the world or our loved ones to ransom; freedom arises from a true meeting: the meeting that occurs when what is between what I think is me and what I think is other than me, come together in a conversation, an intimacy, a joining, intellectually, physically and imaginatively. Freedom can be felt in the body like new love. In our great mythologies, the freeing of another is always the ultimate demonstration of love. Freedom is self become other; become no self at all. In a real conversation, both sides find new freedoms, both sides are let loose and freed from any sense of self they have previously known.
Societal freedom is where my ability to be found by the world is not interfered with by others unless it hurts others: where I have the ability to make myself equal to whatever invitation is being made to me, either through a decisive, freeing ‘no’, an enthusiastic anticipatory ‘yes’ or the satisfaction of negotiating something extraordinary that lies in between. Societal freedom refuses to over- protect, and understands that true liberty is letting go of the protected self and allowing ourselves to be continually, disturbingly and delightfully, invited into new circumstances.
Freedom is always under threat: freedom calls for alertness, to my own or other’s manipulations, from those who wish to assign names to me and rule me by assigning me a label that diminishes me and gives others an excuse to hold power over me.
Freedom always calls because freedom always lies, almost by definition, just beyond the frontier of my previous understanding. Freedom is an open relationship with what lies over the horizon of my understanding. Through silence and the deeper states of attention that silence allows, I see over and beyond myself to something that invites me into a greater world, a greater maturity. Therefore, even though I may not have reached the place where I feel freedom as yet, I have a sense of being free through the felt invitation to some new, unknown place where I may make a home.
Freedom is a state of deep attention and deep intentionality and is calibrated by my relationship to the breadth and depth of silence I have learned to sustain. In silence everything is allowed to speak in its own voice and in a register that invites me to speak back in my own voice. Freedom may be first understood through my being allowed to have my own opinions, but a deeper understanding of what freedom means arises when I realise that I live in a larger radius of experience without set opinions, that I am able to shape an identity through a freer more conversational identity that is recreated every day from the spontaneity of meeting and discovery.
Silence is the key I must find again and again in my life to open the door to a proper sense of liberty: in silence I am free to see that thankfully, things are not as I thought, and I am even freer when I discover that my thoughts and my opinions may be the least of me. Freedom is the anticipatory silence in which everything can happen and everything is allowed to happen in its own way and its own time. Freedom is felt like a broad sky and through silence I gain freedom not only for myself, but for all those who join me under that spacious, invitational canopy. Freedom is a radical letting alone, to be itself, of my as yet undiscovered self; and of every undiscovered self that tries in that broad amplitude, to come and meet me.
-from Consolations II
When you are in that place in you where the entire Universe dwells, and I am in that place in me, we are one.
Namaste
Thank you. This is impressive. And so true! I sense my freedom most acutely in the moments when I change my mind and stop grasping.