Whether tangible or intangible, freedom is your birthright, a power, and is always hard fought for. With freedom emerging from consciousness regardless of whether it is a concept, a state of being, a mind, or an ideal, it can sometimes be difficult to quantify, recognize, appreciate, maintain, and retain.
With its mantra ‘I want to break free’, all the freedoms are relative and essential to your well-being and evolvement as a sentient human being. Furthermore, your right to do what others may consider unwise is enshrined in law. However, there is a caveat, what isn’t your right is to harm others whilst exercising your freedom, therefore freedom itself is limited to the morals and ethics of what is right and wrong, and rightly so.
Wishing, wanting, or needing to be or feel free always involves a person, place, or thing. However, regardless of the noun, or how many times you experience the desire to be free from whatever, your success in achieving this will depend upon how much freedom you are prepared to settle for.
Although freedom is your birthright, you have no idea how valuable it is, until you lose it. Nor is there any guarantee you will ever feel, experience, have, or keep it because freedom is a dichotomy that arises from the fact it is an amalgamation of being a human construct and a state of consciousness.
Human constructs have been created or developed since people first walked the Earth. They are necessary coping mechanisms that provide security which helps you feel secure and stable as you try to make sense of an insecure and unstable world within which you live.
Although the Earth is a beautiful, magical, rhythmical place that provides for all your needs, it does have its’ scary moments that make it very clear that although you are a part of nature, nature itself is bigger and far more powerful than you can imagine. Despite their many shortcomings, if you don’t have the protection of human constructs when you come up against nature, you will not survive. With them, you can embrace what nature will allow you to and thrive. However, nature is impartial, impersonal, and unbiased therefore nature doesn’t care. It’s not its job, as a sentient being, that is yours.
This care has been built within the human constructs to create a world supported by society, culture, economy, and infrastructure which include race, gender, language, commerce, money, the calendar, marriage, education, games, bureaucracies, governments, commerce, and religion to name but a few.
Although these artificial frameworks are designed to protect you, they are also integral to and responsible for allowing the more challenging ways of the world to intentionally and unintentionally work against you. Human constructs can and do mentally, emotionally, and spiritually brainwash your consciousness into either working on assumptions rather than truth, not thinking or thinking inside the box whilst actively encouraging you not to think outside of it. You can be left feeling that to function outside the box is ill-considered and unwise, even though freedom is in the eye of the beholder.
What harnesses this form of manipulation is your self-awareness. If you are, you think, if you think, you have the self-awareness to think yourself free in the box or get out of it either temporarily or permanently. This is achieved by mentally and emotionally transcending the restrictions that confine you, at which time you are free. Although not always a permanent state of being, this type of freedom is a state of mind that brings much-needed relief whilst allowing a more balanced or different perspective to develop.
Conversely, you can become entrapped in your mind, or find yourself fleeing one form of mental, emotional, or physical oppression, only to find you have escaped into a similar situation. Physical, mental, and emotional incarceration irrespective of whether it takes the form of a relationship, debt, poverty, disease, an unhealthy lifestyle, including addiction, or an unrealistic ideal of freedom itself, affects you profoundly.
It distorts your perceptions, destroys your confidence, motivation, and self-worth, and teaches you how to be helpless and over-reliant. Freedom on the other hand does the complete opposite but only up to a point since it is also possible for you to become imprisoned within the concept of freedom. In other words, it’s better to have your freedom even if you don’t know what to do with it than not have it at all.
So, the next time you have this urge to be free, ask yourself if you are looking for what you already have, and if not, what is it that you think is imprisoning you? Is it self-imprisonment, one of the nouns, your lifestyle, or the trappings of the world in general? Contemplate whether you are simply yearning to make decisions based on your own needs rather than trying to meet the needs of those around you.
Envisage your idea of freedom and think about what you can gain from it that you don’t have now, and the price you prepared to pay to get it. Reflect upon what you are going to do with this precious commodity once you have it and ask if you are prepared for the consequences of exercising it. Finally, revisit the possibility that it is you who you are desperate to be free from.
Lowering your expectations is a key to discovering freedom. Finding it and being able to make choices based on your own needs and desires is worth fighting. Once found you will know that freedom is what you make it, and you can break the chains that bind with this one thought because thought creates realities. Then remember those souls who are imprisoned by ideologies the sole purpose of which is to destroy a person’s right to be free, irrespective of what form it takes, for personal greed and power which they regularly abuse.
Elizabeth Francis – www.elizabethfrancis.co.uk
Article by More to Life Elder – Elizabeth Francis
Article published in More to Life – Edition 69
