Freedom Is The Fire, The Fury That Motivates
December 9th, 2006
The world is arse-backwards”, Dr. Francis Israel Regardie
In what context do we put freedom? Do we need a social context, a historical one, some background of political ideologies that shape a culture, or indeed do we need a cultural context? Does freedom differ in theory and practice between peoples, does it take on a different shape in different times?
The answer, for me, quite simply, is no.
Many of the struggles we face today, be they social, ecological, political, financial, war, poverty, oil-addiction, remain a struggle because too many people try to fit an idea of freedom into one of these boxes.
In actuality, this is like trying to fit all four sides of the box into the box. It is a simple-minded, arse-backwards approach to freedom, based on addiction to various measures of security, a dependence on external validation for our inner existence.
Security is an illusion. As all things are impermanent, what is there to secure? In time, a ship’s anchor rusts away and the ship is lost to the ocean.
Freedom is not an illusion. Neither, however is it real.
Freedom is the essence of all things, the dynamism through which we move from yesterday into today. Freedom is eternal, and so does not require a context. Is it simply a utopian fantasy to think that freedom is eternal, and not defined by a particular social or political context?
Again, quite simply, no.
While the methods by which we make freedom known, in the acts that we take to nurture in a particular context, freedom takes on a shape that can be recognized by a culture. Perhaps a peace march, where a country is forced into silence, as the UK was during the Iraq war. Perhaps a sermon on a mount when a people loses the right to even question the methods of an empire. But these actions are not freedom itself.
Freedom is the fire, the force, the fury that motivates, that drives, one to act, but it cannot be contained in the action.
One of the most important things I have ever learned is that the only context needed for freedom to flourish is the individual “courage to care”, to quote Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s imprisoned Nobel peace laureate, and a capacity for wonder.
No ideology will ever liberate anything, no justice system can ever keep the peace. Peace cannot be kept, it can only be invited.
Beyond all the many matrices of ideologies, beliefs, experiences, intuitions, behaviors, consensus’, there lies freedom. And this freedom is eternal, the core of all that is human. It does not need to be searched for, for we are made from freedom. World Peace is not a distant dream of some zen lunatic escaping from the realities of the world, but is the actual reality we live in all the time.
World Peace will not be actualized through blindly following a political path, or a socially sanctioned behavior – all these things are hypnosis.
All these things are illusion. Freedom, and Peace, are what’s left when you stop looking. Freedom is what’s left when a soldier puts down his gun forever. In that moment, all the freedom of the world is realized.
It does not take mass movements, or institutions, but simple actions from the individual.
In everything we do we invite freedom. In every daily act we have a choice to struggle, or stop struggling. Buddha said that he taught only two things “that there is suffering, and that there is an end to suffering”.
All the suffering of the world can end today, and it will not take a mass movement disguised as a revolution. It takes simply a revolution of the spirit, your spirit, my spirit, in every action. In this revolution, no politician, no policeman, no tyrant can ever have any power. For we live outside the illusion progress, and in the love of freedom; ever present, eternal, unending.
Freedom needs no context. Peace needs no plan.
Both are what keeps us moving, if only we were to…..stop…for a moment, and listen. Simply to turn our gaze inward, away from all the many external answers, and listen to our hearts – that radiance that blazes in the depths of our soul, that our actual bodies are blessed with two fingers width below the navel!
In every action, consult your heart, and with every action we breathe a little life into freedom.
by Fergus Harlow
Nottingham, UK
