03-10-2021
Freedom is the will to self-responsibility. —Friedrich Nietzsche
Freedom
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.
—Thomas Jefferson
Freedom is the soul’s ideal dwelling and proper destiny.
The soul is the highest principle of individual consciousness. Freedom is the state of consciousness in which the soul is not attached to or bound by any of the lower principles such as the senses, feelings, emotions, desires, and automatic currents of thought.
The soul’s freedom does not mean that you are not bound to a Principle that is higher than your soul. The soul’s freedom is found when you make all thoughts arising in your soul be bound to a higher Principle or a higher Being of which the Soul is the cosmic individuation.
You will find that in the act and state of being bound to a higher Principle, which is Freedom itself, you experience authentic freedom all around.
Being bound to the higher Principle, you realize that yesterday has no power over today or tomorrow, that the past has no power over how you live your life in the present or in the future. The past seems to have power only because you give it a power. That power does not come from the past, because the past does not exist in reality.
The past exists only in and as memory, and memory exists primarily as reference. Memory has intrinsic values and utilities as reference but has no intrinsic power. Without memory you would lose the sense of temporal continuity and of self-identity in time. You use your memory to guide your present action.
Yet, memory in itself has no power to dictate or determine your present action. In truth you are free to begin your life anew right now. To know this is the beginning of your freedom—of fulfilling your soul’s longing to be free.
The Responsibility Principle
The Now in which God created the first man and the Now in which the last man will disappear and the Now in which I am speaking—all are the same in God, and there is only one Now.
—Meister Eckhart
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
—R Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freedom is not a static condition which once achieved can be retained, but is a dynamic state which must be attained ever anew. The locus in which you attain freedom is always and only the Now, which is never a part of time.
The Now in which you attain freedom is not a moment in time but the momentum arising in the Eternal that produces reaction past and resultant future in the apparent flow of time. Thus, to be free is to be in the Now—the eternal, atemporal Now.
Freedom is the soul’s ideal dwelling and proper destiny. Life is the atemporal (timeless/eternal) present in the temporal (time). The soul is the cosmic medium of Life’s teleportation between the atemporal and the temporal. Freedom is the state of the soul being that teleportation medium with conscious awareness.
You may ask: “How can I be in the Now and be free?” You can be in the Now and be free if you be an agent of responsibility. This is the Responsibility Principle. Responsibility is the Principle of Freedom.
Responsibility is the ability to “promise” or “make a commitment” (spond) “anew” (re-). Responsibility involves and implies the ability to create a future anew by making and acting from a new commitment.
A new commitment means a commitment that is made anew or recreated in every successive moment of time, in the Now, until an entire new situation arises which calls for an entirely new commitment.
When you are not responsible, you react to the past, from the past, in the present. When you react, your life becomes a repetitive extension and a karmic reenactment of your past.
Reactivity is of time, whereas responsibility is not. Reactivity arises as an inertial momentum in time, whereas Responsibility arises as a generative momentum of the timeless.
The reactive mode of existence is the mode of victimhood in which one perceives oneself to be helplessly swept away by the external forces of nature, society, or history.
A victim is one who, having forfeited one’s innate responsibility, sees oneself not responsible for one’s lot in life. A victim is first a victim of one’s past which, one thinks, has ineluctably and inexorably led one to where one is, for which one claims little or no responsibility.
A sense of being a victim, or victim consciousness, is rooted in the deep recesses of the collective human psyche, the race consciousness, because we presume that the past determines the future while we believe that we cannot change the past. While it is true that we cannot change events of the past, it is not true that the past determines the present or the future.
The past also changes because you can change your present interpretation of past events. Your past is in your memory which only arises in the present. If you change the way how you view or interpret past events, you are in actuality changing the past or your experience of the past.
Amor Fati & The Eternal Recurrence
Freedom arises when you choose your past exactly the way it has been and love your fate as it has befallen upon you. This is Nietzsche’s Amor Fati, the love of your fate without any reservation. You love your fate and your life so much that you welcome the Eternal Recurrence of your life.
With Amor Fati, by choosing your past and your fate, exactly and entirely, you remake your past and thereby you free yourself from your past and your fate. A new destiny becomes open for you. And by thus accepting and welcoming the Eternal Recurrence, you reconcile with everyone in your life and everything in the universe, and thereby you free yourself from the cyclic karmic repetitions.
Thus, you have freedom with respect to the past as well as to the future, and freedom is always in and of the Now. You can become an agent, a causative agent, of change, and thus of Responsibility, in respect to the past as well as the present and the future.
The state of being an agent of Responsibility is termed “agency” in psychology. Agency is the antipodal, or the exact opposite, state of victimhood. Thus the road to freedom is the path of inner revolution from victimhood to agency.
If you find yourself powerless, helpless, or unfree in some areas of your life, it is a sign that you are being prevailed over by some form of victim consciousness. Regardless of the situation or circumstance, so long as you perceive yourself to be a victim, you are relinquishing your Responsibility, your power to change the situation for yourself.
When you become an agency, you become the agent of change. Even if nothing external can be changed for the time being in a certain situation, you can still be free, because when you are responsible, you can intend and take full Responsibility for the present situation to be exactly the way it is and the way it is not.
You therefore become the master, and no longer the slave, of the situation. When you consciously intend the situation, or the way your life actually is, to be exactly the way it is and the way it is not, amazingly, you become filled with gratitude for all that is already bestowed upon you. You become reconciled and at peace with the whole of existence.
Then, as if magically and miraculously, your life begins to actually change because you yourself have been transformed. You are no longer a victim, and you are in charge of your life which is blessed with all the gifts already given to you.
Your life, your destiny, is the out-picturing and the external expression of the inner state of your being. As you change, so does your life.
Thus the road to freedom is the road of freedom. It is unpaved. It is a pathless path created only in your journey of freedom. Because of the nature of freedom, wherein Responsibility, and thus self-generation and self-creation, is essential, the road of freedom is the road that you construct and pave along the way of your journey. You are fully responsible for creating your road of freedom.
Freedom, you must therefore earn and attain for yourself by being an agent of Responsibility. If you claim full Responsibility for the entirety of your life, right now, you shall be free to start your whole life anew. If we each claim full Responsibility for the entirety of human life on earth, right now, we will be free to write a whole new human history.
You will love your life, your fate, Amor Fati, while you create your destiny in line with your singular cosmic destiny. You will look forward to the Eternal Recurrence of your life, while you live in the Now in freedom as the momentum of eternity. Then and thus, your Soul’s longing to be free shall be fulfilled.