“All the world over, so easy to see, people everywhere just wanna be free…” ~~ The Rascals
“The great way is easy for those who have no preferences. …The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.” ~~ The Third Patriarch of Zen
We long for freedom. That’s easy to see. Yet the Third Patriarch of Zen suggests that the longing itself makes freedom impossible.
We know this so well. Work is tedious. We long for vacation. We dream of the beach with nothing to do. We see happy (buff) people frolicking in the waves, book the hotel, fly there (that alone can be a horror), and nothing is quite like the fantasy. We spend the week trying to capture that carefree promise in that promotion. Maybe it’s the food. Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s a rude person. Maybe there are moments of rest, moments of relaxation, moments of pure presence. But they are moments.
Truth #1
We don’t actually want freedom. Hear me out.
Freedom isn’t a thing we can have because we already have it. Freedom is a property of the Universe. It is the will to expand in time, space and consciousness. A Universe without freedom would not exist.
Freedom, this force of expansion, is actually a big problem for us. The onrush of energy is so powerful, like taking off in a rocket ship, that pure freedom feels like annihilation.
“Freedom” is pure possibility. It is universal. This pure possibility is woven into the founding documents and the character of the United States. In practice, however, it’s something like the Wild West, or smash and grab, or a masked ball, or collective insanity.
Something is missing to make freedom workable for humans and that is the very thing we all want to escape.
Truth #2
Freedom without limits is unpleasant to say the least. A Universe without limits would expand into oblivion in the blink of an eye, or probably a zeptosecond which is a trillionth of a billionth of a second. The Universe can’t keep it together, so to speak, without a counter-force to freedom, nor can we. One word for that is limits. Other words used are containers, boundaries, and rules, to name a few, but I like the word limits because it is so definitive. And precisely because it’s an anathema to the American Mind. Who says? You can’t make me? You can’t tell me what to do? This is a free country and I can do whatever I want, whenever I want and you can’t stop me. This refusal of any boundaries, containers or rules is that Wild West mind. It is also toddler mind. Training a child to flourish in a society is teaching limits; what they can, can’t and what is negotiable. We are social animals and trying to make it outside society produces Ted Kazinskis.