What is Freedom and How to be Free

Someone once asked me, what would you see if you looked in the Mirror of Erised, which shows your deepest desires.

I replied, I would not look.

Why would I pay any attention to the psychological dramas of the mind? They can be free to run in the background, but I will not let them run me.

Have you ever realized the mind must perceive freedom as freedom from something?

Something has bound you. It’s like you’re tied up in ropes. You feel the need for escape but can’t. You’re stuck. You struggle and struggle, but your limbs are helpless, your intellect useless. You don’t want to be stuck. You want freedom.

Freedom is something everyone wants but few understand. The lack of understanding is what makes it seem so elusive. The reason for this is that freedom cannot be understood through intellect. It has to be experienced through spirit.

You see, there is a wisdom to no escape.

The more you think about freedom, the less you will be free. Your mind will bind you and torture you. The more you idealize freedom conceptually, the more you’ll feel trapped by everything around you. If you value thinking too much, your mind becomes like the ropes. The more you identify with your thoughts, the tighter you trap yourself.

“I think, therefore I am” is a sure way to madness. You can never achieve freedom through intellect.

Remember the Unabomber? He was a person of incredible intellect. A math genius. Attended Harvard when he was just a teenager. Nevertheless, he became a serial killer. Why? For freedom. He thought so much about freedom, dissected it with his intellect to such an extent, it drove him mad. By obsessing over freedom, he ultimately lost it. He ended up spending a lifetime in prison.

What the Unabomber wanted was not really freedom, but love.

Freedom and love are actually the same thing. It is just that the idea of freedom is more easily understood through intellect than the idea of love.

Many of us pride ourselves in our ability to think. We identify with our brain. The constant monologue in our head, we pay so much attention to it. Why is that? We do not identify as much with our heart. The constant beating of our heart. The constant flow of blood through our body. The breath going in and out of our lungs. We do not pay as much attention to those things. We pay attention to what creates trouble for us. We pay attention to drama. The constant psychological drama in our heads captivate our attention, so we identify with it.

Are you in an abusive relationship with your intellect? Time to stop paying so much attention to your thoughts. You don’t need to stop your thoughts. You don’t need to fight your thoughts. Simply stop giving them so much value. Same thing with your emotions. Don’t allow yourself to be pulled into the illusions of psychological drama. Choose peace instead.

Intellect is like a knife. It’s good that it’s sharp. That’s how it cuts well. But you don’t want to cut everything you come across. It can’t be your only tool.

If you try to get to know yourself through only your intellect, you will hurt yourself. If someone tries to get to know you through only their intellect, they will hurt you. This is because intellect is always trying to cut and dissect in order to extract something useful. Any relationship where you’re only trying to extract value from someone is bound to end in pain.

A surgeon can use a knife to dissect you and get to know your physiology, but they will not know you. A psychoanalyst can also use cutting questions to dissect your mind, but they will only understand your memories, and your habitual way of thinking, but they will still not know you.

Spiritual wisdom tells us that we are not our body, and we are not our mind.

Our body is just a heap of food we’ve gathered over the years.

Our mind is just a heap of memories we’ve gathered over the years.

Our body is like a computer. Our memories are like the data and programs it runs on. That computer can be ours. It can do wonderful things for us. But it is definitely not us.

We are the observer. The ones viewing the computer screen. The ones controlling the keyboard and mouse.

We have the power to write new programs, if the ones we’ve created no longer serve us.

We have the power to gather new data, if the ones we have are no longer relevant.

We decide what we want to view on the screen.

We can even walk away from it totally.

We can step outside, away from the computer, and experience nature as it is.

We can just be. Be the life that we are. Enjoy the pure prescence of our exitence in the cosmos.

The way we experience the world through our mind and body is limited. It’s like viewing the world through a computer screen. It is one dimensional. There are many other dimensions of life which cannot be experienced through our mind and body.

This longing to be free, to step away and experience something grander than what is palpable through our mind and body, is essentially the longing for freedom.

To access the dimensions of reality beyond the mind and body, we have to step outside the bounds of physicality, and into spirituality.

Instead of struggling to untangle all the ropes that have bound us in the physical world, we can transcend these struggles altogether by shifting our energies to focus on the spiritual.

The desire for freedom is the desire to be free from something.

Things that are outside of yourself can never be 100% controlled by you.

However, everything you experience is 100% experienced through your sense perceptions.

You can try to reprogram your mind. This may change your sense perceptions somewhat, but algorithms can never be fully adaptable to every situation.

You can try to improve your body. This may also change your sense perceptions somewhat, but all bodies eventually deteriorate into the earth.

You will never be free of the limitations of your sense perceptions by only trying to fine tune your body and mind. These things only lay the foundation for greater self-realization.

Freedom from sense perceptions only comes from stepping away from physicality, and into spirituality.

At its essence, spirituality is love.

Not love for someone or something specifically. Sure, pleasant people and pleasant things can trigger you to feel loving emotions, but those type of emotions are still just psychological drama.

Don’t look for love. Don’t try to love. BE LOVE.

When you become love, the sweetness of your emotions do not depend on anyone or anything. You are free to be joyful and exuberant regardless of what is going on around you. Your body and mind are no longer burdens, but tools that serve your spirit. You experience everything as yourself, as love, not just what can be felt by your senses and what can be understood by your mind.

When you become love, it is not possible for anyone or anything to drag you down, or suffocate you, or bind you, or even lift you up. You are free to be as you choose, wherever you are, because your experience of the world is no longer bound by physicality.

In the presence of someone that has become love, others can experience more freedom as well. Love is trusting, it lets you act however you want, it has no expectations, because it is joyful within regardless of what you do.

May we all be free.