Question6.com: We, The People are NOT HAPPY
19 - What is freedom
We are not free, far from it.
We are told about
Freedom of association,
Freedom of mouvement,
Freedom of speech,
Freedom of the presse,
Freedom of tough,
We are told about all the possible manifestations of freedom. This is our way of avoiding the discussion of freedom itself. We have the same problem with consciousness, life, love…. We want them. We long for them. We spend our lives searching for them, but we can never really reach them.
Watching animals can help
There is a zoo in the Netherlands where the visitors are kept in a very dark hallway. They can barely see each other. Along the hallway are open windows. Through one of the windows, you can see birds flying around in a well-lit room. There is nothing to prevent the birds from flying through the open window and joining you in the hallway. Nothing except the light. The birds stay in the well-lit room and don’t want to explore the darkness outside. The birds are prisoners of the light. Their eyesight, which allows them to see the world, can also be their jail. This also applies to humans. Our senses can become our jail.
Through another window, you can see snakes. There is nothing between you and the snakes except some ice. The snakes don’t come through the window looking for lunch because they would have to go over the ice. The snakes don’t like the cold. They are prisoners of heat.
Those animals don’t realize they are kept as prisoners. They would have to get outside their cage to recognize that there is a cage.
We are prisoners of our senses, just as birds are prisoners of light and snakes are prisoners of heat. We are prisoners of our eyesight, our hearing, our temperature, and the air we breathe. We are prisoners of our body.
- Bergson said that our life is littered with all the personalities we could have been. All through our lives, we make choices, and we become prisoners of those choices. As you get older, changing profession becomes more and more difficult.
Do you remember Plato’s allegory of the cave?
In the third century BC, Plato wrote his famous allegory of the cave. His concern was the importance of education in our lives. To solve a problem is to become conscious of its solution. Education develops our consciousness. We only have to replace his cave with consciousness and his allegory will apply to our 21st century.
Plato imagined people who spent all their life in a cave. All they can do is to watch shadows on the wall in front of them. The shadows are their “reality”. One day, one of them is set free to turn around and look behind. He discovers a fire and symbols being moved in front of the fire. What he could see on the wall was only a shadow. His reality was only a mirage.
The next step was to let our explorer leave the cave. He discovers the outside world. He discovers a new ‘reality’, a new freedom, and a new consciousness. It seems to us, as of today, that freedom and consciousness come together. We cannot blame the people in the cave for not being aware of a freedom they had never experienced. We are conscious of freedom when we experience it.
Plato’s message is that we are prisoners and should escape from our prison. Let’s get out of our 5% of the material world. Plato would approve!
That may be one of the purposes of our life on earth: We must regain our freedom
Let us add another chapter to Plato’s allegory:
Plato's explorer, upon returning to the cave, chooses a different path. He remains outside, where he encounters love. This transformative experience expands his consciousness, introducing him to new feelings and a different reality.
The woman, a catalyst for his awakening, introduced him to a spectrum of emotions he had never fathomed. He realized that his initial cave was but a fragment of a larger reality, nested within yet another expansive reality. His journey was akin to ascending a staircase, each step broadening his perspective.
Let us water the little seeds:
Freedom, consciousness, and love were already buried in our explorers like seeds waiting to be watered. What happened inside him was like what happened in the nature around him. Seeds are buried in the ground, just as he was buried in his cave. If you don’t water the seeds, nothing comes out. Nature waters them. They rise. Seeds discover the sunlight and grow in a different world. It is their new reality.
Consciously or not, we keep watering little seeds buried in our subconscious. Every stress in our life is an opportunity to bring something to the surface that will help us overcome our problems. This is how we water our little seeds. This is how we push the envelope of our freedom. The criterion of success is a feeling of happiness.
Adding a second chapter to Plato’s allegory of the cave:
We first added the love of one person. Plato already knew what would come next. It is the ‘platonic’ love. That means a feeling of love that does not need help from another human being. It is detached from the material world. It is the love of the whole universe! It is how people find peace and harmony. Some people find it in their pets. Some in the flowers. This love permeates the world like the wind passing through a tree - without becoming attached to it.
What makes humans feel alive is the watering of some seeds already existing deep in their souls, such as freedom, consciousness, and love. It is by developing them that we can become conscious of a new reality.