FREEDOM, that Great Prize and highly valued Ideological Standard to which all Americans should aspire. What does it mean anyhow and why does it even matter? When you have freedom to take for granted it really doesn't matter but for those in captivity it is rather important!
Is there One Great Freedom that ensures all others or is the whole made up of its components? For the purpose of intellectual speculation we could say that it is both but that still doesn't say what it is. What is Freedom we ask and the answer must be found in a State of Mind and not in a geographical state. Like all things Freedom must start out as an idea before it can be actualized by conceptually limited beings.
Just because conceptually limited beings cannot conceptualize of Freedom does that mean that freedom does not exist? NOT!!! Freedom is Free that is why it is Freedom, however sometimes there is a price to be paid by someone for the Freedom that others enjoy. That also means there is FREEDOM to be Enjoyed because of the Price that others have paid!!!
So, what is Freedom, are we getting any closer to tracking it down? As always, when making relative references to Absolute Truth, the polar dualities must be accounted for. Until then you may not be ready for the words of "IT" so let's just talk "about it" some more.
Freedom in the personal sense is the only freedom there is. We may speak of free countries but they are made up of Free Citizens. So Freedom must be made personal if it is to count for anything. We can speak of lofty aspirations and noble ideals but if it is not a living experience, it is not the real thing. There is a very good reason why personal freedom is the only freedom there is and that is because of Free Will.
Here is where we will quite likely take a departure from the norm if we have not done so already. Free Will can be complicated or it can be simple but either way it can be made to make sense. We could try to explain it by using mathematic formulas and quantum dynamics but that might be the complicated part, how about we go for simple?
Free will is obviously your ability to choose, so it seems obvious that to understand free will we must examine choice. What is choice, how many choices are there and how does it work? That might be a good place to begin. Free Will is nothing more than your ability to direct your attention and Choice is what you focus that attention upon. Now we suspect that the reason this is unknown is because it makes sense and people like to be fooled. We are not here to indulge the fools so we are just going to tell it like it is.
So then choice is your ability to direct your attention, how does this relate to free will and freedom in general? It relates in the same way that the foundation of your house relates to the house itself, by supporting the whole thing. Choice, or the ability to direct your awareness, is the foundation of freedom or the lack of it in many ways. What is it that limits our ability to direct awareness or in other words limits our choice? Only the things we choose to focus on.
Here is where we find out how complex the simplicity of it all is, by understanding how and why we focus our attention. Now when we say the focus of your attention, the unlearned mind will naturally assume that we are speaking of the objects of our awareness. But sadly we have a long ways to go before we get to that because the Truth is far from it.
To explain how this works let us clarify the distinction. Suppose we are looking at a chair, now obviously this chair is the object of our awareness but are we really experiencing the chair? The answer is NO. As a general rule for humanity and as an absolute truth for mortals, you are never really experiencing the object of your awareness you are experiencing your perception of the object.
Once we clearly make this distinction we can finally start saying what we are talking about. Since we are not experiencing this chair, we are really experiencing our judgment of the chair (Perception), which is directly related to our definition of self. It should be obvious that freedom must begin as the release from conceptual limitation or self judgment. Now doesn't that little jumble of words make everything a bit clearer?
If Self has Absolute Value but we judge it as otherwise, this is the bondage to conceptual limitation that we require deliverance from. We obtain this freedom by freeing up our attention from the judgment we have required it to conform to. Once our attention has been freed from its conceptual limitation, we can now use our Free Will to choose higher concepts that previously seemed impossible. That is Freedom, the ability to Choose Absolute Self Value...
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