I once spent several days fasting on a walkabout in a mountain wilderness.
I carried nothing but a box of matches and a bottle of water. I had no camp or belongings to return to or any need to go looking for food. All I had to do was walk, look, enjoy, and wander as i wondered what was over the next rise. When I got tired each evening, I made a fire and bed down right where I was.
For the first two days I had to keep reminding myself that i really was free to be exactly where I was. I was attached to nothing. I could go or stay and be anywhere at any time I felt like. Once that reality finally set in, for the first time in my life, I got a taste of what freedom of spirit really means.
I think when we die, we have that same feeling as we wander through the wondrous cosmos.
The magic feeling of freedom was lost the minute I turned for home.
I believe the moment we die, we have a feeling of pure ecstasy. Pure 100% freedom from all things physical as our souls join the others on the astral plane.
The last time I walked into the wilderness I took a bicycle along and a large plastic bag found on new matresses (I remembered that from an outward-bound course in scotland) I came to a large hill (We call them mountains in Appalachia) and I should have kept the bike to coast down the far side because it took me two days to cross that mountain with not one ride to help.
It is interesting to note you had a bottle of water and matches, you were still attached and that you claimed a home…how free were you again?.. Freedom is what is inside. You don’t need to fast or get lost to find freedom. You just need to know yourself.
When you get down to just a bottle of water and a box of matches for a week or so in total isolation, we can talk again about the meaning of freedom. Talk is cheap. Getting in touch with the free soul inside takes effort and commitment from the body without. No pain, no gain.
I find it interesting that you associate having a house with lack of freedom. If you need to be able to wander about to feel free, that’s fine. But if you find a place you like and want to stay, why wouldn’t you? Feeling that you have to move about in order to be free is just as much a chain as staying in one place.
I used to feel the same: that everything was designed to trap us! It was a feeling that lasted well into my late 20s, and still lingers even now - modernity does not equate to freedom! Why would it? Who says it should?
If you feel that to be free, you have to constantly move around (thus not being tied to anything) to are just as trapped as the person who feels compelled to return to where they live.
Total freedom would be the knowledge that at any moment you could go somewhere else if you wanted, but this really doesn’t work well in the real world unless you decide that you would like to live in the woods for the rest of your life, because deciding that you will just not come to work in the morning is not very effective in a society.
Total freedom would be the same as anihilation. Not even God, who is bound to His creation, is totally free. All I was explaning in my walk-about in the mountains was was a deeper notion of freedom than I had ever previously experienced. Absolute freedom could only be experienced in the instant of singularity.
According to determinism, there is no such thing as freedom. Anything that would be “free” would have to be totally inert; i.e. unbound even by the laws of physics and hence non-existent.
So, “free” is a relative term. Free from something or free for something or whatever …
If the Demon of Dearth is not spirit, it does not frighten me.
Obama is a man of spirit, for sure. His grandmother is Kikuyu and she spoke well of him. That is unusual.
