One of mankind’s greatest longings is complete freedom. One of mankind’s greatest limitations
is the inability to ever truly be free. We want the frictionless state of our origins.
We want the autonomy of a god. We want the sea of reality to part at the whim of our fluctuating,
individual will. We want, like is so often the case, what we cannot have.
Of course, there are many different types of freedom, and there are many layers and nuances
within each type, but arguably, absolute freedom, the existential sort, in which one is able to do,
feel, and choose what one wants how and when they see fit without any kind of coercion,
restraint, or imposition, this is the ideal of freedom that drives the passionate pursuit of all
other forms, and perhaps, at least to some large extent, all human activity in general. However,
in the final analysis, this ultimate endgame of freedom appears to be an incoherent impossibility.
At the top of the pyramid of freedom, even an individual who is lucky enough to have
unfastened all material and societal shackles remains unfree, restricted and told what to do,
when to do it, and why to do it. This individual, of course possessing one
of the most basic freedoms, physical freedom, can move their body around the world as they please.
But in just this first layer of analysis, obvious restrictions are found. Of course, they can only
move according to how their body does and can, and can only move through and with the body.
We generally do not see the body as a ball and chain because we associate part of who
we are with it and only know of existence through it, but it takes no more than a sick
stomach or migraine headache to realize just how heavy this corporal weight is,
how stricken to and limited by it we are. We are stuck inside, captives to it,
subject to its faulty and fragile mechanisms that do and will break, keeping us bound in
space according to its condition until it finally turns itself off, and us with it, unpreventably.
And more yet, our body controls much of what we choose to do with it—how
we move it, where we move it, and why. Being told when to eat, when to go to the bathroom,
when to sleep, when to wake up, that is the daily routine of a prisoner, not a free man.
Of course, one can decide to temporarily resist their bodily urges, and not eat or
sleep and so forth, momentarily experiencing a fleeting distinction between mind and body.
But it takes very little time for the conspiracy between the mind and body to reveal itself,
the mental sensations corollary to the body’s state soon compelling the
individual to behave accordingly and get in line. This, of course, is just physical issues, though.
Psychologically, abstractly, the individual is also able to think and consider everything
beyond the mere urgers and physical conditions of their body and environment. This much is true,
but is not our relationship with the mind in the realm of thought
ultimately the same as our physical relationship with the body? We can only think through our mind,
and we can only think in the way our mind thinks. We are given one lens of the world with one type
of software running on one type of hardware to process all that we intake and experience.
If an artist was commissioned for a job and told that they were free to make anything they wanted,
but were then told it must be on an etch-a-sketch, would they really be free
to make anything they wanted? Only in some sense. In truth, the freest of persons are
free to think and see things how they choose, but only so long as it is with words that exist,
through concepts that have been construed, in a brain that has been built, with respect
to an environment that has been experienced, all moved by the laws of the natural world.
Our mind’s abilities are its constraints; and its constraints inform us what to think
and see—each condition of the brain working in relation to the world like levees and dams
controlling the flow of thought, each thought emerging out of the cause-and-effect ripples on
the surface of its unending self-orchestrated flow. We are caught in this movement, swept
away uncontrollably without ever choosing where we started from and where we go.
Being compelled what to think and how to see is the report of an indoctrination, not a free man.
It is a demonstration of humanity’s overzealous ego
and anthropocentricism to think that so long as no other humans tell them what to do, they are free.
Man should undoubtedly strive, fight for, and protect all their earthly freedoms within
the physical, social, economic, and political domains of the world. But if and once he has,
the remaining unsatisfied existential freedom, of which he will continue to drink and run
and lust and love to try to attain, perhaps requires a different kind of consideration.
“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms,
and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.” Wrote Emil Cioran.
The closest thing to absolute existential freedom, it seems, is freedom from freedom itself;
freedom from the constraints that the concept of freedom imposes.
Being totally existentially free or unfree implies being a defined, separate thing that can be
contained or inhabited by some other thing. “A human being is a part of the whole,
called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts
and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true [religiosity].
Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure
of peace of mind.” Wrote Albert Einstein in a letter of condolence to a grieving father.
Most would likely agree with the premise that the individual is essentially associated with
their brain. But if so, which part of the brain, which area, which spot? Can you find it? Can you
feel it? Can you locate it when you close your eyes or point to it if you took a brain scan? No.
Consciousness is who we are—how we identify ourselves through experience.
But consciousness is, when distilled down empirically, a strange empty awareness,
malleably undefined and inexorably connected with everything that makes and interacts with it,
and doesn’t. You are not the master of your mind. You are not the servant. You are both and neither.
You are your thoughts and the lineage of every bit of history that they touched to get to you.
You are the words you are hearing and the mind that is automatically processing them.
You are the mind that will forget them in some amount of time. You are everything you’ve heard
and perceived. You are everything you’ve never heard or perceived. You are everything you’ve ever
hated. You are everything you’ve ever loved. You are what’s inside and what’s outside your mind,
your body. And you are none of the above.
If you exist, you cannot be free. If there is no you, you cannot be contained by anything.
Like the desire for perfect, unending happiness, the desire for complete and absolute freedom
is likely impossible. But like happiness, it is, in its true, ultimate form, a state
that comes and goes, unattainable in the ideal, but attainable in the moment. In the moments in
which we surrender to the complete unified image of being, unpluralized, in all its comforts and
discomforts—when we cease trying to square circles and placate everything that contests with us,
when we stop trying to escape what cannot be escaped. It is the classic lesson,
the Chinese finger trap, the Tao in Taoism, Nirvana in Buddhism, the silence of
Wittgenstein—the harder one tries, the harder one flails, the more entrenched one becomes.
In his poem, On Freedom, Kahlil Gibran wrote,
“At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own
freedom, Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you
wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff. And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free
when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you,
and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfilment. In truth that which you call
freedom is the strongest of these chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.