What does it mean to be free?
Free is to be detached, disassociated, unbound to a 'thing' or 'body'.
The grand totality of our world is built upon anything but freedom. For certainly we are attached, associated, and bound to many things and the body social. So, in essence we have never been free. The day that we are born we are in essence not free of our mothers. We are codependent both physically and emotionally. Our instincts may be overshadowed by our educational pursuits in life, but our minds are ignorant and unknowing of our history without such institutions. Our bodies are feeble by comparison to all other animals on this planet, and we would not endure long without our medicines, or without the aid of other people.
I think that when people express their various views of freedom, what the interviewee is attempting to convey to the interviewer is a sense of disassociation with those forces or bodies which the individual, and most of us to some degree or another, views as oppressive or imposing. But, life is both oppressive and imposing. Life exists in the antagonistic state, as does even our conscious mind constantly rattle in fits and spasms of wants or desires, self doubt (or egoistic notions ranging from egocentric to narcissism). And so on.
From the virus that gives us chicken pox when we are children, to the worm that devours our flesh in the grave, we are imposed upon by external bodies.
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If I have never known freedom in this lifetime, then how would I imagine it?
A hermit dwelling in a squalor hut or a highlander residing in a high mountain cave would know not the cost of gaining his freedom, per say, but he would have known the daily struggle to maintain it. This hermit would be familiar with the furious forces of the wind and rain, cold and heat, sickness, loneliness, and wanting.
Our highlander would do well to respect the territorial dispute of bears, mountain lions, mountain goats, vipers, scorpions, centipedes, and other intrusive and imposing mechanisms of the natural world.
These men who are free of the body social still live in an antagonistic state of existence.
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When I was a young man a force in the universe chose to reveal to me the ultimate void of the universe, a dark chasm of blackness. It occurred while I had lain down to sleep. I awoke to find myself floating away from my body, and it was while I was in this state of consciousness that I could see the dreams I had been experiencing. These dreams were little lights spinning around the head of my body, a body which slumped on the bed away from my ghostly form. Suddenly, and without warning, the room slipped away from me, and everything that I had known was stripped from my senses. I was for some variable of time cast into a well of darkness. Therein the great void I was a pinpoint of consciousness. A great ring of whitish light surrounded my point. Impossibly, this ring of light expanded indefinitely, and it was filled with all the imagery of my life, the lives of other people, dreams, aspirations, and many other worlds I had never fathomed existed. But, in this state of consciousness, all that had ever been in my life was now a distant dream. I was dead to the world, and the world was as if it had never existed at all. I felt detachment, isolation, and loneliness as my only companions, as my only reminder of what it had once been like to be human. My mind's eye rolled astigmatic ally, and I was left with a feeling like a Charlie horse in my soul. The ring of light faded, and I found that the surrounding blackness was neither emptiness nor nothingness.
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What I think people truly desire is the sensation of feeling free. It is really our limited conception of freedoms which we so eagerly lust after. No one wants to be bullied. Everyone desires comfort. Yet, in order to have any one of these things some leverage over our surroundings is necessary. If the body social does not strangle our notions of freedom, then the natural world, our Mother Earth, will definitely put us to many challenges that we would find not so desirable.
Instead of freedom, I offer the understanding and tolerance of people as units of consciousness, semi-dislocated and set apart as to experience independent through a very limited medium. And this medium of experience, this universal user interface, becomes ever more so filled with parameters so undesirable to freedom lovers the more aware we become.
Brotherhood perhaps is a good thing, though unity is often a bad thing. It depends upon circumstances. But whenever we believe that we have the ONE and only answer to a problem, well, we are pulled back in to the grand illusion of the antagonist, of this existence we call reality. Believing we have the ultimate answer to a problem (absolutism) is a matter of true metaphysics. Honestly, we are sort of like the moth who is drawn to the light, and then zapped by the bug zapper. We are, as I often have tweeted about, lured in by the trappings of the light, and held in the darkness of matter. The material world is not free!!!
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I believe that we are consciousness imbedded in flesh bodies. We will one day transform this consciousness through virtual reality, and similar technologies. As we dive into a virtual world, we become so infused with the game or experience, such as visiting a virtual house, that we temporarily become that character or vehicle in the virtual world. As technology develops further, we will be able to experience consciousness in different ways, new ways. In this medium, perhaps, some measure of what we believe is freedom will be possible. Yet, only if the better people are in position to overlook such technologies.
Technology, however, does not ensure all ends result as planned. Nothing truly can.
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