Freedom?

As our brains and bodies go into Holiday Mode, (even though it is raining right now), Here's an interesting article from the DLM Blog:

How to Really Become the Boss of Your Life

Posted: 30 Jun 2008 08:15 AM CDT

Written on 6/30/2008 by Alex Shalman, creator of the Practical Personal Development blog.

It is of utmost importance for you to be the determining force of how you live your life. That's why the first thing you should probably do is stop reading this article, because it will influence your mind. However, if you do choose to keep reading, you're going to discover the power of personal freedom.

In this life I am free. How is that possible? How can that be when the laws of government and gravity, and the need for food, love, and oxygen bind me? The freedom lives in a place called my mind - boy doesn't that sound weird?

"Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change." ~Stephen R. Covey

Free Yourself In Seven Ways

1. Freedom from food. Delectable pastries, succulent flavors, and savory foods of all kinds keep us at their mercy. Even the ones that don't taste so good, but are necessary for our survival, induce us into a slave-like dependence. It doesn't have to be so.

Solution: Great men by the likes of Gandhi and Buddha were masters of the fast. They would be able to go days, weeks, and even months without food. One time, Gandhi changed the course of peace in India, and the history of the world as we know it, because his mind allowed his body to endure a fast. He was free.

2. Freedom from money. Clothes, cars, houses, jewelry, and gadgets are all interesting little items that people are willing to directly exchange for their freedom. Credit cards expedite this process by holding us accountable, and thus slaves, to the money that we've spend before we had.

Solution: Buy only that which is essential. Better yet, live off of the land. When you stop desiring and consuming, and you start living and producing, you quickly lose money as a personal oppressor and begin to use it, instead of it using you. Being a valuable person, and creating value for the world will take you far.

3. Freedom from government. They can control our education system, our taxes, and our economy, but it is our choice if we hand our freedom over to them - our government.

Solution: One solution would be not to vote, but it would be more useful if it were a unanimous decision. One in which each person decided to do what's right, live in harmony, peace, and use their natural-born-morals to govern themselves. Another solution? Let your voice be heard. The written word is more powerful than any government in the land.

4. Freedom from love. Love can really put a choke hold on an individual. Most people have experienced, or have seen a clingy relationship in their life. One where one person "cannot live" without the other. Bards have sung songs as such, and epic battles have been fought for such love.

Solution: Freedom from love comes when we let ourselves truly experience and accept it. It is as natural as drinking water, and when we allow ourselves to love another human being, truly, and to love ourselves, truly, we disregard our capability to be a slave to love. Instead, we become a vehicle of love, and love itself.

5. Freedom from guilt. This powerful emotion can lead us to do just about anything. Guilt has been known to create marriages and break them. Seen to make people overeat, do drugs, and become violent. In the worst of times man has taken his own life due to feelings of guilt.

Solution: It's going to take you feeling the pain of the guilt, fully embracing it, and then letting it go in order to rip of the shackles of this emotion. It's helpful to concentrate on what you can do right now, versus what has happened and what is not an option for you.

6. Freedom from oxygen. The need for oxygen, and our subsequent lack of freedom due to our dependence on it, is based on the concept that we are afraid to die. Death is an integral, unavoidable, and lasting part of our life cycle.

Solution: Freedom comes when we embrace that death will come. Accept it, and live our life to the fullest while it is still within our ability to do so.

7. Freedom from ignorance. Perhaps the worst restraints that we can experience in life are those imposed on us by our own mind. The only thing holding us back in life, really, is that which we know. Those opinions and viewpoints that we have established at some moment define how we think and the methods that we use to interpret what we experience.

Solution: Educate yourself. Pick up as many books as you can, read them all, and don't believe a word of it.

"Man is free at the moment he wishes to be."~Voltaire

Freedom: Is it practical?

Is freedom practical? No, not if we're looking through the eyes of society, our consumerist group-think collective. Society would have trained you to think that what I am saying is wrong, ludicrous, or even disgusting.

Such is expected. By being a mindless drone of the collective, one is suppressing their ability to think freely, consciously, and individually. That's fine, I accept that for you, and you can too. However, if you choose to be a proactive person of freedom, liberty, and justice - both for yourself and for all - then perhaps putting your self-thinking-cap on will be the greatest gift you can ever give yourself.

"To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom"~Andre Gide

-Alex