The Tree of Freedom 🌳
Understanding is The seed 🌱
Dear Friend 🟣✨🟡,
In the last post, we embarked together on a journey that lead us to say that:
Understanding is the seed of freedom 🌱.
This is where I would like to begin today. But before we can meaningfully consider the question of freedom, we must first inquire into the nature of our actions.
Why is it that we do the things we do?
After quick consideration, we might come up with some of following reasons:
It feels good
A sense of obligation, such as providing for our family or paying rent
It is a social convention
Habits carried from childhood
Love, pleasing others, guilt, fear, rebellion, …
Our parents
Religion
A personal philosophy or belief system
Ambition
Experimentation
Increases some KPIs
Our manager said so
Or simply, we do not actually know 🫢
And many other reasons of course…
At any rate, we see that we act out of motives held in the deep recesses of our being. And as we just saw, not all of those motives are thoroughly examined beliefs and convictions that we hold in full consciousness.
But that is not the whole answer to the question we asked. The further we contemplate this question, not only in “thought”, but especially in self-awareness while willing. We would quickly come to the fascinating realization, that we are mostly asleep with regard to our will.
Let me clarify what I mean by asleep. Imagine yourself in a room with a couple of your friends having a conversation. If I am awake, I will be able to hear them and engage in the conversation if I choose to do so. If I am asleep, I would not hear what they are saying and I would most definitely not have in any way the capacity to engage in the conversation. So despite my physical presence in the situation, I am not awake to chose to engage with it.
This is, by analogy, how we are with regard to our will. We are present in the situation, but we (🙃) are often not awake to chose to engage with it. Needless to say here, that this is not absolute. We are awake to different degrees in different situations.
Let me offer a vivid example. I often change the hand where I wear my watch. And despite knowing this, I cannot tell you the number of times I catch myself checking the time on the hand where the watch habitually is and not on the hand where the watch actually is. Of course this only happens for a few days, until the new hand, in turn, becomes the habitual hand. Then once again, I change where I wear the watch.
So despite knowing in my thoughts, where the watch is. I do not know in my will where the watch is.
You might try a similar experiment: decide to hold your phone with the unfamiliar hand for the next month and see how often your will goes back to the familiar one, as if on its own.
We now begin to see that there is a clear separation between our thoughts and our will. Even when “I” decide to act differently, it does not go that I “will” act differently.
I do not necessarily always will what I think and I do not think what I will.
However, this separation is only temporary, because eventually my will catches up to my thoughts. In the same way, that eventually, my habit catches up with the actual hand where the watch is.
So we could say, that:
Thoughts become will in time.
We explored this in more details in the last post.
Conclusions
Most of us are familiar with the idea of conclusions as the result of our reasoning. We often regard conclusions as simply another type of thought. This perspective leads us to believe that thinking and willing are of a different nature, different substance: one is internal and ethereal (if I may use this word), and the other is external and material. We would like to believe that what we think has no impact on the external world, and only what we do matters. This clear-cut distinction often leads to all sorts of hypothetical unrealistic thinking; a conceptual loop without end. But if we come to see thinking and willing as one continuum of the same nature and substance, we might begin to regard action as the conclusion of our reasoning.
To draw a vivid analogy, I could say the following:
In the same way that water vapor becomes ice in cold and in time, thoughts become will in time.
And we can probably all easily understand that if the vapor is polluted, we cannot expect the ice produced to be pure. In fact, it is far easier to purify vapor than ice. Just as one might purify the will by heating it and refining the vapor of thought from which it forms.
This is perhaps why Pythagoras said in his Golden Verses, verse 30:
“Never do anything which you do not understand.”
Or why a Zen koan might say:
“Before you raise your hand—who is raising it?”
As long as I have not awakened to my will and thoroughly examined the thoughts that form them, “I” may not truly exist in any meaningful sense. What I call “I” is mostly a stream of almost automatic actions motivated by borrowed beliefs, collective assumptions, societal norms I never questioned, religious codes I inherited, and countless other influences I have mistaken for my own.
What is Freedom?
Now that we have examined the nature of our actions, we can come back to the question of freedom. What is freedom?
Freedom is not a rejection or a rebellion against our held beliefs. Freedom is holding beliefs in full understanding or in other words; converting beliefs into knowledge. Whether those are the same, refined or new-found beliefs. If those beliefs are seeds, full understanding or knowledge means knowing what kind of fruits those seeds will bear in the passing of the seasons. So if we want mangos, we have to plant mango seeds.
I could say:
Freedom is the degree to which we become aware of the thoughts that guide our will, discern their origin and truth, and consciously guide our will in alignment with thoughts we have individually recognized as true and good.
The next obvious question is, how do we recognize the true and good?
I will let you contemplate this question while I tell you some trivia.
Did you Know?
Did you know that, Ford did a cost/benefit study and “concluded” that it would be “cheaper” to pay death lawsuits than to fix a defective car?
Did you know about the world’s most perfect food that is technically delicious and science backed? (You might think I am joking but that is actually how this company presents itself on their website, check it out.)
It is a ready-to-drink powder in a bottle that you mix with water 😋. They call it: “real science, real nutrition, real food.”
I guess I have to learn what the word “real” means 😅.
How we do we direct our actions?
I hope you enjoyed the trivia.
Now let us come back to our question. If freedom is acting according to thoughts we have individually recognized as true and good, is there not a paradox hidden in this idea? How do we recognize what is truly good, and not simply what is convenient, familiar, or self-serving? How do we ensure that the thoughts we follow are not just those that advance our own interests at the expense of others, while still appearing noble or justified in our eyes? After all, it is always easier to believe that chilling on the couch is better for us than any form of physical effort.
To approach this paradox with clarity, let us recall a few essential ideas we have explored so far:
In the previous post, we discussed how we can come to regard the outer world as a vast museum with an exhibition of the past of our inner lives.
We already discussed the process of creation by which our inner life becomes the world we live in. In doing so, we no longer experience our inner life as something subjective within us, but as the very environment that surrounds us. We become subject to our own thoughts, made outer through creation.
This is important because within our minds, we are rarely able to judge the quality of our thoughts fairly. We tend to live inside them as if they were unquestionable laws, unaware of their distortions or limitations. But once those thoughts become our actual lives, their quality becomes evident; not through analysis, but through experience. We begin to feel their beauty or their weight and sharpness reflected back at us by the life they generate and we live. And in that reflection, we may either revel, or wish we had thought differently.
What is this faculty by which we may either revel or wish we had thought differently ?
The Warmth of Feeling ☀️
It is unfortunate that I have to make this comment, but here I do not refer to feeling as moodiness or the sentimental romanticized version we may associate with the word today.
I refer to feeling as the faculty of sight into the future, what cannot yet be seen. The way we recognize harmony or dissonance between our thoughts and life itself.
Have you ever worn new shoes that were just slightly uncomfortable, but you pushed through the discomfort anyway until the discomfort turned into a blister and eventually the blister into a wound?
This might give us an idea of how the meeting at Ford went. What do you mean it does not feel right? The spreadsheets are always right.
Or a much needed conversation before creating the most perfect food. What do you mean it does not feel good? It is technically delicious and science backed.
That is what happens when we let our thoughts and will take the lead without listening to feeling. Whenever we ignore the subtle signals and reason ourselves into actions that are necessary or that seem right but do not feel right, it is only a question of time, before the discomfort turns into a blister and the blister turns into a wound. Or before we all end up eating the most perfect food.
Feeling, on its own is not enough. Our feelings have to be reflected upon, understood, digested. Only then do they begin to warm and clarify our understanding and shape the way we act, which it turn shapes the way we feel in future actions.
The Tree of Freedom
Understanding is the seed of freedom, however the seed is not the tree. The seed is the tree in the passing of the seasons, the nurturing of the soil and the warmth and light of the sun.
So we might say: the seed of freedom is born from right understanding. But unless this understanding is carried into action, it remains abstract, not yet real.
Through action, our thoughts enter the world, or more accurately, our thoughts become the world. And from the world, we receive something back; not just results, but a feeling. This feeling tells us whether our action harmonized with our deeper nature, or whether we forced it, ignored something, or distorted it.
This resonance, must be thought through; not reacted to, but reflected upon. And thus begins the spiral: from clear thinking, to free willing, to resonant feeling, and back again. Each turn of the spiral draws us deeper into understanding and higher into freedom; not as a state we achieve but a journey to unfold.
We often live in cycles of thinking, then willing then feeling. They are separate processes that we experience in different points of time. We think, but sometimes we act against our resolutions. We act, then we regret. We regret, but we do not learn the lesson. We often find ourselves repeating the very same patterns.
The tree of freedom grows to the same extent to which we can align those three to happen simultaneously and harmoniously in perfect resonance. So we will what we think and what makes us carry no regrets into the future.
Whether we believe in heaven or hell, or Karma and reincarnation, we often hold that this happens after death where we either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of our actions. But perhaps this idea only becomes necessary when we do not regularly reflect upon, feel, and learn from the lives we are already living. If our thoughts, our actions, and our feelings remain fragmented, then the uncomfortable shoes cause a wound.
But maybe, just maybe, we do not need to wait until after death to pass through either one. Maybe we pass through them every day or even every moment. What is death anyway?
May you nurture your understanding until you see it grow into a magnificent freedom tree 🌳.
What about the Others 🤔 ?
So far we have considered the question of freedom from the perspective of one individual. You might be wondering, what about the others?
Can two free individuals live together 😆?
You might also be saying I did not create the world I live in, I did not create any of these systems. Others did.
What others 🙃? What do you mean “two”?
I will let you contemplate that, until we explore it further together in future posts.
Thank you for reading,
🟣✨🟡
Written in Auroville, India 🇮🇳