Freeing the mind.

I love cognizing common themes. Grand schemes. Over arching unity. Universal experience.

After browsing through my writings, essays and journal entries, I became aware of a common theme of thought, or struggle, that I and many other philosophers find themselves against. The notion of Freedom.

Sounds silly no? Freedom? This word is a conundrum. Freedom is a characteristic of humanity. It is the ability to exercise freewill. But so what? What is the problem if we don’t have freedom? Freedom opens the door to a world of discussion, a world of naming, but in brief I’ll say this: Freedom is the ability to create meaning and depth from a world we are both apart and separate. Freedom is our ability to experience reality, to unveil the foreground and carve out a sense of place for ourselves. It is the ability to reflect and act on that reflection, to transform the world around us.

Freedom lays the ground for transformation. Period. If that seems a bit bold, it is. Freedom is transformation. The word creation puts the wrong spin on freedom, tainted with the supposition that it can bring something from nothing. Transformation, on the other hand, relies on a preceding existence that is to molded. It takes experience, experience rooted in a cultural context, and transforms it into something meaningful.

Knowledge is the product of this transformation, and the more one engages his reality critically, the better one becomes at creating meaning that transcends into common experience.

The better question is, how can we gain more freedom? or better, how can be live more freely? The reason why this is so huge, in my opinion, is that it freedom is biophilic in nature. Freedom loves life. It is Oppression, or the absence of freedom that is necrophilic. It stifles, inhibits, strangles, poisons life.

But what is life? Freedom opens the gate to possibility. This is not to say that there are not limits and challenges, but that is all they are: temporal and relative boundaries. They exist only because our mind has not surpassed them. They are not permanent, nor impossible. Freeing the mind unleashes the torrents of imagination where dreams spring forth. So long as we fail to dream, we are imprisoned by the limits of these walls. Freedom is not physical. It is mental. It is in the mind.

Life is in the mind: ‘Whatever the mind of a man can conceive and believe, the mind of a man can achieve’. First we must conceive and conjure this life, then believe. Finally, we must act in this new life.

Whatever your discontents, whatever hardships you face, worry not, for salvation lies in the recesses of you mind where nascent dreams are waiting to be stirred.

And how do we stir these dreams, these glorious possibilities that transform the world into paradise? Revolt. REVOLT. Elevate yourself from the here and now, be radically aware of the slumbering stagnation within you. Raise up your critical consciousness to confront reality. Do not fear or tremble at the sight of the weary who lay unconscious all around you. REVOLT. Make noise, wake them from their trance! Throw yourself against these walled boundaries, sacrifice the malignant mindset that traps and sedates your dreams. Rise up, unfold your tired limbs, raise your eyes to the starry skies and choose a light to lead you. Charge at the mystery beyond and your dreams will take flight.

Wake up! Get emotional! It is a revolution of mind! We are not curators of the earth, we are its cultivators; not the heirs to dreams, but the composers! Every being is responsible to this duty.

Anyway.