What Does Freedom Look Like?

What does psychological and spiritual freedom look like?

Is it no barriers? No boundaries? We mistake what we call Freedom for what it truly is.

In the age of consumption, we feel that when we choose to take something that it represents our inherent freedom.

We believe that we had the 'choice' to take the thing or not. But suppose one doesn’t take said thing, is it not the case that the door to choice remains open where as if I have taken it there is no alternative outcome?

We live in a day and age where people are very concerned with labels. The caveat here is that I’m very well aware that identity and how our sense of it interacts with our current collective system is indeed a very complicated and nuanced discussion. But on a broader level, to be drawn overtly into labels is to be drawn into the belief that your freedom to be and who you are is entirely dependent upon other people's beliefs and their relative acceptances of you or not.

Why should others perceptions of reality effect your path to a free and open experience of reality?

Then ask, if labels disappear and everything including identity and selfhood become completely undefined and lack any sort of agreed upon parameters, will it bring that promised sense of freedom? Practically we need boundaries and labels to determine where exactly we are. Freedom - like everything in life - can only exist in polarity to it's opposite. In this case it’s opposite is not oppression nor tyranny but rather distinct colours, shapes, boundaries and forms. In essence these are the things that give us a sense of our divine, individuated sense of self against the backdrop of that which cannot be objectified but which is the substratum us all.

We and any ‘thing’ can only have substance if there are conditions around it that define it.

Freedom, unbounded and unclarified can’t be recognized by a human mind that sees the world through a prism of spectrums, peculiar qualities and labels.

So perhaps Freedom to a limited and by default dualistic mind really refers to those moments we were recognize that there are barriers. That there are boundaries but that they exist to give us an opportunity to sense into the inherent Freedom that lies both beneath and beyond those conditions. Choices, labels, barriers and boundaries are not impediments to Freedom but signposts to deeper understand Freedom.