FREEDOM
by
Geoffrey A. Farthing
Freedom is a magic word. It means the chance to be oneself, to grow
straight and true without distorting, even crippling, influences and
the opportunity to live one's life according to one's own lights without
interference, discord, irritation and even fear. It means privacy
free from intrusion, freedom of thought and choice, and the chance
for people and races to develop their particular bent and characteristics.
Freedom means all this and much more.
Is a baby, is a schoolboy free? Is a young man in love, or learning
his trade, free? Is a married man or woman free? Are we, as parents,
free when the children are grown up and have left home? Are we free
in old age? All these situations we find limiting and maybe irksome.
Is a castaway on a desert island or a hermit on a mountain free? Each
would certainly be free of interference from other people. The only
limitations he would suffer would be his own. In such cases as these,
unless we saw our failings and strengths for ourselves, they would
never come to our notice and we would have no measure of ourselves.
We could live with our conceits unchallenged. There would be no one
to bring them to our attention. Maybe a few of us do withdraw from
our fellows to avoid this or comparisons with others or to avoid having
to cope with the pressures and difficulties inherent in relationships
with others.
The recluse or hermit has the necessity of looking after his body.
He needs food, clothes, warmth and so on, but these do not challenge
him, make him justify himself. Only other people do that.
Natural circumstances of climate, weather, geographical situation,
our dependence on food, water, air, rest and so on, even most of our
own limitations, are all acceptable. We can move, or otherwise change
our circumstances. We can ignore our limitations but we cannot ignore
other people nor alter them to make them more compatible. This has
often been tried, by persuasion, sometimes gentle, sometimes violent.
What right has anyone to try to alter his fellows, recognizing that
whatever he does must inevitably interfere with their freedoms, their
social habits, religions, views and political ideals? Who has the
right to set the standard and to say what is desirable and so enforceable?
These questions seem virtually unanswerable in meaningful terms.
Evolution, however, seems to have worked out the means of peaceful
development in human communities. The first essential is the restriction
of individual liberties - within acceptable limits. Custom over a
long time prescribes the limits, and "authority" imposes the observance
of them. Within these limits, the maximum individual freedom for self-expression,
use of time, work, the general ordering of life, thought, etc. is
essential. The "authority" must be acceptable too. Authority must
not be unpredictable, erratic, or arbitrary. It must enforce the law
but not make it. Any community law should be justifiable and challengeable
by that Community and never become absolute and fixed.
Outside of these limitations of liberty no one should have any rights
or powers to impose his will on others, unless it be for example,
parents bringing up children, but who could make practical rules for
this, other than love and understanding (and a good deal of courage)?
Freedom demands a look at problems such as "permissive" sex relationships
and the effects of these on the community. How far does the individual
subserve the community or the community the individual?
We have looked at the freedom limitations a man suffers, just because
he is what he is, and at the inevitable restraints imposed by society.
We have noticed the reactions of personality to personality, which
include the subtle ones typified by, as it was said, Mark Anthony's
genius being "rebuked" by Caesar.
Man is dependent on nature. Units of the human family are interdependent.
They cannot get on without one another. No man can come into existence
by himself or rear himself. As an infant, he is helpless, utterly
dependent. Humans congregate into communities for protection, division
of labour, mating, and so on. A community provides much more than
man's physical well-being. It puts him into these important relationships
with other people. This supplies his further needs of affection, admiration,
assurance as well as of criticism and test. This takes care of our
emotional needs. Similarly we require the stimulation of our fellows
to make us think, to make us express ourselves clearly, in other words
- to promote our mental development.
Physically, emotionally and mentally we are largely dependent on
others, but, as we have seen, as well as providing the stimulation
and the pleasantries of intercourse, they mean limitations and sometimes
unpleasantness. In the Theosophical Society we say these trials and
constraints are our Karma, the result of what we have done. Looking
at them in the present light as character-developing aids, would we
really be free of them even if we could?
Does it begin to look as if there is no such thing as freedom, and
if there is, would it really be desirable? Maybe we shall have to
have a deeper look, a look at the essential nature of being, of our
individual being. Here we come against great difficulties because
we can only know our being in terms of our own "knowingness". This
knowingness might be described as the awareness of knowing (subject),
of knowing something (object). It might be thought we are now becoming
unnecessarily abstruse. But it must have become obvious that apart
from interference from other people the limitations imposed on us
by our own vehicles of "being," e.g. our bodies, and by the physical
circumstances or other conditions in which we find ourselves, are
the real restrictions on our liberty. Real freedom can apply only
to an unconditioned and unlimited state of being. Absolutely, this
is probably unattainable, at least until our emergence into the ONE
is attained, at the end of our cycles of being, in what has been called
Para-Nirvana. Para-Nirvana implies that Nirvana is a condition less
absolute than Para-Nirvana. This implies that there are degrees of
liberation. For our deeper meaning, freedom must be thought of in
these terms. Real freedom becomes an inner subjective condition. Such
a condition could only apply to consciousness, and for us as humans,
unselfconsciousness. This must also mean that somehow consciousness
is graduated. We have to try to see what that could mean.
We are familiar with the idea of levels of being: physical, emotional,
mental and so on. What we are saying is that to operate self-consciously
at each of these levels means our operating in a different mode of
consciousness for each of them. The 'feeling', so to speak, of consciousness
at each of them is different. The appreciation of things operates
in one band of consciousness. Our response, in terms of feeling, to
these things and to creatures and other people operates in another
band. The experience is of a different order. Similarly with mind
activity, thinking and remembering, where not so much feeling is involved,
we are aware of a definite kind of inner activity. The awareness
of each of these kinds of inner response and activity is knowingness.
Notice that this too is an inner activity different again from the
physical perceptions, or emotional feeling or actual thoughts themselves,
of all of which we can be aware.
This state of being aware, reflexively, of our responses and so on
has been called self-remembering or self-awareness. In such a state
we say a man knows in a particular way, what he is doing. This
state of being aware of oneself in action and of the action, is knowingness
in our present sense.
Now knowingness of this kind is not conditioned, in that it is not
dependent on the thing, or action, known. It is the thing known that
is limited or conditioned. If then, we would know freedom, we must
somehow cultivate our knowingness. This means lifting our awareness
free of objective consciousness, i.e. of the ordinary activities or
use of ourselves at all levels in waking life, This is a special human
ability. Carl Jung, the eminent psychologist, has told us of the occasion
one day, going to school, when he suddenly became aware of himself,
self-aware, in this special way. It is the state so admirably described
by Dr Maurice Nichol in his Psychological Commentaries. It must be
the climax of a certain period of effort and growth. It seems it is
an ability that can be cultivated, but seemingly not for its own sake.
In any case, we could not do this because we cannot know the experience
till we have had it.
In theosophical terms it must correspond to what we could call "Egoic"
consciousness. This is a paradoxical state because in it, while one
is freed from the limitations of personal "vehicles" and circumstances
in that they are transcended, the degree of transcendence is limited
to the degree of our Egoic growth or development.
The achievement of this growth is by "spiritual" training. We all
now know what this means, even if only vaguely. It is right action,
in the right spirit; it is devotion, perseverance, and self-forgetfulness.
The culmination of this in due time, not of our choosing, is a break-through,
seemingly always sudden, into a new world a new state of being - a
state of freedom where everything is seen in a new way, a detached
way, an uninvolved way, and yet everything is of interest and concern.
We see nature at work, in creature and process, as life, living and
moving, in LOVE, to an inevitable end wherein all share and all is
well. Anxiety as to ultimate outcome can have no place. All the seeming
petty detail of our lives is played out against this background of
undisturbed serenity and compassion. Our own selves, as we once regarded
them, are part of that process, but we are now unattached, unconfined.
We are of the process but not in it. We are free and can say, as could
Milton even when in prison: "the fishes that tipple in the deep know
no such liberty ..". This is real freedom; it is Theosophy too.
Within our Society we must surely have regard to all that is written
here. Our rules are all the restrictions we should suffer. The Society
cannot prescribe forms of belief or desirable literature, formulate
dogma, follow an orthodoxy, recommend practices. Its function is to
promote its Objects, nothing else. Members must be free, free to follow
Truth their own way, free to make their own mistakes, read what they
like, do what they like, only with reasonable regard for others interests
and freedom. Let us remember that "The Truth shall make you free";
vice-versa, Truth can only survive in Freedom.