The Call of Unbound Freedom – Part 1,2&3

The Call of Unbound Freedom – Part 1&2
By Gilbert Ross • May 17, 2016

Note from the Editor: This article is the first part of a series with the title “The Call of Unbound Freedom”.

 

 

What is Freedom?

I know that you know what freedom is or supposed to be but do you remember what it is? This is the important question and perhaps the only question that needs to be asked in order to find freedom – to soar high and discover that you were, are and will always be free. Freedom is a given that you have not opened up to remember yet. I do not mean to start off by sounding cryptic, so please accept my apologies upfront if anything that is written in this series of articles might come across as shrouded in mystery or ‘esotericism’ because it is not meant to be anything like that. In any case, this perception is only, well, a perception. The goal of this series is to serve as a guide that does not talk to your mind in any explicit or purely factual way but it talks directly to your heart and to your soul.
What will come out from reading this text is not something that you will grasp by your mind’s constant attempts to classify, label, rationalise or analyse. Be sure that it will fail. Not because it will not understand what is written. In fact there are many things that your mind will grasp and that will certainly be very helpful in practical day to day life. But this is not the gem at the heart of it. The real treasure that will come is in triggering memories you have encoded within many layers of your being – from your DNA to your nervous system, bio-energetic field and subtle bodies, up to your soul and beyond. Don’t worry if you are not making any perfect sense of it now. It will resonate with you and flow through you shortly.
So what is this thing about freedom being not what you think it is but what you remember it is? In short, you have obscured the very basic truth that You Are Free with mental concepts and ideas of what freedom is and should be. You have covered an inner knowing and memory with layers of mental constructs about freedom being this or freedom being that. Most of all you have been made to believe that you are not free. Your concept or idea of freedom is always something which your mind latches on to as an ideal that you do not have now but might have one day. Freedom then for most humans, becomes a hope and not a real mode of being that can be tapped into right here, right now.
Yes, I know what you are thinking. What about that innocent person who has been imprisoned or held captive unjustly for many years? What is freedom for him? Is it not being out as a free man? What about the woman who saw immense suffering in her war-torn country and who had her children taken away from her and is living in utter poverty and misery? What is freedom for her? What can we say to all those people who have been broken, misguided, kidnapped, taken to hell and left there? Can we tell these people that their idea of freedom is only a misrepresented ideal and in fact they are free every single moment? I will tell you this – some of these people who have been through life experiences we cannot even fathom, know it already and you don’t need to tell them anything. Sometimes hardship and difficult life moments have ways to strip us naked from layers of pretensions, expectations and false beliefs and make us see ourselves as we really are. Of course, we don’t need to go through immense suffering to open our eyes. We can do it through our will to remember who we really are.
 

Let’s Get Real about Freedom

So what is real freedom? Is it just a matter of perspective or degrees? Or is it something we have forgotten its real meaning? Where do we find our freedom and how?
Real freedom is not a matter of degrees as in our mental conception of freedom. For example you might think that having more financial independence will give you a greater degree of freedom. Yes, this can be said when we understand freedom as freedom of movement and access. Our mental construct of freedom is very much tied to its physical representation of movement and of being unchained and unbound. So in that sense of seeing freedom you can say that in theory more financial wealth will give you the means to have more movement and freedom. Even more directly, if you had to be physically limited in movement for some reason or another, the only idea of freedom that runs through your head is to be physically free to move about. Ironically, the same thing would be said if you had to completely lack a body. People who have experienced out of body experiences of sorts will share with you the immense sense of freedom from not being tied to a physical body and having the ability to move anywhere with the sheer power of awareness. So once again we see that the idea of freedom that is linked to physical space and movement is a relative one and will always come in a matter of degrees. It can never be otherwise because space and movement are both relative. Hence once we tie the idea of freedom to space and movement we will get locked into a framework of thinking that is relativistic and subject to angle of view or perspective.
Is this the real sense of freedom? I’m afraid not although it can be partly associated to the real sense of freedom; but it is not freedom in itself. The real freedom has to  do with creation and therefore creativity. You have the power to create your life and shape your destiny. In other words you are free to make a choice about what you want to create in your life – abundance, beauty, prosperity, love, frustration, fear or disenchantment. You are free to create whatever you want in whatever way you want. You are a creator – that is your real nature and your real purpose. So you have the great freedom to turn the negative into positive, to rearrange and shift a situation around, to build a new reality, to change your ideas and bring in fresh new life and energies into your life and those of others. You are a continuous channel of change and creativity.
 

Misguided Beliefs and Ideas

Yet this freedom is misperceived and misaligned to our beliefs and ideas. It is lacking. We lack the freedom, however, not because it is not there but because we can’t see it and therefore we can’t be inspired by it. We have parted away from this basic simple truth a long time ago. We have forgotten all about it and yet it is hanging there in perpetual suspension waiting for us to look at it, acknowledge it, breath it and make use of it. Through the eons, we have forgotten more and more about our real nature, about our great freedom. We have build many beliefs that run against this very basic truth. These beliefs have been influenced by our perception (or misperception) of the world, by the consensual reality of the society and culture we live in and by the false creations of our own mind. So these beliefs have burrowed deeper into our being. They became hardcoded into our genes, into our bodies, in our mental world and language which in turn creates the shared reality we experience with our fellow members of society.
 

Forgetfulness & Remembrance

Everyday we reconfirm our beliefs of scarcity, limitation and fatalism. These affirmations are hidden in our thinking, expressions and mode of speech. We chant them everyday! They are solidified by our fears which in turn creates more fear into a vicious circle. We keep on reminding ourselves that we are not free instead of stopping to remember that we really are. We are living the ultimate illusion, the greatest denial of all. The truth that we are free flies over our heads, runs beneath our feet, sideways and in parallel. It is everywhere yet we do not see the signs because we can only interpret the signs that we remember of. So where does all this take us? Are we forever trapped in a mass-scale amnesia, into a reality matrix that offers us no escape or way out? Or do we have a way out? Yes there is a way out and it is called remembrance.
 

To be continued in Part 2 of the series

Thanks to: http://soulhiker.com

The Call of Unbound Freedom Part 2: Creativity & Experience
By Gilbert Ross • May 22, 2016 • No comments

Note from the Editor: You can find Part 1 here. Would you like more of this series? Please share on social media as much as possible and put your comments below. This will give me feedback on whether I should keep on going with the series. 

Why Am I Free?

It’s funny how this is a question nobody asks! We are so used of asking “Why am I not Free?”. Change the question around and snap!, your mind flips for a second. You shake yourself out of the trance. At least for a while. Stop to think for a second – ask yourself the question. Now. Go through it gently. Look for internal signs like some felt sense of wonder, openness, space. “Why am I free?”. This is a question which presupposes the truth that you are free. Your waking consciousness is baffled into confusion for a second because it doesn’t make sense. This is when you have the chance to peep through past the piles and piles of beliefs and mental fortresses. It’s a direct call with your inner being. In that moment, in those seconds, you connect. Perhaps you realise what has been there all the while
I cannot say what you find there and what the answer may be but I can give you a general idea. You are free because You Are. This is something the mind cannot grasp because the mind always latches on to breaking down things into causes and effects. What if the cause and the effect are one? Bang, the software crashes. This is a paradox for the mind but for your deeper consciousness it is a simple resonating truth.
I’ll give you another pointer. You are free because you are a creator – this is your true nature. You are an inseparable part of the creative process of life. Religions and philosophies have always told us that there is a creator but that this creator is separate from us. If we dare think that we have the freedom and power to create, we are said to have hubris or a God complex. In reality there is nothing more humbling than realising the truth. It is humbling because to know the truth you have to knock down all the pretensions and false identities, your acting roles, your illusions. You break free from the tyranny of falsehood and you are at one with your real You. How can that not be modest, genuine and honest?
That is what seeing yourself as a creator is. Knowing this great sense of freedom, not from your ego’s false identities, but from your true inner being. Seeing and being your true nature is anything but narcissistic or hubris. It is a deep maturity that comes from transcending the narrow and self-focused interests of your egoic mind. The ego cannot know what real freedom is because real freedom means the exclusion of its existence. What the ego does is it implants other concepts and ideas of freedom and how freedom is something that you don’t have.

What does being a creator mean?

From a high perspective, being a creator means being open to the creative force of life and putting your conscious intention to direct this force somewhere. From a more earthly perspective, being a creator means having the freedom and power to create new things into being – from feelings and thoughts to intentions and their manifestation.
You create new opportunities, actualise dreams and ideas, put things in motion, you create ripples that change your destiny and those of others, you invent, you make possible what otherwise seemed impossible. You manifest your destiny into being, change your reality and most of all co-create the destiny of a new earth. Yes, you’ve read it right. I am not fluffing up words or dressing them posh. It is so.
This is of course what being a creator is in a very short summary. There is a confluence of so many aspects and so many overtones in meaning that the question would be a volume on its own. However the idea in all its beauty and brilliance is poetic in as much as it is down-to-earth real. It is there for everyone to experience and open up to. Now that I mentioned experience, this is another important concept intertwined with the idea of freedom and creation or creativity.
We know the world and ourselves through experience. It’s not through abstraction, logic or thinking, irrespective of how clear they are. Experience is fundamental to consciousness and to everything. The Universe, and everything within and beyond, is experiential. It’s an experiential engine. For you and I, experience drives our every thought, feeling, memory and imagination. It is primary and fundamental. If you never experience, you cannot think, abstract, imagine or make sense out of anything.

Experience Counts

So experience is the basis of everything. Like I mentioned before, you are free because you simply are, but you are because you experience otherwise you would only be a potential, a template. In short you are free because you experience, or to slice it from another angle, you are free to experience the reality you choose. Experience is not something that is given to you like an impression but it is what you make out of it.
This is evident in our language. We say “he is more experienced”, meaning that somebody has gained experience through interacting with life and making something out of it. He has created something. Experience is forever tied with consciousness and with creating because reality is constantly created through consciousness experiencing. Without going into metaphysics and against the dominant scientific paradigm that reality is separate from consciousness, I will break it down like this: “Freedom is the ability to create your own reality by choosing what to experience”.
How wonderful is that? You have the freedom to create your own reality by choosing what to experience! The higher the experience, meaning the more conscious intent and openness you put into your experience, the greater the creative gifts of shaping your reality will be and the more free you are as a creator. Which brings us to the last point – awareness.
Awareness arises out of putting our conscious attention to something. It can be active as well as passive. Active awareness is when we consciously focus our ‘inner lens’ onto something to make it sharper or more defined. ‘Passive awareness’ comes from the quieting of the mind, when we clear those things that block the view – the emotional debris, distorted perceptions, mind games and attachments. So in a sense it arises from sweeping away the mental junk that does not help you connect and remember something. The result of connecting and remembering something you already knew is then often referred to as inner awareness.
 
More of this series coming up. Please share and show you care Click here for Part 1.


Thanks to: http://soulhiker.com

The Call of Unbound Freedom Part 3: Awareness
By Gilbert Ross • Jun 16, 2016 • No comments
This is the third part of a series. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already.

 
The co-emergence of Awareness & Experience
Awareness is as basic as experience. In fact to experience something, you need to be aware of it in the first place and at the same time to be aware, you need to be experiencing something. There is a kind of a circle or loop. It is what philosophers consider to be a problem of self-referentiality. But in reality it is only a problem when we understand awareness to be just a function of our waking consciousness – the same level of consciousness we use for thinking, grasping, analysing and communicating among other things.
A very important aspect of consciousness is that it is multileveled or multi-dimensional. In short, consciousness is more than your thinking, attention or self-awareness as some aspects of Science would have us believe. It is extended over many dimensional planes of reality, one of which is the same one your physical brain and body are in and the one your ‘I’ thinks is the only reality you are experiencing. But it is not.
The part of your consciousness that is referred to as your ‘wakeful consciousness’ is where you perceive this physical reality, think, conceptualise, store memories, have feelings and so on. But you have far greater intelligence and your consciousness has much more depth and dimensionality.
You only feel you are experiencing this reality because the other levels of your consciousness have been filtered off once your consciousness was embodied into so-called ‘third-dimensional reality’.  Your wakeful consciousness is in fact only a very thin slice from your whole spectrum of consciousness.
You are just not aware of it, at least most of the time you are not. So coming back to the problem mentioned above, the chicken-or-egg situation with experience and awareness is solved if we look at it from a multileveled perspective of consciousness.
Sometimes you are experiencing something at a deeper level of consciousness, beyond your waking consciousness.
I am not taking about what popular Psychology calls the subconscious or unconscious (although these are terms that can be rightly used to put a label on all those processes we are no ‘consciously’ aware of). You could be experiencing something at your soul level or at a transpersonal level, for example at the level where we experience our collective myths or what Carl Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’.
Your ‘waking consciousness’ can sometimes get glimpses of what is going on at these levels – perhaps through dreams, near death experiences, ’shamanic’ visions or through deep meditation and insight.  So you become aware of something you were already experiencing on another level. It is also true the other way round. At a soul level you become aware of and integrate experiences you are having through your physical body.
 
Freedom, Experience and Awareness
So to summarise the whole idea: you experience something because you are aware of it at some level of your consciousness (whether you waking consciousness or deeper levels) but at the same time you are aware of something because you are experiencing it at some level or another.
In other words, we can experience and be aware of something from separate levels of our consciousness and this is how both experience and awareness can both pre-exist each other without falling into the chicken-or-egg anomaly.
With this in mind, the idea of freedom can be refined to “Freedom is the ability to create your own reality by choosing what to experience by means of your awareness”.
Many spiritual teachers of the past and present talk about the essential goal of expanding your awareness. To expand the awareness means to be able to experience yourself more and the truth about and within yourself. To use a fancy word, to expand your awareness means to get loose of your ‘reality matrix’ and take a peep behind the lies and the shadows. Thus to expand your awareness naturally implies a greater sense of freedom since you would be able to meet yourself as a creator outside of the matrix rather than as an automaton within.
What all this means using simpler words is that by becoming more aware you become more free to choose what to experience and hence which reality to create.
 
 
That Incredible Lightness of Being
 
In our popular and collective imagination, freedom is a flight of fancy – it is being airborne and as light as a feather. Lightness is in fact forever tied with freedom and this is not just in our imagination, personal or collective, vivid or otherwise. They have a kindred spirit or rather they share the same essence.
 
In the English language, to be light has two meanings – to have little weight (or to be the opposite of heavy) or to actually be luminous and share the same property as light, the energy visible to our sense perception. I don’t think this is a semantic coincidence although etymologists can perhaps have a say on this. In any case, the notion of lightness is central to our experience of freedom or conversely, our freedom of experience.
 
When we are consumed by daily life with its trials and tribulations, we sink into an aura of heaviness. Our energies contract or get blocked from flowing through. So is the light of our consciousness. It partially obscures our vision on a life situation, on ourselves or on any problem. We feel we can’t ‘see through a given situation’ and in the most dire of circumstances, we feel engulfed in a heaviness and wrapped in a shroud of darkness.
 
This is where we experience lack of freedom on a soul level. It is when the light of our higher consciousness cannot fully merge into our waking consciousness and thus we feel cut off from the creative life force that surrounds us and lies within us. In other words we get separated from our real Self, from our inner freedom to be creators of our own destiny.
 
If this sounds familiar to you, it is because it is a familiar experience. We are all victims of our own disconnections with the Self. It is a bit like a shaky internet connection if I may use the analogy.
 
Sometimes we are connected and information is flowing through from the higher levels of our consciousness to our mind, brain and body. We are intuitive, responsive, fully engaging with life, without being swept away by its currents. We are in touch with life and we experience an incredible lightness of being which comes from the freedom of being aware which experiences to choose as we co-create our own destiny.  It is an incredible refreshing and empowering experience.
 
Yet we often get connection problems. We disconnect, partially or completely, from the web of life. Our energies shrink and start spiralling inwards instead of outwards. They fall into a closed loop driven by the interplay of our swinging emotions and the trappings of our own mind.
 
Think about how consuming it is when you over-think or worry excessively on a problem. Your awareness becomes locked on a narrow circle of your life and this creates heaviness, pressure and depletes your inner resources. You become ‘dense’ as all of your energies are only confined to that narrow circle of life. Your vision contracts because you are only allowing light to be shed on that narrow inner circle. This is not the same thing as focusing your mind on something. It is not ‘spotlighting’ on the circle of life but rather turning off the light and communications from the larger whole – the full spectrum of your consciousness.
 
The Grand Soap Opera of Life
 
I often see this connection issue to result in a sort of a grand soap opera of life. You know those soap operas that have been running for over three decades. If you scrape them down to their shell they are just a long series of people falling in and out of love with each other. The same thing happens to us with life – we constantly fall in and out of love with it. One day we feel we have a promise of marriage and everything is blooming and expanding, another day we are going through a rough break-up and everything seems rolling down the gutter. It’s ironic and tragic-comical.
 
When we are in love with life, we remember our connection to it. We get moments of remembrance of our freedom as creators of our own destiny. We are empowered, flourishing with ideas and spouting positive energy through every part of our being. This is always accompanied by a sense of lightness of being in both senses of the word.
 
We are both alight and light. The lightness is also largely a cohort of space. You know when you have an object that has a lot of space cavities inside like a sponge or a cork. It is light because it has space. Even a hollow structure that has space inside is lighter than one that is solid.
 
This is the same thing with us. When we are deeply connected to life and our Self, we are creating space and this creates a lightness of being. Our energies are less ‘dense’ and are rarefied and subtler. People around us feel lighter too than when we are surrounded by a dense and heavy energy.
 
They can recognise their own space and freedom from that lightness. And in turn this creates more harmony in our relationships and between us and the outer world at large. In actual fact, there is more harmony because we would be harmonising subtle energies of people and things to match our own frequencies. It’s a kind of ‘entrainment’ between two or more systems when things eventually balance out by matching and syncing to one particular energy frequency.
 
Transparency and Projection
 
This incredible lightness of being is also when we feel our space of consciousness is transparent enough to allow ‘light’ to pass through – we become ‘enlightened’. We free ourselves from the denser and heavier energies and thought forms that obscure the light of our higher consciousness from shining through. We break free from the ‘veil’ which disallows us from seeing the world and our true nature with clarity.
 
This metaphor of the ‘lightness and darkness’ of consciousness is in fact, very deeply engrained in our different forms of expression and knowledge –  from art, science, philosophy, mythology and religion – because it is a projected reality of our inner microcosm onto the outer macrocosm and vice versa. Another way of saying it is that we are projecting our inner freedom (or the perceived lack of it) onto our outer Universe and conversely reflecting the freedom and limitations of our external physical world into our inner world. This doesn’t mean that it is correct or exact. It is just the way humans have always related to their inner and outer world.
 

Read The Call for Unbound Freedom Part 1

Read The Call for Unbound Freedom Part 2

Thanks to: http://soulhiker.com