Today I seek to determine whether it is possible for a human being to experience absolute freedom. This is tremendously important for me, as I find myself drawn to the idea of freedom, but I do not yet know if that path can yield a perceptible result. To answer this question may be linguistically challenging. It is my aim to use plain language as much as possible.
As for method, I hope to establish first a definition for the word freedom. Next I will attempt to flesh out experience of freedom and divorce it from its verbal definition, which acts as an anchor on the experience. Finally I will attempt to determine whether the experience that remains may be experienced.
The freedom at which I am pointing is not specifically political freedom, though perhaps political freedom falls under the absolute freedom with which I am concerned. Political freedom is primarily freedom from coercion by a governing body, which is somewhat narrower.
The first hurdle we encounter is that freedom is a speech act. The freedom that is familiar to us is a shared definition, according to the tastes of our culture and period, which changes over time. In early human history, agriculture gave people relative freedom from the need to hunt and gather. Modern medicine offers, to an extent, freedom from some debilitating conditions. In these examples, we find consistency in that freedom is a relative term. Relative implies a comparison of two situations, separate in space or in time. One can have more freedom now than one had before, or have less freedom now than one might have, given a different scenario.
It is further apparent that freedom can only exist for a mind that has the ability to draw comparisons. As we have ascertained, freedom is a relative phenomenon. In order to set today’s freedom beside yesterday’s freedom, I must first be able to integrate the concepts of today and yesterday.
Also implicit in freedom is the duality between myself and everything else. I seek freedom from an external entity or situation. It is important to be careful at on this point. Duality versus unity is a disputed zone in philosophy. For our purposes, we must let that be for the moment. Freedom ceases to be meaningful if duality is not the state of affairs in which we live, so we must found our inquiry on the premise that duality exists. Within the context of duality, the final piece of our definition is a describable as a kind of inertia or momentum that is independent of external forces. Freedom is not quite the state of being insulated from the effects of the external world, but rather a non-connection to them. External influences cannot enact force upon one with absolute freedom. When truly free, coercion is impossible.
To review, we have arrived at the working definition. Freedom is a state in which a mind is beyond influence from the apparent duality of the world in which the mind finds itself. Now we can begin to strip it away, laying bare the experience of freedom itself.
Sorting out the phenomenology of freedom is difficult. We must set ourselves upon finding out what feelings, at the interface of self and other, constitute the experience of freedom. First of all is imperturbability. The free person is beyond the influence of such an interface. Whatever the external world is doing, the free person is unmoved. The will alone gives rise to motion. That which is not willed by the free person does not occur.
In this state, freedom is the convergence of absolute acceptance an absolute rebellion. The free person is unmoved by the forces exerted by the world, thanks to the faculty of being able to accept those forces without hesitation. It is the fighting spirit applied to one’s refusal to fight. Although absolute acceptance is an empowering idea, it may involve costs that the inexperienced freedom-seekers are unwilling to bear. In order to experience absolute freedom, one must be willing to lose everything. When a guillotine blade is dropping, the free person is relaxed and confident that all is well, even at the final instant.
The necessity of giving up everything is perhaps why we have not yet experienced freedom. We cling to that which we value. For this reason we dare not leap into freedom’s embrace, as we must leave everything else behind.
We have only one question left. Can absolute freedom be experienced by a human mind? Can the world crash down, murdering our loved ones, crippling our bodies, snuffing out the light of human consciousness without disturbing us in the least? This is a very difficult question. Such imperturbability must be extremely rare.
The answer may hinge upon whether freedom is a spectrum or a binary phenomenon. Is becoming free a gradual act, as in a growth from tyranny to its opposite, or is it binary? Can a human simply decide that whatever occurs, I shall not be moved? History gives rare examples. Joan of Arc comes to mind. A condemned prisoner (that recurring favorite of Albert Camus) who has accepted his sentence also arises. If freedom is to be found, it certainly seems to be among the condemned.
Yet all of us are condemned by our very mortality. For this reason alone, it would seem that absolute freedom is in store for all of us. The folly would be waiting for the final moments to experience it. We must all eventually surrender, therefore it may be beneficial to surrender now. Do not wait to embrace your absolute freedom.
Come what may, you are already free if you can let it all go.
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