What is freedom

What is freedom?

Superior forces dominate man, which does not all comprehend. Saying that, we delimited freedom’s domain, an individual being “free” only in ignorance.

Man consists, according to 1 Thessalonians 5:23 of body, soul and spirit. The spirit cannot be subjected (while, sometimes, displaced). In the measure the man is his spirit he is free from the adverse forces.

We perceive our soul by emotion. This consists of three energies: sensation, sentiment and wish. Because man ate the apple offered by the Devil in the Garden of Eden, the soul behavior is under the domination of malefic. The body is governed by instincts. Experiences oscillate between the two poles.

It is wrong to think that the satisfaction of instinctual drive and of soul impulses means freedom. Human societies which follow these principles reach anarchy and oppression. Drop’s freedom is to be part of the ocean. A bucket of water evaporates.

Reason is the manifestation of the spirit. It may research the laws of the Universe and conform on the wavelength of consciousness. In this process comes the will. Will is spirit’s decision to follow a certain path. It has the role of negotiating one’s own actions with the ensemble of actions, regarding the purposes.

Is our body free or it is pushed from behind?

The body has autonomy, but it is conceived to be the servant of soul, and this, of spirit.

To a closer look, we notice that not the body perceives, but sensation is one of the elementary energies of the soul. Perception is not a chemical reaction, it being able to unfold as well without the help of physic body.

The decreasing acuity of this suggests the consciousness leap that happens in death — death is a new birth, and for a child to be properly born, he has to satisfy the gestation period. We have the obligation to live the life we received to the end.

“But this freedom is not the free pleasure and stubborn wish, but supreme necessity”, writes Heidegger in Hölderlin and Essence of Poetry (Originea operei de artă, 1^st ed., p. 205).

The man who is outlaw is beyond law, law accuses him, wrote to me Lucian Iordănescu. Therefore, not the conscious one is free to do what he wishes, but the unconscious one. The superior forces that determine human behavior, when they are made conscious, action in two divergent directions: Good and Evil. The one reaching here faces the problem of option: he will choose the way of Good or he will dedicate himself to malefic forces. The first road has as reward eternal life, the other, annihilation as individuality.

Let’s think I have two glasses, one of which is dirty and one clean. To clean the first I don’t break it, but I clean it and I put it next to the clean one. By cleaning process executed against the will of the first glass, that would want to rest dirty, it looses its identity of dirty glass, becoming from dirty glass — clean glass. In this sense has to be understood the saying of Hermes that no entity may be lost.

A God that would ensure the Hell to the greater part of His creatures cannot match the God revealed by the Bible. Hell and Heavens have to be understood as temporary states. Fundamental are the states of Dynamics and Potential.

Of course, the pains of purification are shown in the book of Job 1:8 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? The continuation is: Job 3:3 Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. And the end is: Job 40:4 Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.” — The possibility to answer means that Job entered a conscious dialogue with God, i.e. he became an initiate.

What are the landmarks of the behavior o a free being? It has to aggress no other being. It is written: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. (Galatians 6:7). This is the law of karma, or the law of cause and effect, of action and reaction, which we meet everywhere in physic, psychic and spiritual nature.

Past actions of man form passive karma. Present actions and decisions form active karma. Circumstances which man has no control over them constitute the state of throwing, as Heidegger names it. We were not born for so we wanted. Therefore, we are not ours.

Indeed, we notice that we have no control over functions such as digestion or circulation, these being controlled by unconscious.

As the personal unconscious constitutes the soul of man, the collective unconscious is his spirit. According to the mystic Indian philosophy, Atman=Brahman, i.e. the Self of man is God.

This way we can overcome the argument of the third man, man in particular being an exemplary of man in itself, of Archaeus or, if you want, of Existence, the former being constituted of to be (das Sein), which the philosophic tradition calls with the scarcely defined concept of Being.

Parmenide’s saying „Being is, and can only be, non-being is not, and cannot be” makes the mistake of considering that outside Being would exist a second state in which things are not, in which would be placed the Nothing and which would be the Nothing. Or, the Nothing is. Simply by pronouncing this word we defined something as being the Nothing. As follows, the Nothing exists, non-being being. The consequence is that the all-comprising state is existence, this being total, fundamental and absolute, comprising everything, including itself. It is generated by to be, or, longer, by the property of being. This property is, too, otherwise the existence would be generated by what does not exist and would no longer be fundamental. In a Christian language, the To Be is the Father, while Existence is the Son. The Holy Spirit is the Energy, therefore that form of existence that is able to move existence between the state of potential and the state of dynamics, including itself, being self-potent. The term of Dasein which names man signifies nothing else than existence, a part of big Existence, a to be in conscious mode.

Supplementary remarks:

From above, it follows that the ethic substance (constitution) of the universe consists in the thelesmic determinism (Greek thelesma = will). Any situation is a result of one or more wills. This way we could image a synthesis of the Spinozian determinism with the New Age idea of the free will, but what interests us is the biblical standard. Hazard, it follows, does not exist, it being nothing else than the working, unknown to us, of some decision acts, ours or of somebody else. On the free and the taken over will, I wrote at http://members.home.nl/tgeorgescu/newage.html