I have been puzzled for a long time by the concept of "freedom of choice" touted by Christianity and Western philosophy. Somehow it has always left me with a widespread sense of smelling a deep hypocrisy.
I have often asked myself: how can an individual practice freedom of choice if he is fully conditioned to perceive, see and interpret reality, inside and outside himself, through a particular and limited lens? Where is freedom when the choices that are perceptible and understandable are already at the outset absolutely limited by the perspective angle, by the beliefs and the prejudices that define that specific personality in that specific moment?
Therefore, I invite you to look carefully, with curiosity, affection and with passion, before giving hasty, self-gratifying or ideological answers. Before repeating hypnotic beliefs, ask yourself, where am I? Where is my freedom of choice when I react compulsively? When I judge without even realizing it? When I create separation with the world around me habitually? When I repeat hypnotically in deeds and thoughts the mantra of me separated from the other, of matter separated from spirit? When I believe that I am free because I choose A instead of B and I don't even look at the endless sea of other possibilities? When I pride myself on my ideology or my beliefs because I believe that they put me hierarchically above others; make me better than others; when I deny the countless things I do not know or do not understand?
Where's freedom? Where is freedom if I MUST be in a certain way, if I MUST behave in a particular way, if I MUST defend opinions, points of view, ideals, boundaries, color, race? How could that “MUST” be the demonstration of my being free? Why should my supposed "freedom of choice" between sin and virtue somehow justify, explain, make me feel less burdensome the separation from the divine that they taught me and tried to convince me that exists? Me here and God there?
What is the fear, the terror, that prevent me from seeing the simple reality of my non-freedom? Are we really willing to hypnotize ourselves with the lie that we are free because we choose a Ford instead of a Volkswagen, a pizza instead of an omelette, a job rather than another, or any object rather than any other object...?
The vast majority of spiritual seekers longs for relief or even salvation from their suffering and move in the hope that one day the final event, called enlightenment, liberation, fulfilment, will come. This hope also implies a concept of freedom as something that, too, will happen in a sublime future event with a bang. It also very often implies an attitude, mostly unconscious, of fatalism, victimhood and the use of one's presumption of ignorance and sleep as an excuse to continue to act unconsciously: "I can do nothing else; I am not yet awake!". Awakening is a succession of events, a series of moments in which the meeting point of the vertical non-dual dimension of the eternal present and the dual horizontal dimension of time and space, the becoming, manifests with absolute clarity and direct experience beyond any concept. In that synchronicity there is awakening and enlightenment as a manifestation and revelation of true nature.
And, after every awakening, there's the washing machine... there is the continuous and passionate practice of transforming into a living reality the understandings, the intuitions, the realizations that grace, true nature, have revealed.
There is the practice of cleaning and scraping the encrustations of reactivity and prejudice.
In the vertical of the eternal Being we are absolutely and inevitably free; in the horizontal dimension of time/space we deal with the limitation and obfuscation of conditioning and clarify our shadow in the light of true nature. This is our practice and individual responsibility.
