The Beginning Of Freedom

WordsOfPinder
Jul 12, 2022
3 min read

Updated: Jul 13, 2022

Sending everybody some positive vibes for Tuesday. It's definitely a busy summer on this end. Being creative at the pace of modern life needs focus, patience, and organization as bedfellows. It's pretty amazing all the tools that we have to learn to move ahead with our passions these days. I'm absolutely loving each step along the way and the discovery of it all. It wouldn't be worth doing if there were no challenge or adventure to the things that we set about to bring into being in this life. On a philosophical level, I think that anything that occurs spontaneously appears out of nothing... yet, to us humans, it really can feel like in order for something to take place, we have to sweat and give it all we've got. Perhaps this is what you might call the "learning curve of existence".

To get up on that wave and start surfing takes effort at first, but once the steps of the activity are better known, things can be done much more easily. To know that we exist in a sea of energy waves on a scientific level, brings a little light. The idea that we are part of a larger energy ocean and can flow with the current instead pushing against each crashing wave... that helps me when it feels as though the waves of life are coming in hot!

Stay cool everyone and keep smilin' through the fluctuation of phenomena... those changes that this turning world brings. The planet spins and we spin with it. Everyday, I have to remind myself to change the programming we've been given by society... that there exists a world that we as people have to fit into. The ideas that we are given in our early years are just that—ideas—and it is normal for human beings to think in terms of shapes and sizes, known and unknown, and what seems to fit in a given picture. It's up to us how we choose to frame anything and that gives each of us back our power —for it is the thoughts themselves that constrain us. It's ok not to know exactly how everything all works. To know that we don't know is not something to be avoided: it is the beginning of freedom.

There is a quote that I just stumbled on that seems to illuminate this for me:

"The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground." —Chogyam Trungpa

In my day-to-day life, I don't levitate up to the perfect mountaintop and see things in this kind of philosophical 20/20 vision, every minute of every day. But perhaps these abstract viewpoints —this way of examining ourselves and the world can become more commonplace. I call it a way because it is dynamic. It is not a set view, adopted from the outside in and at its root involves stepping into who you are —not how you fit in.

I admit that certain thoughts can seem abstract, but when examined more closely, these thoughts are also practical. When moving through life, we take in a slice at a time, not the whole thing. We become trained to look for regularity in the pattern and our habits can become tuned to these regularities as well. It makes practical sense to understand perspective as a changing lens rather than an agreed upon pattern. It is actually an abstraction that things are fixed. The sun is going to shine for eons, but it is not fixed.

The thing is, our words are part of these lenses or views that we take, part of our way of looking. For me, songs and poetry emerge because the common words that we use slant things and can only contain or embody so much meaning. However, from a very matter of fact viewpoint, the idea discussed above could be summed up in this way:

a) practicality is often confused with a fixed view and

b) abstraction does not necessarily mean that something is without sense

Thinking then involves shifting the lens. Moving seemlessly between practicality and abstraction within the continuum that perspective is.

From this perspective, we are all explorers discovering lenses of wisdom within a much larger continuum. These lenses of wisdom are uncovered by "deep sky" diving (see photo above) into the nature of existence and examining the words of brilliant people throughout history. Another quote comes to mind —this one dating back all the way from the 3rd century: