No nation has ever made a louder hullabaloo about "Freedom" than The United States. It's our justification for military intervention around the globe; our troops are lauded as "heroes defending our freedom," no matter in what fractious, oppressed, poverty-stricken corner of the Third World they're deployed. Freedom of expression provides the legal rationale through which the pornography of violence and the violence of pornography inundate our media and infect our consciousness. Unregulated freedom from all constraint or control is the unrelenting rallying cry of ruthless, uber-competitive corporate capitalism. And yet, by the profoundest definition of freedom, in reality most of us are abject slaves.
If my spirit is in chains, what does it matter if I have license to exercise all these other so-called "freedoms" and a hundred more? As Kabir said "...you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death." Where does true freedom begin? Paradoxically, only with complete surrender. One of the numberless names of the God I encounter at the innermost core of my being is FREEDOM! Unless I achieve unity with this Radiant Source; orient my fundamental indentity to this Universal Truth, I will always remain a slave, a craven addict of soul-devouring idols. True freedom can never be won by any political means if it's not first awakened in the liberated soul.
There is only one way to be truly Free--become supremely empty. As long as the little, deluded, superficial "I" of worldly self-importance runs the show--projecting its fears, promoting its desires, defending its image--you remain a slave, whatever seeming power and prestige you possess.
Real Freedom means utter surrender to That which alone is utterly Free--the Eternal Spirit streaming invisibly through all created things. Here is the Source and Center of your deepest Self, the Cosmic Breath that fills your whole being, until it stretches out tautly like a great sail billowing in the wind!
-- from my book As The Spirit Moves: Teachings of the Angels, 1999.
Consumer society materialism is one of the greatest obstacles to real spiritual freedom. Let's say I'm standing in front of the toothpaste section at my local supermarket. Look at all the different brands, sizes, prices, flavors, special features, so many possible choices--what freedom! No, only the delusion of freedom--like those "painted cakes" which can never satisfy hunger. Meanwhile, as ever, my attention is seduced and focused outside myself--momentarily possessed by but one of ten thousand ersatz epiphanies in this All-American "scrimmage of appetite" we call "the pursuit of happiness." But the American modernist poet Marianne Moore wrote this:
"The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity."
How pure a thing is joy! Here's how I know that at last I'm truly free--I'm infused with sheer Joy! Such Joy is never secondary and contingent--dependent on anyone or anything in the world outside me. On the contrary, it is always primary and unconditional, beaming forth from the Divine Beacon at the secret epicenter of my soul. Once we've tasted this ultimate Freedom, anything less which masquerades by the same name will be exposed as what it always was--just another glitzy disguise for slavery.
Joy gave birth to the galaxies. It is the Source of every atom of your being. All creation exists because of Joy. Joy is where you come from. Joy is where you are going. Joy is the triumphal hymn of the universe! Your deepest agony is the distance you have traveled from Joy. Your highest hope is the promise of return.
You have heard the sparrow. It sings for Joy! Joy curls in the wave breaking, and Joy is the glistening of the shore. Sunlight blazes down for Joy, and with Joy the earth receives it. The eagle soars, the mole burrows, the deer leaps, the fish swims, the grass grows, the bud opens, the seed begins--for Joy, Joy uncontainable, eternal Joy!
-- from As The Spirit Moves.
