Some reflections on Freedom

Kant distinguishes between appearances and experience, in that to truly experience something both your mind/understanding and your heart/sensuous presence have to be engaged. The unity of experience happens when we surrender not only to the naturalistic present, the here and now, the spontaneity of an experience that presents itself a new at every beat, but also when we’re neither caught up in our minds nor drowning in our hearts, but rather, floating in a seat distinct from both. “I’ is capable of observing its thoughts without succumbing or identifying itself with them, just as it can observe the passage of emotions without being consumed by its affect.“I” am no more my intrusive thoughts than I am my joy or anger, “I” is the being observing them.

Now lots of things can clog up our minds and block the creaks of our heart, effectively interrupting the unity of our experience by either wholly intellectualizing and mechanizing it, or by succumbing to an indistinguishable and unintelligible blurr of affect. The later is a peculiar state because in some states of consciousness this affective unity can be nourishing, and in others it can just be confusing. When the whole world melts into color and not only do ‘I’ become indistinguishable from the world out there, but objects in the world would be composed of the same towering blend of affective paint. Whether this ‘sense-certainty’ contributes to a sense of freedom or confusion is what Hegel would call the difference between sense-certainty at the initially stage of consciousness, and sense certainty at a higher octave after consciousness gained the experience of self-conciousnesss and understanding. To experience the world freely, in the most essential meaning of the world, both our minds and hearts have to be free, from arrogance and indoctrination, from attachment and desires. To experience the world freely, we must first clean the creaks of our spirit, remove the pollutants that obstruct the inflow of experience into our hearts and minds, and learn enough about who/what/when/why/where/how we most essentially and naturally are so that we may allow our being to flow truly, authentically and unapologetically into a world in which our beings' role is made clear to us. Our beings are composed of many parts, hearts, minds, souls, spirits and bodies, harmony between these instruments in an orchestra requires they all work together toward the same ends, or purpose. No end unites our being like the Gates of Life and Death.

The irreducible ‘I’, the observer of our inner and outer worlds, the watcher of their exchanges and the currents that flow from our being outwards or the world out there, inwards. It's a humbling thing, to know that who we most immediately and honestly are can neither proclaim tyranny nor dominion over our inner worlds and the potential that flows from ourselves, nor over the world that is much older and bigger than us. ‘I’ is just a floating simple, an aberration of space and time, an intrusion of the infinite into the finite, and the finite in the infinite. The point of convergence between future and past.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean a constant experience of joy and peace, in fact, the beginning of one’s freedom involves coming to terms with our own and collective suffering. You can be free and miserable about it, but its often more constructive to use that freedom to choose liberation and peace instead of the cycles of momentary pleasure and pain we bond ourselves to.

Some people are tourists in their hearts. The archetype of the Newtonian, calculative scientists that must make a pilgrimage every time they'd like to feel in the empty halls of their hearts. Contrastingly, some people are tourists in their minds. The archetype of the remorslessly feeling artist, too caught up in the indistinguishable and unreflected currents of their pre-reflective minds. These artists are tourists of the mind that treat reason as irredeemably egoistic, divisive, and unempathetic. Often times they’ll find either too little constraints in their guided dives into their imaginatinos, or too much control over the outcome and deliverable products of their imagination. It can be difficult to float above the currents of our affective imaginations without a mind to parse out its messages or patterns, to make out the drunken lulls of the hearts and make them intelligible, communicable. Similarly, it can be confusing to dive into our conceptual imagination without a heart to guide us with its love and personal intuitions. The ideal is to have a well lived heart and fulfilling life of the mind. The constraints of reason offer our limitless imaginations a great friend.

Allow your heart and mind to converse. Sometimes the mind has to bring the heart in check, other times the heart has to remind the mind not to intellectualize an experience that demands to be felt.