More ON FREEDOM: Empathy & Imagination | Being With & Being Alone | Freedom Overcomes Illusions

More ON FREEDOM (part 1.1): Empathy & Imagination | Being With & Being Alone | Freedom Overcomes Illusions
A response to: ON FREEDOM (part 1) by Relament, posted 6 May 2009

The capacity and desire to “imagine anything and any situation” is an essential component of the endeavour we call empathy. Empathy an endeavour, rather than an emotion or a mode of determination, because trying to feel and understand the mind of an other is an intrinsically endless occupation. We can reach and pull, question and answer, dig until our nailbeds bleed, yet one can never fully explore the unplumbable depth that is each and every human being. Relament is a battery of empathetic tools and empathetic desire. I can think of no one I have conversed with in my life who has made more of a charter out of Empathy than he. Yet… at this moment… he chooses to be (pretty much) alone, even while still on his empathetic quest. Odd choice? Perhaps! Is that oddness a bad thing? Hell no! We each choose, and thereby create, our freedom. The world of free beings IS an odd place, and that’s just alright with me…

But what are the limits of one's freedom? (We’re not gods; or are we?); or rather, does freedom have limits?; or rather, am I not establishing the limits of (my) freedom through my choices? To take a bit of a tangent from Relament's thesis, let me say that what I have found to be the case in this life is that any and every limit to freedom, once recognized and subsequently ignored, is then no longer a limit. We can argue nature vs. nurture vs. freedom and independence all day, but it is in reflection combined with action that we can eliminate those limits that, once boiled down, are merely habits which are malleable and under our control, if we choose to remain (un-)conscious of them. We create our own limits and our own freedom. Our freedom is limited only by how we are willing to, and actually do, ACT.

Illusions [can be] --> Limits [are] --> Choices [create (enrich or inhibit)] --> Freedom / Life!

• What illusions are necessary (if any)? What illusions are dissolvable (if not all)?
• What illusions are desirable to me (if any)? What illusions do I desire to shed (if not all)?
• How may I uncover those hidden illusions I hold of which I am not aware?

Be. New. In this moment. Now. No Illusion-Shattering Required. Human Beings ARE Free!