I come from the country that was bound with totalitarian regime of communists for ages. I also come from the generation that was born around the Velvet Revolution and have no real contact and experience with this period of time. I just meet various kinds of people talking about their experience which always leads me to reflections on the key issue of that times – the idea of freedom. Let me share one brief article on freedom with you…
We used to have few and we had not possibility of choice. Now we have plenty and we have not ability to choose. We fundamentaly need freedom and we fundamentaly need certainty.
Our idea of freedom is based on desire to know that it is us making our lives happen. We tend to be free because we feel that true authenticity of our lifes starts right there. Our idea of certainty is that I can rely on the fact that state of affair is long-term consistent framework where my possition is clear and stable. This is where our life-certainty starts.
Authenticity is difficult, dangerous and makes our life uncertain. Certainty is difficult, dangerous and makes our life non-authentic.
When mind is free, it is always the mind responsible for itself. When mind is free, it must always face the responsibility of decissions, solutions and verification the truth. Every hour of every day. When mind is given certainty, it does not need to consider the issues and verify the truth, because this all has been already solved some way by somebody else. Once upon a time during certain hour of one particular day.
We tend to freedom because we somehow feel that by being free we meet ourselves truly, unless it is still something we are not about to bear because it is just too heavy. Freedom is uncoverable by human limited conventional mind. Idea of freedom transcends human mind bound by convention.
Freedom brings doubts about certainty of comfortable conventional life. When being free, we still have to confront the convention, whether it lies to us or whether it is correct and true and this is exactly the act that tears us away from the light mind – slavery.
Anyway, freedom is not an anarchy. Being free does not mean to do anything you want and to thing anything you like. Contrary, freedom is modest and careful consideration on our ideas and action. Every hour of every day.
