Letter 1.11 - Freedom
Dear Benoit,
People give their life fighting for freedom. It is a human basic need. This is not a domain where you can make experiments and measure everything. All I have to offer is some clues:
​
You have been told that we are born free. This is wishful thinking. We are born in a physical body and this physical body has limitations. To make you conscious of the outside world, your body is equipped of sense organs to make you see, hear and smell a small part of the world around you. Unfortunately those sense organs are made of matter to detect only matter. Your body and its senses organs are keeping you prisoner of the material world.
We are in our body like a fish in a pound. The fish knows that it can go up or down, left or right. He has been in every corner of the pond. He has seen everything. He is not conscious that he only went around his cage. His pond is surrounded by an island, itself surrounded by an ocean on a planet turning around a sun, turning around a galaxy among many other galaxies. What could be around our material world? The immaterial? And what is behind the immaterial? Scientists say that matter is a condensation of energy. Could energy be a condensation of love? Plato’s allegory of the cave still applies.
Let's have a look at individual lives:
As we grow up, we will make decisions concerning our life. Every decision will become a limitation to the rest of our life. The older we get, the more difficult it will be to change profession, or leave a certain environment. Bergson said that our life is strewed with the corpses of the personalities that we could have been. It seems that the freedom we have is the freedom to select our limitations. The main purpose of our life could be to decide who we want to be when we die.
​
There is more:
History is telling us that our life is part of the evolution of our society. Did you know that the 15th century was dominated by Portugal? The 16th century was dominated by Spain. The 17th century by Netherland - the 18th century by France - the 19th century by England - the 20th century by America. Everybody gets a chance. Just wait for your turn. The life of millions of people was serving a certain evolution, whether they agreed or not. There is something above individual freedom that we are not conscious of.
​
There is even more:
My parents did not create my body. They triggered a process out of their control. My body is made of deviations in the cycles of millions of atoms. I don't know who is in charge of regulating the traffic. The same idea applies to everything in the material universe. We can see that there is a flow in the universe that is out of our control. It is way above our head. We should not project on the universe our limited way of thinking.
​
We should accept the fact that our freedom is limited. Our choice is to accept our limitations or to keep pushing the envelope. We are not born free. We are only fighting to expand our freedom.
​
Good luck
​
Pepe Brainjuice.