May
2008
Freedom or Power, What’s Your Will?
In our movement toward wholeness and maturity, perhaps the most fundamental challenge—and our goal—is the acceptance and embrace of our freedom. To live as sovereign individuals, so that our highest authority is our own sense of what is right, and knowing that we hold the wisdom to assess for ourselves the particulars of a situation, means that we fully trust ourselves and are willing to stand alone, if and when necessary.
Since creative people are so often ahead of their time, we must really know, as an experience deep in our bodies, that our assessments of relationships are right; and this deep, inner knowledge gives us the courage to be harbingers of what may one day also be discovered by the masses. Galileo knew he was right; Blake knew; Einstein knew; Walt Whitman . . . the great ones knew.
This type of innate knowledge comes through the experiences of intuition, inspiration, epiphany, and insight. These are spiritual experiences: understanding moves through you energetically, so that you see something and feel the rightness of it at the same time. This spirituality is fresh and personal; it exists apart from any particular theology or ideology.
Sadly, living without a personal spiritual connection to life and the freedom it supports is the grim lot of most people. Lives lacking a genuine, experiential spiritual foundation tend to oscillate between controlling others and being controlled. Without the spiritual ground of experience which is the very will of freedom, the prospect of freedom is just too much for people, and power is the woeful tether by which they aim to feel secure.
Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom explores the widespread aversion to freedom and persuades us that sadomasochistic tendencies underpin it. "It is always the inability to stand the aloneness of one’s individual self that leads to the drive to enter into a symbiotic relationship with someone else. It is evident from this why masochistic and sadistic trends are always blended with each other. Although on the surface they seem contradictions, they are essentially rooted in the same basic need. People are not sadistic or masochistic, but there is a constant oscillation between the active and the passive side of the symbiotic complex, so that it is often difficult to determine which side of it is operating at a given moment. In both cases individuality and freedom are lost."
Later in his book, Fromm relates that these destructive tendencies to escape from freedom result from the thwarting of the individual’s sensuous, emotional, and intellectual expansiveness in childhood. These perversions are the torque our spirits take from the suppression of our exuberance, curiosity, and creative will in childhood and, which can continue all our lives. By continuing to suppress our natural tendencies to explore, move and stretch our bodies, imagine, try things out and invent, we perpetuate our pain and give rise to yet another generation of frustrated human beings stuck on a see-saw of power relations.
Here's the remedy: reactivation of our creative and expressive pleasures goes straight to the root of perversions of spirit that we witness in our lives and our societies. Encouraging our children and each other to spend more time puttering and tinkering with things out of curiosity, creativity, and imaginative play, fostering our spiritual connection to life through observation, meditation, and the many means that help us to do this, and providing ourselves with the conditions for the experience of intuition, inspiration, epiphany and insight will all feed the hope of a new humanity that has the courage for real freedom.
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
Jari,
I think your essays are getting better and better!
xoxo Amy
Jari - My sense is that the power relationships that you’re describing are really about dominance, which kills aliveness. There is another enlivening kind of power, quite distinct from dominance, empowering ourselves and others to make a difference. For me, this comes from a profound respect for others and their (potential and actual) magnificence and the intention to have all that glory realized, powerfully.
Another valuable statement. Keep them coming. David
Thanks, David. Good point. There are many theories and philosophies of power; this is a fertile conversation. If, for the moment, we take power to mean the ability to influence action (our own, or that of others), then of course there are wholesome and unwholesome ways of doing that. Artists, healers, parents, educators–all of us–are engaged in persuasion in some form and, hopefully, we are appealing to the best in people and encouraging them to live and work from the most loving place they can find in themselves. This is not always the case, even with so-called methods of empowerment. But I think the empowerment you speak of is a wholesome process of encouraging someone to experience life and act from their own authority, grounded in goodness. But, how does one grow up inside and heal from injury and untangle one’s confustion so that a genuine personal authority and ethical ground is there, upon which to confidently draw? There will be more on this subject here on the blog–thanks very much for commenting.
Jari, Freedom does take courage. It isn’t so much that people fear freedom or have an aversion to freedom as it is a case of not knowing what true freedom is. As you rightly point out: freedom is ultimately spiritual in nature. Dance, movement, and creative expression are downplayed in our education, to make us ‘fit in’ better. We lose our creativity, our sense of self, and the real feeling of what is right for us. We lose our power AND our freedom. Your work encourages others to find their true selves, to express their creativity, and to find spiritual freedom. This discussion is lacking in formal education, but hopefully can be encouraged in online social community. Thank you.
Thanks for writing, Ron. Regarding your last point, would you agree that the disempowerment you speak of starts even earlier than kindergarden? Parenting–what a challenge, right?! This summer my two podcast guests for July and August will speak to the very roots of the conditioning that moves humans away from peace, trust, and pleasure in our own being–that intrinsic freedom from seeking external approval, validation and management.