Truth vs Falsehood (38 page)

While on the surface such a story is tragi-comical, the consequence to society is quite injurious when the judiciary validates the distortion of victimology as reality. In a society where anyone can frivolously be declared a guilty perpetrator on a whim, nobody is safe and everyone is at risk without protection by logic, reason, and balance of the traditional rule of law. Thus victimology becomes operationally a social racket with extorted benefits plus artificially sanctioned, inflated egotism of “pseudo importance.”

Unlike an iron filing that has no say as to where it will be pulled within a magnetic field, the human spirit is gifted with the option of choice, and by its own hand (spiritual will) determines its fate. By comprehending the nature of the evolution of consciousness itself, forgiveness and compassion arise at the witnessing of human suffering and anguish that are the consequences of ignorance and naïveté.

SECTION III

TRUTH AND THE WORLD

CHAPTER 13

Truth: The Pathway to Freedom

Introduction

In reality, we are free to the same degree that we are enlightened, both individually and as a society, but what is true freedom and how can we know what it really is? Everyone imagines that they know the answer for themselves, but do they? Is freedom a psychological/emotional way of experiencing life or merely intellectual/political idealism and just an appealing slogan?

To even try to define ‘freedom’ turns out to be rather complex and baffling. To define the term requires, as it did in defining truth, not only content but also context, i.e., for whom and under what conditions.

Upon investigation, the problem is solved by discovering that there is a whole scale of relative degrees of freedom and that the term refers back again to calibrated levels of consciousness, along with the difference between inner subjective experience versus external conditions, both real and perceived. To truly understand freedom is to experience it and not just think or hypothesize about it. Operationally, it could be said that everyone is as free as they believe they are and able to accept it. It can be asked if that is an imaginative fantasy or confirmable reality.

Definition

The dictionary states that freedom is a “state of liberty and independence; ease; manner; privileged; self-determining; free of restraints.” Constitutionally, Americans are guaranteed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” to which President Roosevelt added the four freedoms of “freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear of the world.” (Address to Congress, January 6, 1941.) We see that freedom is defined in terms ‘of’ desirable values and freedom “from” the undesired. Thus, freedom is defined in words that reflect human wants and needs versus ‘want nots’ and deprivations.

It quickly becomes obvious that as defined, freedom is purely a subjective phenomenon that reflects the interface between desires and their degrees of fulfillment and is therefore a relative state of experiencing. It is also obvious that a person who has few wants or aversions would feel an inner freedom the majority of the time, and that persons with lots of aversions, likes, dislikes, and desires would seldom feel free at all, even when surrounded by abundance.

Thus, maturity and the level of a person’s consciousness determine the quality of the experience, which is personal; therefore, to what degree is society obligated to fulfill these expectations? Is social freedom defined in terms of accomplishments or opportunities? Is it realistic to expect society to expand its perimeters so that no one feels ‘uncomfortable’ inasmuch as that is an internal condition and not actually a social factor? Should the laws of the land be modeled after the pathology of neurotic problems and personality disorders? (Everyone is free to not feel uncomfortable if they so wish.)

To understand the relationship of the individual to society requires a reexamination of the mind itself, out of which dreams, desires, aversions, and dislikes arise. Some people are uncomfortable most of the time just because of who they are and their infantile expectations of being catered to. Clinically, and through research, it is found that the farther below consciousness level 200 a person calibrates, the less their inner experience of freedom; and at the lowest levels of consciousness, such experience is precluded. The corollary is that the higher the person’s level of evolutionary development, the greater the opportunity, likelihood, and degree of freedom experienced. Above calibration level 540, freedom is a constant, inner experiential reality that is independent of the world altogether. With evolution, success, happiness, and freedom are all independent inner states that are the gift of the realization of the Source of one’s own existence.

Freedom as a Product of Mind

Because experiential freedom, whether personal, social, or political, is an emotionalized mentalization, much can be learned by a practical and nontechnical understanding of mental functions, including expectations.

As a result of evolution, ‘mind’ is not just a ‘thing’ that everyone equally ‘has’ for, upon observation, it is discovered that there are really two dominant energy fields of mentalization, and each is correlated with a calibratable, dominant level of consciousness that is reflective of an “attractor field” (as defined by nonlinear dynamics). Alignment with a specific, calibratable level-of-consciousness energy field is a consequence of genetic/karmic inheritance, modified by experience and intention. Mind is thus describable on two primary levels, which are, in turn, reflective of differences in brain physiology and the emergence of the etheric (energy) brain of higher mind. Lower mind is thus restricted to the capacities of a physical brain and its neurochemistry. A description of these two levels of mind is also concordant with traditional knowledge and human experience. These can be portrayed as follows:

Table 1: Function of Mind—Attitudes

All gradations exist between the contrasting pairs that reflect intensity, e.g., there is a difference between craving, wanting, desiring, ‘must have’, and demanding in contrast to the options of preference, hoping for, wishing, choosing, favoring, or accepting. The difference in just this one single quality alone can spell the distinction between homicide, rage, depression, and misery versus contentment, relaxation, and being easy-going in one’s expectations.

Psychology, psychiatry, and brain chemistry, as well as philosophy, pay little attention to a study of attitudes, which is surprising considering how important they are to human happiness, satisfaction, and success. “Attitude” can be defined as a habitual mindset that relates the perceived self to the perceived world and others. In our society, attitudes are studied within the so-called field of “self-improvement” for which there are workshops and voluminous literature. The common collective experience is that expectations of self and others become modified with growth and progressive maturity, along with spiritual evolution. Thus, the cultural field of growth attracts the progressive segment of society recently labeled “cultural creatives” (Ray and Anderson, 2000). As a simple exercise, merely surveying the contrasting lists, including the one that follows, has a freeing effect as it brings various options to awareness that have been overlooked.

Table 2: Function of Mind—Attitudes

Table 2 reveals further options and possibilities that benefit self-awareness. Limiting attitudes have been called ‘character defects’, and groups that support spiritual growth have noticed that these defects begin to diminish as soon as they are recognized and owned.

The benefit of accepting one’s defects instead of denying them is an increase in an inner sense of self-honesty, security, and higher self-esteem, accompanied by greatly diminished defensiveness. A self-honest person is not prone to having their feelings hurt by others, and therefore, honest insight has an immediate benefit in the reduction of actual as well as potential emotional pain. A person is vulnerable to emotional pain in exact relationship to the degree of self-awareness and self-acceptance. When we admit our downside, others cannot attack us there. As a consequence, we feel emotionally less vulnerable, and more safe and secure. Most domestic arguments stem from the refusal to own or take responsibility for even simple character defects, such as forgetting an errand or some triviality, which, oddly enough, constitutes the majority of interpersonal conflict. Most bickering represents the endless mutual accusations over trivialities that emotional maturity and honesty would have prevented in the first place. Battered spouses and marital homicide start out over mundane affairs and then escalate as they trigger the release of the narcissistic ego to which ‘being right’ is astonishingly more important than even life itself.

The key to painless growth is humility, which amounts to merely dropping pridefulness and pretense and accepting fallibility as a normal human characteristic of self and others. Lower mind sees relationships as competitive; higher mind sees them as cooperative. Lower mind gets involved with others; higher mind becomes aligned with others. The simple words “I’m sorry” put out most fires painlessly. To win in life means to give up the obsession of ‘who’s at fault’. Graciousness is far more powerful than belligerence. It is better to succeed than to ‘win.’ A little honest humility would have saved a high-profile celebrity from a jail term.)