Welcome to The Dojo, a dedicated space here at The Muse where we forge the tools and practices we need to develop and maintain a clear, resilient mind. In the early installments in this series, we learned how to purify our mental space and how to clear the mind and psyche for unimpeded flow of learning and practice. Today, we start putting both lessons into practice to attain six different levels of freedom.
If you are a regular reader, you’re familiar with the work and research that goes into my essays; despite or perhaps because of the Internet’s insatiable thirst for quick adrenaline fixes in the form of screaming headlines and scrolls of 60-second videos, many of us appreciate the long-form read, the deep dive, the multiple layers of a subject. And The Dojo is just that. A space where you can slow down and take the time to think, to wonder, to understand, to see a little deeper.1
If this is your first time here, I strongly recommend to start with the welcome post, which gives you critical context for the entire series.
As with all of my work, I write every word myself. No LLMs, no bots, no prompts edited to sound human.
Can you be truly free if you can’t clear your mind? Can you achieve a clear mental state if you’re not free to do what you want?
Can you meditate in prison?
What is freedom, really, and is it different from liberty?
Freedom
/ ˈfrē-dəm /
The power or right to think, speak, feel, move, or act according to one’s will or desire without fear, restraint, or coercion.
Liberty
/ ˈli-bər-tē /
The quality or state of being free from external restrictions or control within a society; the right to act freely in one’s way of life, behavior, or political views, which is granted and protected by a society or government and which implies limits and responsibilities that do not infringe upon the freedoms or liberties of others.
Freedom and Liberty are the twin sisters underpinning personal, cultural, and civic life, carrying the torches of creativity, insight, and innovation—three grounding principles of human progress and evolution. Of course, as with any human experience or condition, these sisters carry a dark side, one that replicates on different scales and manifests in different shades, be it a nation, culture, religion, city, family, or individual. Freedom shouldn’t be a zero-sum game, but far too often, it is.
One person’s freedom is another’s prison. When we actively, intentionally encroach upon another human’s inherent right to govern their existence in this world or their ability to live and think freely, our “freedom” becomes morally and philosophically bankrupt. There is the overt way one can encroach upon another’s freedom (e.g., verbal, physical, legal, or political assault) and the covert way (e.g., insisting so loudly and vigorously on your own version of freedom, or forcing others to accept your worldview or ideology, that you effectively deny others the right to their own freedoms). There is no political right or left here: the “Christian” women teaching others to become submissive to their husbands under the argument that an obedient, subservient wife is the cornerstone of family bliss are just as guilty of suppressing their fellow humans’ right to think and speak as the gender fluidity activists who publicly vilify doctors and parents concerned about the long-term health impacts of re-assignment surgeries on teenage youth, or the genocide apologists who declare any child born in Palestine, Iran, or any other country whose culture is offensively inconvenient for them, to be a terrorist by default and therefore worthy of wiping off the face of the Earth.
If any of the aforementioned examples inspire strong emotions, you have no doubt formed specific opinions about these topics prior to this moment. The focus of this discussion is not to litigate who is right and who is wrong, but to delve into the nature and boundaries of the freedom of thought and expression. A child born anywhere on Earth should have the right to life and liberty; any state or organization that finds that child or their family to be undesirable should not, in any scenario, have the “freedom” to murder them and thus deny them their own freedom to live (one supposes you need to be alive in order to think and speak).
Indeed, humanity’s Original Sin seems to be crushing the freedom of another.
Whose freedom, whose liberty?
None of us are truly and completely free. Thankfully so, for in order for a society to function, rules and structures need to be in place. Just as stars, planets, and the natural and biological worlds are governed by certain physical laws, so too human societies operate on agreements, regulations, tenets, and policies. We’ve all seen what happens when those in charge of respecting laws flout them instead and use them selectively, primarily for their own benefit. Their “freedom” to act as they wish effectively crushes the freedoms of the rest of us.
This is the issue with terminology and legal structures. Philosophically, one can perform a convenient kind of gymnastics to justify one’s own greed and thirst for resources. The river of human history runs replete with the blood of people rendered un-free by those who desired their lands, their riches, their resources, or those who considered their own religions or cultures to be superior. Apparently, you can only be truly superior if you annihilate the inferior rather than simply letting them live as they wish; nevermind who gets to decide which tribe gets to wear the “superior” hat and which one gets the “inferior” one. The very definition of “superior” implies there must be something “less than.” In this country, we venerate our rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” blissfully ignoring the monstrous waves of theft, betrayal, and violence the European colonizers visited upon the Native people just a few centuries ago. The invading populations granted themselves a morally illegitimate liberty to settle lands already inhabited, stewarded, and managed, wresting it from their original inhabitants by force, conquest, and deception.
This essay (in its three parts), however, is not intended to be a history lesson—plenty of books on that subject. Our purpose here is to pull the raw concept of freedom apart from its political and historical linkages, and work our way deeper into the core of what freedom means for the critical mind. In the previous essays in the Dojo series, we explored the meaning and action of purification and the clearing of the mind, so that we may prepare mind, body, and soul for the clarity and resilience that freedom of thought enables. These three concepts—purity, clarity, and freedom—are the pillars of critical thought and mental strength.
It is one of modern life’s (and especially us working moms’) great ironies that this author has not had uninterrupted free time to devote to this essay on freedom. And yet, it’s precisely the lack of time and mental space that has helped me see deep into the multilayered fabric that freedom in fact is. This word we so flippantly throw about, not stopping to think what it really, truly means for us, for our loved ones, and for everyone else we coexist with in our various social circles as well as the rest of the entire world, does deserve our full and unfettered attention, at least long enough for an essay—or three. Don’t you think?
Modern human experience is threaded among six prototypical kinds of freedom: financial, professional, physical, psychological, mental, and spiritual. For the purposes of this essay we’ll stay respectfully outside of discussions that touch on religion, for reasons I trust are understood. I really don’t need the wrath of the gods of all the world’s religions raining upon my head; I’ve got dinner on the stove.
The question begs itself: why not simply address the freedom of the mind, when this whole series is supposed to be about critical thought and mental strength? That was indeed my original intent, to focus on the freedom to think, to speak, to express and communicate, but as soon as I began to sketch out the structure, it became clear that any freedom of the mind is intertwined with other freedoms we don’t think so much about and don’t necessarily associate with it:
Financial freedom: We need some level of financial support to have the physical time and space to think. If our mental space and psyche are occupied by worry about paying the rent, finding a job, or maintaining our high-end lifestyle, we’re not free to focus on the things that truly interest us.
Professional freedom: Employment provides a certain level of financial stability, but depending on the job, it may give you even less of the kind of freedom of mind we’re talking about in this series, for you are now spending your mental faculties on producing labor for your employer—and potentially still dealing with financial worries.
Physical freedom: For those of us who are able bodied, we tend to take physical freedom for granted. Same for those of us who are physically safe (whether from war, assault, illness, or danger). We should not discount how powerfully related freedom of the body is to freedom of the mind.
Psychological freedom: The psyche is deeply intertwined with the mind, for one influences the other. You can maintain freedom of thought and emotion even in the face of financial, professional, or physical restrictions, but freedom of the mind is most profoundly linked to the psyche—the totality of our thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
Spiritual freedom: Speaking formally, this is also religious freedom, but at its core, spiritual freedom is the ability to connect to the deeper well of energy and spirit that connects us all, and to choose how to relate to it, if at all. As such, spiritual freedom is interlinked with that of the psyche as well as the mind.
Mental freedom: Freedom of the mind is the foundation, the keystone for all of the other freedoms listed above. It is perhaps the most critical for an individual human being, and the most often controlled, manipulated, denied, and assaulted, for it directly challenges power, fame, and greed.
Out of respect for my readers’ time, I won’t spend excessive amounts of space on each type of freedom, as each easily merits a full essay of its own. My intention here is to provide a structure for thought and discussion that we can call upon for future essays. Even so, I’ve had to split the essay into three parts: here in Part I we’ve done a warm up and an introductory flyby of the six different types of freedom; in Part II, which drops next week, we discuss freedoms of the financial, professional, and physical kind; and in Part III we dive into freedoms of the heart, spirit, and mind.
If you’d like to explore specific aspects of any of the six types of freedom, let me know in the comments.
See you next week! For readers in the U.S., wishing you a Happy Memorial Day holiday as we honor our fallen men and women of the armed forces who’ve sacrificed their own freedoms in service of their nation, which in too many ways are being dishonored right now.
Although… teaser! Shorter pieces are coming too—and they’ll be no less rich. Like bite-size tiramisu’s ☺️