A View Toward Freedom

The previous entry I titled here "Life Is Easy. We Make It Hard."

I read over that this morning and pondered what I was trying to get at. What am I trying to say? A journal is essentially a man talking to himself. What does a man have to say to himself that he does not know? The mind is a complicated thing.

The human mind is not like a computer hard drive with a set of files stored in a precise location able to be recalled instantly. It is more like a vast country of rolling hills, with little pockets of information nestled into drawers in hundreds of different locations, and our conscious mind has a map, but the map doesn't indicate where exactly any individual "thought" resides.

I talk to myself in order to find the right language to make a realization – or to "change" my mind. This talking – journaling, thinking, writing, pondering – is akin to walking through those rolling fields with the map in hand, exploring every shed and barn encountered along the way.

Language is very important here. Getting the right language to express it is critical.

I find these phrases like "choose happiness" or "life is easy, we make it hard" and repeat them to myself. They become like mantras, to be repeated until we believe their overall moral thrust. But in truth, it is only when we understand why we have reached a moral conclusion that we can truly believe it – and come to actually experience the change within us that comes from accepting it.

That is because humans are rational beings. Everything we do and say and believe has a reasoning behind it. (It may be a faulty reasoning, but nothing is truly random.)

If our reasoning for adopting a philosophy like "choose happiness" is that we're deeply depressed and actually think life is dogshit, then we're not really "choosing happiness", we're simply putting on a mask. Maybe we feel that other people will like us more if we're more "positive." Maybe someone told us that our "negative attitude" was bring them down or creating career problems for them. Our motivations, in other words, are externally oriented. We are trying to please others.

But what's the point of pretending to be free of distress, fear, anger, etc.? If we want to actually BE free, it's not enough just to appear to be "positive" to others. We have to actually change on the inside. And in order to change on the inside, we have to change our inner model of reality.

Internally, all of us model reality in our minds. Beliefs are the building-blocks of these models. We have beliefs about the world and our place in it. By changing how we model the world, we can find our way to freedom.

When I say freedom, I do not mean the modern American version of freedom, which seems to just mean having a lot of money to spend.

By freedom I mean being free of distress and negative mental states – namely fear, resentment, and envy. My meaning is very close to the Aristotelean "eudaimonia" or "the good life." These concepts may actually be completely equivalent.

My opinion now after experimenting with different philosophies, approaches, and ideas, is that I believe that freedom is entirely achievable by anyone – with time and effort.

This is my goal.