The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.
Α24. The acquitted mind is content therewith or takes action?
While he enjoys the light aura of acquittal, a thought emerges from the registrations’ stock and shakes him. He remembers voices of known and unknown brothers, which he has heard within the years, suspicious and censorious voices, which suspected and blamed with an unshakeable argumentation whomsoever rejected his responsibility. Voices which the mind believed at the time and which made him promise to himself that he would not ever make this mistake, he would be a responsible citizen and he would not shift his responsibilities to others or to his supposedly bad luck.
The mind is now afraid that his self-acquittal was but a cheap trick of the ego, in order to make himself feel not guilty for all bad acts which he has committed. He does not want to become like some “silly” brothers, as he labels them, who have their head in the sand to avoid reality like the ostrich does, because he knows that this path cannot lead to freedom. He wants to be one of those who are “men”, he says, who wear trousers and not dresses and who dare to confront truth face to face. He has been strictly taught to consider this image as the ideal for himself, and not the image of the scary person who constantly avoids his responsibilities looking for subterfuges and excuses.
On the other hand, he thinks, so much calmness and joy which he felt a short while ago must certainly carry something real and authentic. Because, whenever he has told cheap lies as excuses, something ate into his stomach later and he could not relax. This is not the present situation, that’s for sure. But then, where lies the truth?
He deepens a little more and empathizes with himself, in order to catch on his deeper motive. He feels again the inner need which prompted him to the acquittal of himself. He recalls the accompanying emotion which he felt at the beginning of this work and compares it to the emotion which he felt in the past every time that he was looking for excuses. Indeed, he finds a great difference. To be exact, they are diagonally opposite.
This time his motive was the decision to take one more mighty step towards the conquest of freedom. The motivating and accompanying emotion was the tiredness and the despair due to the bondage of slavery and the resistance of many years which did not let him follow joyfully and simply the advices of the brothers-teachers which he had read and heard and which he had seen be successfully applied by other brothers who had obeyed their teachers. This despair had now been trans-formed to that kind of pure decisiveness which does not take into consideration any inner status quo or habit. Otherwise, the mind would not have taken the effort to hazard the radical acquittal, which opposed to the guilt conviction of a lifetime.
On the contrary, in the other cases, when the denial and the shift of responsibilities to other brothers, events or situations dominated, the mind’s motive was apparently the inner resistance, the slothfulness and his denial to admit and confess his responsibilities. The reason for this negative attitude was that he was really bored and unwilling to change his mentality, although the familiar old way of thinking caused him tiresomeness and pain. The accompanying symptoms were the usual guilt-caused knot in the stomach, a spread out feeling of dissatisfaction in the whole body and the mind and other such miserable things.
After this clarification the mind calmed down again. He got rid of the upsetting idea that he deceived himself, because he made clear that this time his motive for self-acquittal was his burning desire for unobstructed further action and unhindered continuation of his course on the path which leads to freedom, and not the complacency based on a lie. Hence, he was assured that his intention is truly to use the acquittal not as a fake paper of indulgence in advance for the lawless and promiscuous repetition of the same mistakes in the future, but simply and only as a safety valve for the reconciliation with himself. Besides, this safety valve is unquestionably existent, as his ignorance, which was the cause for his mistakes during the first years of his life, was absolutely real and undeniable.