The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.
Α6. The slothful mind is called out to answer.
The mind now lazes around and is unwilling to think. He would prefer if I left him alone to go and play a game of oblivion and carefree joy within the world. But I have tried this thousands of times and have seen that the brewing denial and the innermost fear of knowledge always tied the stomach in knots and made the game of joy vain, drab and miserable, stressful as well as stress-generating.
So, the time has now come for compulsory draft for the mind, so that he finds for me which are the real inner causes which lie beneath the evident outer occasions. He is now supposed to stop playing the victim of injustice, claiming that supposedly that bad boy hurt him and therefore he is now justified to sit alone and cry. He knows very well that the truth is quite different and that there is no other outlet for him than to find it for me, because this time I do not intend to retreat; I have already had enough of hearing lies and not meeting happi-ness. I urgently need truth. I have no time for more pain, as a popular Greek song says; life rolls on and goes, and the only one who can find truth for me is my mind, as I do not have any other instrument able to think and observe me[1].
Hence, I catch him from the neck, like the cat does with her kittens, that is to say with decisiveness and at the same time tenderness in order to avoid hurting him. I bring him back from his ostensibly carefree saunter within the world, I snap the door forcefully behind me, I sit him opposite me and ask him in a rigorous and withal imploring vein:
- Well, what is to blame, you wise and brainless baby father mind? Here I am, opposite you, an open book, watch me, X-ray me and tell me, please, what went wrong, when and why?
- Why do I dread neediness and poverty?
- Why do I not bear failure?
- Why have I been addicted to the easy solution of fugue in front of every difficulty?
- Why do I not bear injustice?
- Why do I see red when a man, brother and fellow traveler, puts me down, taunts me and does not let me speak?
- Why do I not bear first to admit and then to accept and reconcile with the chagrin which the defeat induces me and instead always prefer to pretend that I am perfect and untouched by human passions?
- Why do I dread so much the grim future of slavery in the bondage of your prison and do not believe that one day I will cast off your stubbornness and your fixed ideas?
Aghast the mind, who had been pampered by my tolerance and defeatist willful blindness all these years, listens to the burning questions about future which at last my anxiety poses him. The door to the world has been closed. There is no other outlet for the mind to flee. It is necessary that he answers now, the margins have been exhausted, he can see this. However, in order to answer, he needs first to think, and he has been unused to thinking the lazy one; moreover, now he is not allowed to give a perfunctory answer, in order to disentangle himself from this difficult situation.
He has often does so in the past; he used to drag up some slogans from books and conversations which he had read and heard. But the slogans did not work, and he knows it, that this time I will not let him escape unless he gives me an answer with depth and truth, because he can see now that I do not any more toy with my future; I write and proceed step by step to the liberation from the bondage of his prison, because I cannot bear anymore to live in the mental yet relentless slavery.
He says to me: “OK then, I will be hard pressed to watch you, observe you and empathize with you, until I find and give you the answers you are asking for”. He has not yet sympathized with me; he did not answer affirmatively because he was moved by my unhappiness. For the moment, he has only been rattled by my decisiveness. He realized that here something is going on, something has changed, and he simply accepts to bow to the power I manifested. It does not matter, this is enough for me for the time being, provided that my job is done and I get the answers that I need.
He has now agreed to collaborate with me, but it is already ten o’clock, and he needs sleep, he says, as the emotional tribulation of the noon with the brother who aggravated him made him tired. He asks me to let him go to sleep, and tomorrow evening, he promises me, he will work with zeal and care for me. I believe the sloppy wanderer, he has been awakened now, and he will not crook me.
Besides, all the fury, the feeling of injustice and the fears which preyed upon my mind for hours have now quite weakened. I can hear only their sweet humming echo. I feel much better now, just because I was pleased to dedicate two creative hours to posing my mind the burning questions which tormented me. So, I can sleep sweetly and tomorrow evening I will resume the journey that I have started and which I do not know yet by which exact means and through which way is going to steer me to freedom.
But I trust my intuition, which says that there is no chance after so much investigative work which I am going to do to fail to find sometime the correct path which leads to freedom.
One remark here: the hunger I felt two hours ago, while I still had not resolved to write about my acute problem, now has been totally eliminated. This proves that the stomach thought to be empty, which was nothing but a trick of my slothful mind, in his attempt to make me believe that I was hungry and eat, so that I would feel heavy and then sleep, as usual, thus providing him once more with an effortless yet prospectless outlet to his problem. But this time I chose not to eat, in order to take loving care of myself.
Now I am glad for this choice I made. It was a choice of critical importance for the continuation of my way to freedom. I could never imagine how important it can be for the future of a person to choose something so simple, such as to exhibit self-restraint and not eat one evening. Yet, it finally seems to be very important to practice self-restraint. At least some times it is certainly very important.
[1] Subsequent remark: While I read this text postmortem, I realize that one very important reason which for the first time made me so decisive towards my lazy mind was that without the answers which I was demanding from him the continuation of the works of the erection of the State of Freedom would be totally unfeasible. This would beget the definitive stoppage of writing and the abandonment of the work which I had started. It was the volume of the already written texts which in no case would allow me to stop and which commanded the continuation of the works. I was now on a one-way road in which I could move only forward.
It was the first time that I found myself under such circumstances, because I had never in the past begun such a systematic and written inner work that I would feel bad to interrupt it. A cursory and brief work, in which someone has not yet deposited his soul, is easy to quit. But after such a systematic inner endeavor, one says “since I joined the dance, I will dance”, or “I ate the donkey; only the tail is left to eat” (Greek idioms). I had now adopted the mentality of “quit is not an option”, which I had heard being taught in some sales seminars, which in other words means: “to quit does not exist as an optional choice, no matter how difficult the obstacles I shall find on my way”.