Independence, Freedom, Personal Responsibility

As Kathy, Lucy, and I were talking on the way to the seminar on Sunday, the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death” came to my mind. When I said this, Kathy said something about even this showing the physical and the spiritual focus: liberty is a focus on energy and death is a focus on matter. “The soul is dual in every aspect,” I remembered. I first heard Kathy say this many years ago when I first began studying with her. Always, this phrase I heard echo within my mind ringing notes that told me “there is more for you to know in these words.” I heard different things each time, which added to my understanding, but always the echo came – there is more.

Independence, freedom, and personal responsibility are my next choice of ethical values to write about. When I think about “liberty” phrases throughout history run through my mind – the French Revolutionary cry, Patrick Henry’s famous phrase (as it is remembered anyway), “Lady Liberty” and Ellis Island. I think about why independence only comes with courage, and why personal responsibility is a quality of someone who lives the courage of their convictions – the convictions of life, of being alive. These are not grand ideas, except in the fact that figures throughout history have shown us what courage it takes to live nobly, with full conviction of the truth and doing no harm. They are noble ideas because they stand out so in the train of our collective behavior throughout time. When I look at my own life, and I am calm enough to seek counsel, entertain the tribes and parties of people I have been and known throughout my own eternal time, those energies that have gained nobility through knowledge of themselves as they changed stand out because so many more shuffle along in the shadows or the labors of their own making. When I think about the many people in my life who have influenced me (consciously, in my memory today), I smile especially with those whose presence has been a calm, steady light of life. I realize they are the ones with the nobility to know themselves as loving people, with a constant appreciation of the efforts and joys of being alive. There are people for whom their hands are beautiful tools with which they can create or fix anything, conjure anything from a material of their own choosing. Others never think of creating in this way. I admire these forms.

I know now that the joy in creating, anything, beginning with the birth of thoughts, ideas, is a sign of accepting personal responsibility as a creator with the energy of the universe intact and acknowledged. Independence is the joy of knowing the unity in one for all and all for one. Freedom is the sense of infinity, which is the description of us as chemical energy beings. Without borders, boundaries, rules, or restraints, no “right” or “wrong,” we are simply creators learning to recognize and use the guidance of our own creative energy, with its properties and qualities that are consistent with clearly defined Ethical Values.

My goodness, I have struggled with this knowing of myself in my life. This is not because I have not had very courageous role models and examples – in fact, it is because of them, and my learning of why they are good role models and examples, that I can appreciate the evolution of consciousness and the great teacher that experience is, by our own design.

I have struggled in my own little world as I held my struggles tight to my chest, though they are of course never invisible or without influences which ripple. Learning how to define the many ripples of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and experiences as energy fields and levels of evolution through infinite lifetimes, makes me feel the thrust of “give me liberty or give me death” in the energy of life that motivated its utterance. I sense embryos of energies I have lived – the cloths I have been wrapped in and have wrapped myself in, warming to the thought of being human, or of learning to know the hunger borne of emptiness; the films that come from rods and cones and filaments forming from liquid magic, making colors vividly and forever known; the translucence of light seen through skin as it forms, that gentle beat of hearts with the pulse of some universal music. And I see images such as I saw this morning as I lay in bed before awaking fully for the day: three little children, figures running down a hallway or tunnel of bright white, giggling, one with dark hair and a red ribbon through it, running fast and at the end turning then disappearing into the white without a wink. Such laughter, such reminders of what it means to me to be alive, visible and invisible.

I recognize how I have sought warmth, love in the physical boundaries of life – sometimes skin, sometimes food and drink, sometimes the thrill of consuming something else – buying something on impulse with the hunger that came with it whose satisfaction was disguised as freedom and power. I am slowly learning why this is essentially different from the energizing that naturally permeates my being when I smell the scent of something like the lilies I bought a week ago, and the smell of woodsmoke from fires crackling in fireplaces, warming rooms. Let it be, I hear inside and the hum continues. This is evolution at work! Living our freedom is living our freedom of expression at all times, I heard during the recent seminar. Next, the true freedom of expression is to know who we are as “originals,” not counterfeits, or “aliens,” or “copycats.” This is knowing the essential difference between creation and reproduction. There is a sign somewhere on the highway in Virginia which says “Antiques made daily.” Well, now I think of this in the context of we have to keep “being who we are” every moment of every day, with the wisdom of our ancient beginnings and our accumulated knowledge expanding that wisdom. Parents know this, some more distinctly than others. Not knowing the motivation of creation is saying, I can’t learn, I have to copy. The night before the seminar,I looked into the blue eyes of a beautiful little boy whose face was calm, innocent, and expectant. In them I could see the same tunnel of white, the rippling air, the giggling and disappearing. I could also see the questions that lingered like low-hanging fruit through every season.

As a child of parents, now grown, I feel the shaping force in creation which is as hot as molten iron and as gentle as a mother’s kiss. Feeling this force of Fall, the season this year, I know I am changing like the seasons. I have never felt this this deeply before. More than skin deep? The skin is its own universe. My eyes are opening and I am not disappearing but growing.

Check this out - "magic-eye" pictures, this time referring to Lady Liberty