Spiritual freedom

Introduction
Research has lately found evidence that the body has at least three
mind centers. There’s the one in the head, the one we all have known
about. But there’s another one in the heart area. And a third in the
intestines. Or the gut… if people would just listen to their body and its
reaction to a certain situation or person, often they would read the
circumstance more correctly.

Within you is the inner voice of Soul, your true identity, the source of all
truth. The purpose of life is for each of us to master our own spiritual
destiny, where we can find happiness, balance and divine love under any
circumstances.

Spiritual freedom’ is the core ingredient of Islam. It refers to a state

where a person is socially and spiritually free, allowing him to prosper both
materially and spiritually. For such a person, there remains salvation in this
world and in the Hereafter. On the other hand, if people do not have real
freedom then their inner potential will be wasted. As long as such people
keep their spiritual facet chained, they will regress and be hindered from
progress. We need to be free in every sense of the word (i.e. freedom from
within, freedom from satanic powers and freedom from man- made
forces).

One of the tasks entrusted to the Prophets from the very beginning
was to liberate people from their internal locks. We need to free our eyes,
tongues, ears and minds from satanic thoughts and actions. In the
contemporary age, human beings live in total confusion and bewilderment.
Do you think that we are truly free to think, decide, choose and vote?
Given the extent and overwhelming nature of the external propaganda and
pressure of our own lusts and lower desires which are heavily expanded in
the culture of materialism, we have more or less lost the essence of true
liberation within and without. It is the power of a true religion that can
liberate us.
Discussion
The vulnerability of the organism is the root of both pain and pleasure,
because the organism must evaluate the stimuli which impinge upon it in
terms of their significance for its well-being. But the greatest source of
human suffering and delusion is the reality principle itself-- which ironically
is the mind's very solution to the problem of the body's vulnerability.
Treating its experience as real is its primary adaptation to the world upon
which its survival depends. The reifying tendency of the mind is its
capacity to extend reality, or "objectness"-- on the model of literal physical
reality-- into areas which are non-physical or not literal. It is, in effect, a
form of hallucination. The solution becomes the problem when the sense
of reality runs amok.

The most effective way to control people is to define the games they
will play-- including the cognitive games by which they experience the
world and themselves. Perhaps the essence of intelligence is the ability to
make mental connections leading to a global, comprehensive, and
adequate model of reality upon which appropriate and effective action can
be taken. To manipulate or obstruct the information flow of this modelling
process is to control or limit the behavior arising from it. Disinformation is
communication given out to control the model-- either by creating a
distorted image in the subject's mind or by flooding the communication
channel with irrelevant information. Facts are disarmed, or become
outright lies, when isolated from their proper context, history, or unity with
other facts in a total picture.

The mind in transition from the pre-subjective state to full subjectivity

is in a vulnerable position. It projects its hopes and fears as real and
external, in the form of non-physical entities suggested by the discovery of
the subjective domain, yet also projected as objectively real. It is
susceptible to the tyranny of superstition-- gods, demons, and invisible
forces that terrorize the imagination. And of course it is vulnerable to
manipulation by those who would exploit this aspect of mind to their own
advantage.

Relative freedom is always contextual. In a "free" society, one is at

liberty to drive along the street of one's choice, but not on the wrong side
of the road. One can vote for one among several candidates, but these
options are pre-selected in an elite process. Freedom is therefore the
possibility of playing in a limited range of limiting games.
 The absolute freedom spoken of in spiritual traditions is, above all,
liberation from the tyranny of the body-mind, the compulsions of organic
existence. The dilemma of the conscious subject is the poignant
realization of being a potentially free point of view-- consciousness-- riding
upon and trapped within the machinery of a deterministic physical
universe. While the tragedy of living in a "meat machine" can be
expressed abstractly, it is also very personal-- the essence of one's
relationship to the body and the world. This relationship is felt most directly
as the compellingness of experience-- the sense of reality which reflects
the body's programming and the power of the world.

The tyranny of the body-mind is also experienced as the incessant flow

of thoughts. The inner horizon, in other words, is not still, but seething with
thoughts, feelings, activity. The biological purpose of all this mental activity
is to anticipate and control experience-- that is, to evaluate the significance
for the body of events and possibilities in the world. Its job is to sift good
from bad, because by adhering to pleasurable experiences and avoiding
painful ones, the survival of the organism in favored.

The subject is interior to all experience and to all behavior as well. It is

witness and chooser. The freedom of the subject from the compelling
meaning of experience is identical to its freedom from behavioral
compulsion. This is so because the organism's experience-- whether a
thought, an emotion, a bodily sensation or a perception of the world-- is its
perspective on its behavioral options.

To remain interior to an experience is to disengage from its meaning.

This meaning refers to the associated behavior because the meaning is a
judgment and the behavior is an action concluded from the judgment. To
identify with the experience is to identify with the response, and to be free
from one is to be free from the other. I am free to contemplate my
thoughts, my feelings, my body's pain, for example, to the degree I am
free of compelling responses to the any of them. The perception and the
behavior contain the same information, refer to the same situation, and are
aspects of the same response carried out in perceptual and motor
pathways. The experience and its associated behavior have the same
meaning, deriving from the same intentional connections.
 The ability-- indeed, the compulsion-- to assign a value and meaning to
events in the world, is a product of natural selection. Our minds are
dualistic because otherwise we simply would not have evolved. But
consciousness is able to embrace this fact itself. We are aware of our
circumstance, of our conditioning, and of the nature and limits of the
platform upon which mind is built-- just as we are aware of our physical
circumstance in the universe, as a life form on a planet in a galaxy of
billions of stars, among billions of galaxies. That this is a fragile
understanding is signalled by the enormous resistance to Darwinism and
to Copernicanism before it (both negate a literal interpretation of the

The human mind is potentially an open system. Working within its own
limits, it is able to see greater truths than what is built into in the system.
This remarkable fact is the essence of what sets consciousness apart from
animal servitude to instinct. To pursue a modern idiom, it is what gives us
a degree of freedom that machines do not possess. It is the basis of the
longing for transcendence at the core of the religious and intellectual
traditions of both East and West.

Freedom is ultimately freedom from "reality". The desire for outer

freedom addresses the power of nature, society and other people over us.
The desire for inner, or spiritual, freedom is rather a response to the
programming of the organism-- the principal symptom of which is the
sense of reality (including the reality of the self). Now, this programming is
itself a response to the power of the external world over the organism.
Perception, emotion and thought are strategies in how to deal with the
world and its dangers and opportunities. In other words, the whole normal
range of human experience is simply an inner view of the programming of
the organism. We experience our identification with this programming as
the compellingness of the events around us-- that is, as the believability of
our perceptions, thoughts and feelings. We gain freedom from it by
restraining the sense of reality, by questioning our experiences and
mastering the impulses to act which are based upon them. Since it
appears to be forces in the world-- the environment and other people--
which have power over us, as a first line of defense we gain freedom from
these forces by affirming a self that is apart from them and aligned with the
organism in its quest to survive. But then we realize, in subjective
consciousness, that interior forces act within our minds. So, going deeper,
we realize that freedom is not only freedom from the dictates of the world,
but also from the dictates of the organism and its mind.
 Spiritual freedom is freedom from identity itself, from who we think we
are and what we think we are entitled to. Ultimately it is freedom from
being anyone at all. Just as we are innately convinced of the realness of
the world, so we are convinced of our own reality as well. We believe we
must exist because there must be someone to "have" experience. But as
we have already affirmed, the subject is no object. And the subject, to be
free, cannot be identified with any object-- neither the body nor the mind
nor any of its contents.

Spiritual freedom may be cultivated first by understanding clearly what

it is. Worldly freedom is freedom of the ego. Spiritual liberation is freedom
from the ego-- that is, from identification with the body-mind and its needs.
It is not a carte blanche (… la New Age) to pursue one's desires-- nor
indulge one's fears-- based on more sophisticated perceptions of what is
real and desirable or dangerous. On the contrary, it is liberation from the
appetites and fears of the conditioned body-mind which fuel such
perceptions. Interest in it does not usually arise until there has been some
disillusionment with images and formulas for success-- even spiritual
success-- and the cycle of desire/action/result/desire. There must be some
realization that "needs" are inherently insatiable, action inherently limited,
and results inherently disappointing. The longing for spiritual freedom does
not often arise before there has been a loss of confidence in the strength
of one's perceptions and ideas of what is reality and where one is going
within it. We do not usually question life until it fails us. Worldly freedom is
the power to change one's experience. Spiritual freedom is the
complementary power to change one's relationship to it.

So we must be clear about what we want. Do I want to have my way or

protect myself in what I believe is the reality of this situation, or will I
surrender to the unknown of what is? Is it enough to receive what is
happening, observe it, be curious about it? Either I am rejecting this
experience and conniving to get a different one, or I accept to meet this
squarely as experience. A choice must be made between the desire for a
different reality-- which implies judgment, agitation, emotional charge,
struggle, drama-- and the desire for peace, which implies relaxing in the
acceptance of what is.

To accept experience, however, does not necessarily mean to accept the

conditions in the world that give rise to it. It is not a formula for passivity. It
simply means we are not compelled by our conditioning, but are free to act
rather than merely react. It means we are not possessed or duped by the
mind, but are at liberty to use it as an instrument for examining and acting,
when appropriate, upon the world.

If we choose surrender, often we find our whole perception and

definition of the situation shifts. We see that what is is valuable in some
unexpected way when we accept to face it. Often we see that nothing real
of itself was causing us suffering, but only our way of thinking about it or
stubborn insistence on having our way. In this, we are little different than
small children, whose dramatic sufferings often seem so exaggerated to
adults.

The basic longing of the subjectively conscious mind is for

transcendence, for freedom from the constraints of whatever system it
perceives itself to be immersed in. Self-consciousness is thus the root of
the Fall from a state of grace within the natural order, because it is a
perception of one's limiting condition. Animals are just as ego-centric as
humans, and even more bound by their conditioning, but have no context
within which to consider these as a limitations. Their state of grace is a
simple relationship to the forces that govern the organism's fate-- a
relationship of unselfconscious participation in the game of survival.

In the biblical myth of the Fall, taking in the knowledge of good and evil
implies the right to judge, to evaluate experience. But this puts the cart
before the horse, for this "right" is the precondition for survival of the body,
the essence of the natural state of the organism. The self-conscious
human mind may feel itself trapped inside a system whose premise is
survival of the separate embodied ego, so that the Fall in effect is
conceptualized as the fall of the soul into nature and embodiment. In this
ancient view of the existential position of consciousness, we are spirit
sojourning in a fallen material state. This is directly opposite to the more
modern view that we are material systems which, having passed a
threshold of self-consciousness, are dualistically aware of the limiting
context which is the very condition of our being here as consciousness. On
this reading of the myth, the Fall was the fall from a pre-subjective state
into self-consciousness and its Faustian desire for freedom and self-
transcendence.
The myth of the Fall carries another interpretation, in which to be naked in
the Garden is to be totally self-accepting, spontaneous, non-judgmental.
To be naked emotionally and psychologically is to be uninhibited,
guileless, intimate, fearless of the others' responses, without guilt. When
our eyes were opened in self-consciousness we lost our innocence and
covered this naked vulnerability with all manner of psychological defense
against the possibility of pain and all manner of calculation to achieve
pleasure. The Fall was thus the fall from the innocence of the small child
into the defensive personality structures we associate with adulthood, the
fall from essence into ego. From this point of view, the spiritual goal is to
recover, within adult autonomy and creative power, the natural state of
innocent surrender to life.

The world always surprises us, and no formula adequately captures it.
The longing for peace and transcendence cannot be parlayed into a
program to avoid entanglements, for then this desire would have its
disappointments and create its own suffering. We must be free even from
the desire for peace, ultimately even from the desire for the freedom of
desirelessness. We simply are free-- to choose surrender-- in each
situation as though for the first time. As a discipline or practice, a
conscious relationship to experience is simply the willingness, each and
every moment, to meet what is. Spiritual freedom is not freedom from pain
and suffering, and does not guarantee the ego's concepts of happiness,
but is freedom from a self that craves happiness and abhors suffering.
When we are willing to be fully in experience without having to do anything
about it, then even death can have no sting.
Conclusion
We have learned not only to regard part of the phenomenal world as real
and out there, but also to regard part of it as subjective and in here. The
part of the continuum of consciousness that constitutes an experience of
the body is held to be me, not something in the world. Similarly, we identify
with the contents of consciousness that constitute thoughts and emotions:
my thoughts, my emotions, as well as my body.

But my body is actually a physical object in the world. It is not a private

experience but a public fact. It is an object with which this consciousness
has a special relationship, because this brain is connected to this body,
rather than to other bodies or external objects. The body-- as visual and
somatic experience-- stands as object in relationship to consciousness
which is subject. Therefore this body is not who "I" am, although I am free
to call it "me" or "self" in deference to the special connection this
consciousness has with it.

Similarly, "my" thoughts and emotions cannot be "I", the subject.

Though they are not objects in the world, they are objects of
consciousness, as external to "I" as objects in the world. The appropriation
of these sectors of experience as part of "self" refers to their special
connection with this body and brain as an ongoing background and source
of the subject's experience. The self is taken to be the subjective realm in
contrast to the world of external objects. But strictly speaking "I" does not
exist as any sort of thing, neither in the world nor in the subjective realm as
an object of experience. It is merely a point of view.

Reference

http://bruiger.leftfieldpress.com/doc_html/27.html

https://www.quora.com/What-is-spiritual-freedom
 SPIRITUAL FREEDOM

ACADEMIC
PAPER
EDNALYN J. RAPANAN IPHP
JEROME S. TRINIDAD MR. NINO ARANEZ
XII- H.E- 1