Something a little different here. This is something I just finished writing, so I thought I would blog it. I've divided it up into three posts so I'll get back to posting my answers to questions in a couple of weeks.
FREEDOM JOURNEY
A Homecoming Story
A young child may desire more freedom, but what she lacks in freedom, she makes up for in family connections. Eventually, she comes of age, leaves home, and gains more freedom. She’s still connected to family, but that connection does not interfere with her new found freedom. Desiring even more freedom, she goes off to university, earns her PhD, and obtains employment and a compensating salary befitting her educational accomplishments. In other words, she has earned her freedom, but in the process, she has left family connections behind, or, perhaps a better way to say this is she left behind the stifling aspect of freedom denying family connections. This liberated lady, soon thereafter, weds, has children, and begins anew this process which sustains and perpetuates life and her family linage. But, more to the point here is that increased freedom, at every turn, requires a break with the past. Sociologically speaking, these significant breaks with the past are called “rites of passage.” But, for the purpose of this homecoming journey, these breaks, these freedom generated “rites of passage,” both define and produce new dimensions of freedom – a change in kind, not degree, of freedom.
From start to finish freedom is embedded in a process that evolves more freedom, but, in the beginning, this freedom is spread out and weak. Let ~~b represent this weak, but totally connected freedom. In this evolutionary sense, ~~b represents not only freedom, but the freedom inherent in the physical universe (small amount of freedom, lots of connectivity). When freedom breaks with its past and takes a step up to a new dimension, it includes and transcends its own limiting condition (the symbol, ~~b, represents both freedom and freedom’s limiting condition). Since freedom’s structure is preserved across all the changes of freedom, new dimensions of freedom always occur within their own negative space/condition. In other words, when ~~b includes and transcends its own dimension, ~~b becomes b while occurring in its own negative space, or ~b. We call this higher dimension of freedom life.
Freedom, in this new dimension, takes on all the characteristics of living matter, or, what sustains and perpetuates life also sustains and perpetuates this new dimension of freedom. This higher dimension can be compared to the experience of little miss leaving home. When freedom takes its first breath of fresh air, it is akin to little miss surveying a new world, one without parental authority hovering over her head. In this new dimension, freedom continues to expand and the result is the creation of massive amounts of biological complexity and diversity. Life, however, never escapes the conditions that inhibit and limit its expression, nor does it escape the grim reapers shout to cease and desist. But, what a success story it has become, there is hardly a place on earth where life cannot survive, but more to the point, life evolves more freedom.
Over the course of evolving brain sizes and mind boggling complexities, freedom, once again, incorporates and transcends the conditions which inhibit its expression, and it does so in a way that preserves structure (structure that implies wholeness). When living matter escapes the conditions that inhibit and limit its expression, it transcends its own ~bb by including it in a higher dimension. We are familiar with this dimension of freedom because we are the experience of it. When non- being occurring in being gets experienced in the negative condition of being occurring in non-being, an implied identity (~bb) gets embedded in a physical event (b~b). In other words, what is being described by this higher dimensional of freedom is self-consciousness occurring in an environment of physical facts. In this higher state of freedom the human being can anticipate future possibilities (imagination), communicate via language, reflect on what is and ask why, analyze problems and solve them, and form judgments on a wide variety of topics. In fact, all the mental processing that gets called “mind” is a by-product of b~b~bb. In a word, self-consciousness implies identity and identity implies knowledge, and all this knowledge exists in an environment that is continually giving up its secrets to inquiring minds that want to know.
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