“Freedom is not the right to live as we please, but the right to find how we ought to live in order to fulfill our potential.” —- Ralph Waldo Emerson
This quote sounds fine the way it’s stated, however, how many of us take freedom for granted due to our lack of present conscious awareness of who we really are, why we’re here, where we’re going and for what purpose? Fulfilling our potential is an absolutely grand idea, if only some of us knew what it was. Yes . . . there are those who do know what that potential is, and unfortunately they are among a select few. Looking further, those select few have learned, gleaned, discovered, encountered, evolved or chose another way. They may have been fortunate to have role models growing-up, mentors, teachers, guides, and yes . . . parents, that took time and taught their progeny to follow a different set of principles or values, which may have served them quite well. We’re all different, and our choices establish who and what we become hopefully with a conscious awareness of our essence. as Henry David Thoreau expresses in these words . . . “There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.”
So what will it be? A lifetime of misdirected value judgments, wrong paths, misguided forays into various professions that in the last analysis lead to dead ends and lost opportunities, or addictions to available d-sensitizing substances, habits etc. There is a plethora of choices we can make either consciously with discernment, or unconsciously wasting decades of this life’s invaluable journey only to perhaps awaken one day, and realize this quote by Eric Butterworth finally connects with our awareness, “Wherever we are in our life is because of where we are in consciousness. Our belief system creates our reality.”
For many, they haven’t embraced the freedom that gives them the right to find out how we ought to live and fulfill our potential. What reality have you created, and further . . . do you take full responsibility for creating it? What is keeping you from revealing that reality of truth that exists within all of us? Instant gratification doesn’t work here. It’s not like the constant indoctrination through a bombardment or infusion of directives, seminars, lectures, broadcasts, conversations, or news media outlets with individuals/personalities who create spin in deference to what history teaches, and where truth cannot be substituted. It may be that a great deal of work is yet to be done, when we finally peal back all those layers, and perhaps for the first time we see ourselves as we really are. At first blush that experience may be quite shocking or frightening, but a positive yet necessary step toward your own conscious freedom. No one is going to do this for you, no one can. As Don Miguel Ruiz so appropriately states, “The truth doesn’t need you to believe it; the truth simply is, and it survives whether you believe it or not.” In the last analysis then . . . your freedom is your truth with potential, yet to be revealed. JLR