The Freedom Trap

With apologies to Desmond Bagley* for stealing his book title, I really couldn’t come up with a better title.

This whole Corona Virus situation has caused me to contemplate. I must admit I have felt critical of people buying up and stock piling. I have been amazed by it, amused by it and even a little shocked by it. I have been waiting for it to stop.

Personally, I do not hold fears about Covid-19. But then I look at what is being presented in the media and I get to understand that some people may be terrified.

Last night I bumped into someone I trust to the core of my being at an event. She is one of the wisest people I know and I asked her what she felt. She shared that she had been exploring it with others, using the incredible Thoughtstorm? Process and they had arrived at an understanding of the incredible desperation that exists in our modern, seemingly wealthy and seemingly free society.

I could not get this off my mind. I contemplated it in bed last night, and this morning when I woke. It has been percolating away all day in the background of my attention.

Finally, I realised something. “Whom do I know who is actually free; feels completely free?” A small number of people came to mind and that was it. Do I feel free? Yes I do, but it has nothing to do with my financial status or my capacity to travel.

I remember back in 2001 watching with incredulity as the US Leadership, citing their war cry of “The Land of the Free”, enacted the Patriot Act, perhaps the greatest ever curtailment of human freedoms in the history of that great nation.

And I do not suggest for a minute that Laws take away our freedom. In fact, they often give us a safe playing field upon which we can live our lives. It is a good thing that it is unlawful to hurt or kill someone. I am happy about that.

But I look around me and I see people I know and others I do not know, who are marching their lives to the beat of someone else’s drum. Perhaps it is even the drum of a fictitious being.

Do you do what you love every day? Do you love what you do? Now, I am not suggesting a Pollyanna existence. We all have times when life can be a grind as we get the necessary but less exciting things accomplished.

Can you stop what you are doing now and go off and do something else you have long wanted to do? Can you decide to take 3 months off so you can go away, get healthy again and do some writing? Can you change the things in your life you no longer enjoy?

Or are you stuck because of things like Financial commitments, agreements that do not serve you, other people’s demands, insecurities, the judgements of others, or a lack of confidence.

Can you make a decision based purely and simply on what you feel, without having to check in with anyone? If you can’t, you are simply not free. And I suggest, freedom is one of the things we crave more than anything. What is freedom then? I would define it as having complete autonomy over our own lives, to be able to make our own decisions and choose our own direction.

I realised today that people who do not feel free, who do not feel they have a sense of control over their lives, will likely experience a level of desperation in their lives.

 “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation...” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Many live a life hoping to find a time when they have amassed enough financial wealth that they can leave their job and find freedom. But often they sabotage that very goal along the way as they spend money they don’t have, to buy things they do not need. But the act of making that decision seems to have an element of momentary freedom in it.

And even when they do get to that magical number in their superannuation, are they truly free, or are they destined to spend the rest of their days with one eye on the stock market hoping that some Wall street catastrophe doesn’t rob them of their savings.

Freedom is not something that happens in the future. It is something that either exists for you right now or it doesn’t. But, the blind spot is huge. See, none of us has any idea what will happen in the future. We are banking on a complete unknown. If we take our attention off what we are predicting might happen in the future, we are all free to decide right now.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” ~ Viktor Frankl

Now I am not for a minute suggesting anyone become irresponsible. What I am saying is that we do need to learn once again how to take back our lives, how to escape from our indoctrinated thinking and how to become the masters of our own mind. We need to learn to live deliberately. When you find that place, you can feel free sitting inside a cage as Viktor Frankl did.

There is an extraordinary course you can do to help you get to this place where you are 100% source over your life. It is deeply profound. I have sought to inspire many good people to do the course over the years, to help them as it helped me so long ago. Many tell me they want it. They even register for the course.

But when it gets close, the things they really need to evolve through, their fear of money, or their sense of powerlessness, pop up to say “oh no you don’t”, and they pull back and say to me, “I will let you know when I am ready”. They forget that they were ready 2 months ago.

The brutal bottom line for all of us is this. We are not trapped by our job, our finances or any other aspect of our circumstances. We are simply trapped by our own thinking. And the great cosmic joke of life is that any effort we make to change that will probably be scuttled by the very thing we need to move beyond…our thinking.

So, to feel like we are in control, we watch the news, predict gloom and tell ourselves we are not going to be left stranded and head for the supermarket to do a super stock up on essentials. Then we take it home, pack it away and smile to ourselves that we are in control and we will survive.

Last question: “What do you really want?”

If you would like to learn more about the course I speak of, or about Thoughtstorm, please drop me a note.

* Desmond Bagley is an American Author and one of his novels, The Freedom Trap was later made into a film starring Paul Newman titled “The MacIntosh Man”. It is a ripping yarn that left an impression.

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