This post is actually about freedom. But without studying death you won't ever discover the parameters within which to live freely. Or so a Stoic will maintain.
"The Stoics taught their followers to seek an inner kingdom, the kingdom of the mind, where adherence to virtue and contemplation of nature could bring happiness even to an abused slave, an impoverished exile, ora prisoner on the rack." - James S. Romm, introduction to "How to Die An Ancient Guide to the End of Life"
Seneca (c. 4 BC–65 AD) studied death always. Life, for him, was not merely a one-time-line track towards this exit, but a necessary course in learning how to die best. He seems to me pretty holistic in his esoteric memento mori approach - albeit he remains ever stoic and pragmatic, like a true Roman, (relatively) free of the dogmas of religion, and empowered by learning.
In the midst of a cess pool of the Emperors Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, he remains inspired to find a red-thread of purpose (from the Logos) and discover the right path to happiness. He values interconnectivity over personal gain. One’s private death is but one leg of a giganormous human millipede (my imagery). It is the health of this communal creature that must concern the individual. This requires full-term commitment to being an independent thinker and participant of society, but not at all costs.
Life constrains, hence death liberates. Especially in the decadent and depraved age of Seneca (who ends up miserably and fatally as an advisor to Nero), life was not lived in the green pastures where tender souls could frolic and prance around carefree. But is being free of cares the ticket to freedom?
The struggle for freedom of expression was not the issue, back then. It was more about getting everybody on the same page for the betterment of all humanity. There is something very double about the individual we must all become: no sooner has it achieved a fair amount of self-rule, than it falls into the desire to be totalitarian over others. Everybody knows better than - which is an aspect of wanting to be the best you can be until it loses sight of the common good and the freedom that this goodness is.
Modern man is hardly freer than Seneca was. His Angst of being bound and silenced cuts quicker to the chase and it has all but erased trust from our vocabulary. There are so may more thought ties binding him to himself, which has become a leaden basket under a threadbare balloon of imaginative flight. Life is his liquid propane to give the fear of death its buoyancy. But what when the cannister is empty? And so we fear dying and make longevity our highest good. But what about living to die? Can we examine the freedom there is in that?
Man has become gluttonous for feedom, but he is in error if this leads to detachment. (A flaw in the theory of Zen Buddhism which doesn't matter on a small scale level of practice, but cannot promote a happy civilisation.)
Freedom cannot guarantee you a painfree existence. It is more or less why people allow themselves to be slaves to the economy (money), beguilded by the hope that money can buy you pleasure, or if the worst comes to the worst: pain-killers. One is never born free. Wild, perhaps! But not free. There is a field in which freedom is to be found. It IS not life, but determined by life. As the zero is discovered after the one, freedom is discovered in the release from now. I am here, but not now, or now, or now..., anymore... In that not-being I am free; in that freedom I AM.
This reality spirals even farther in upon itself to come out on the other side as follows: to be unfree is to sever yourself from life and shackle yourself to defective opinon. It is all paradoxical and contradictory until you live it.
In theory:
the only freedom that should really concern us is the one that IS a freedom of thinking, that deadly process of old ideas linked into a past perception on which w e build future expectations.(See Rudolf Steiner for more in his Phd thesis, "Philosophy of Freedom").
When in the name of freedom we merely want to rid ourselves of all authority we become islands of our own making. We live in protest. We drown in antipathy. We give our energy to the powers that be. Look at Tuvalu and Kiribati: on the brink of sinking (predicted to have sunk by year 2100): there is no fighting shifts in climate. We choose our battles in abstaction. This is to play into the hands of usurpers, who long sold their soul to the devil (which is a serfdom of self-choosing and the chains are loose fitting, but it's easier to belong somewhere than to yourself).
We have always built communities (lived in tribes) to pile up clout and reach a safer higher-ground. Man is not a herd-animal, but family constellations are quintessential to his social organisation. We have to stick together and giving up on life is death, not dying.
Where there is hope there is life: it is this we take with us into death, not life.
When we oppose autocracy we spend a life on war or struggle and end up depleted, but what else can you do? Freedom is hard pushed to exist under absolute control (constant surveillance, demanding conformity); systems that impose limit self-rule. We can learn from history and its horrendous tortures and punishments that no amount of oppression or coercion can make man change for the better, but it will make him harder, tougher, more snydely cruel.
However, freedom is not found in an arbitrary and casual existence either. It does not rain like pennies from heaven. It IS not the air we breath (free of charge, so far). The fancy-free do not make exemplary role-models, however much we might like to have a go at being one for a bit. I wonder what examples spring to mind for you? Perhaps, for me the Fool from the Tarot deck, but in real life?.... Perhaps, some rock star or bohemian artist, but how truly free are they, really? They might be unrestricted, unihibited, unimpeded to follow whatever impulse next, but this also tends to include licentiousness and unbridled excess - with much bed-riddenness in the end.
Freeing oneself from misery can make much sense from time to time. We are rational beings after all and if we think it through, who is telling us to stay in the struggle? To what aim? What would really happen if we made a 7 billion person strong suicide pact? Say, next monday at ten past eleven? It doesn't work if only half would remember to set their time-timers. Cults who tried to free themselves before the aliens came all seem preposterously insane. And yet, it is lawful to terminate the lives of prisoners in one country or assist suicide in another, and in war you are at liberty to do what you need to do to win the battle. Why not? They shoot horses don't they?
Seneca does not eschew the topic of ending one’s own life. He endorses the option of an elegant and self-determined death. This echoes the Japanese ritual suicide (harikiri or seppuku). Dirk Bogarde (d.1999), in an interview on Desert Island Discs (Radio BBC4), was very frank and decisive about taking matters into his own hands if he should be sentenced to a battle with cancer, like his friend went through. The struggle of his best friend (not openly acknowledged as a -sexual- life-partner) was but a reality but also a painful thought informing him of his future actions. It bound him to an opinion. Is that to die freely? In this case, when the time came, the actor/writer was bound to a wheelchair by a previous stroke, and died of a heart-attack. Seneca actually did commit suicide (on the instructions of his employer, Nero). It is said his death was excruciating - since killing yourself is seldom easy....
⛉The freedom to grow up into anything you want to be?
We learn from our gardens - and permaculture has turned this into a science - that plants grow within the constraints of cosmic and natural laws in order to become the perfect Brussel sprout or Doyenne pear; even the papyrus along the nile is dependent on these laws under the wide open sky. Ever-greens are never unchangeably green, cacti are not entirely self-reliantly succulent. Only Japanese knotweed and tumbleweed seems to take freedom to a new anarchic level!
Is it, perhaps, still a delusion to free oneself from moral corruption? And then from all doctrine? Is one then, still, not standing on the pinnacle of probity, that lonely two soles-worth of square feet of I am who I am with nowhere else to go? We almost enter the realm of nihilism: nothing left to say, nothing left to do, noone else to be, anything goes, nothing really matters: it only matters to stay unfettered me.
Be kind, not right....
Freedom cannot mean to leave everyone free to do as they will. Neither to smash eachother's brains in nor to jump in front of a train, if that is what they want to do. No matter how desperately or with however much devotion, or divine bewitching. We, also, cannot extend our freedom to say, go on, then. Have a jump. You’ll see: it makes no difference. To say that, would sound jaded, albeit ethically in the name of freedom it might be the only thing left to say!
The thing is, it should never have to come to such absurdist scenarios. Once we find ourselves in this kind of a world where war and suicide (and let’s toss in euthanasia) becomes an acceptable free choice, we have become slaves to materialism and megalomania and all things either theoretical or base: in any case far removed from the sacred seat of the heart. Right now, we are failing to loosen the bonds between our atoms and our sense of self. Thus we have become inextricable from our pain body, where freedom cannot live. (No room to breathe.)
"If freedom were destroyed by a tyrant or health were forever compromised, such that the promptings of Reason could no longer be obeyed, then death might be preferable to life, and suicide, or self-euthanasia, might
be justified." - James S. Romm, introduction to "How to Die An Ancient Guide to the End of Life"
Freedom has fallen into a terrible lethargy. Virtually comatose.
How to keep our children out of this apathy or indifference and banal laisser faire if it is too late for ourselves, already? Point is, of course, your etheric, your vivacity, way of life, overflows into that of your child’s, by way of an etheric cord. It’s umbillical, at least until the child is seven (or thereabouts). So, you have a duty of care to yourself.
You cannot always hope to be perfect before having a child, sometimes the having of a baby delivers you from yourself into your own arms along with the child. Together you heal and grow healthy. This is to choose joy over freedom (the freedom to drink wine when you’re pregnant, with a blue cheese salad; to go to the disco when you are lactating; to sleep around when your toddler needs to crawl into your bed; to climb the corporate ladder faster than mumps, measles and teething problems let you.)
Let us all prepare for death (discover what that really means - on a non-physical level!) and find freedom therein!
Enjoy!
Complementary reading to Seneca - and slightly less moribund:
- Discourses of Epictetus
- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Freedom has fallen into a terrible lethargy. Virtually comatose. -- Perfect
It amazes me how often people believe that they don't fear death and that they embrace its inevitability. I think they're kidding themselves. I've done the opposite; I've embraced my own fear of mortality and acknowledged that I am anything but stoic about it. Seems like a pretty rational thing to fear, when our existence is literally dependent on keeping these old machines running for as long as possible!
Maybe, you are still a tad too young to not fear death. How's that for a paradox?
I am not suggesting age wears that fear thin with complacency (plenty of immature people fear death forever). Perceptive folk like yourself tend to mature or relax into that person who is ready to journey death as the very river of life. All that is not living love becomes the shells we cast off. So too our corpse that sole marker of time. It's a bit Kabbalistic, but it is above all something you can experience for yourself.
Often, the (smarter) young confuse a fear of death with the panic of not getting things done in time.
But there comes a time when you understand - gleaned from experience - that although fear is necessary, the fear of death is a temporary illusion Or so the esoteric philosopher smiles - piling seeming paradox upon ever more annoying paradox (death being fairly sure, permanent and evidence based).
Death comes only to the rational. The rest lives on. It's a law hard to proove but almost to be found in quantum physics (just don't ask me to show you how!) I feel already I am not going to get you on board to taking a more Platonic-existential point of view, where other pressing question come to the fore, no less! I shall reserve them for when we might meet there in a couple of decades from now and cogetate on what fears are far more threatening to our existence at all (in the machines or not).
The most healing moments I had in my life was when I let my thoughts free. Free association making connections in ways I couldn't make consciously. I feel than the same freedom I also free in a moment of laughter. I am sure I can never be free in the abstract way. I am filled with believes from other people and culture, most given to me and accepted by me when I was to young to make a decision about them. I struggle about freedom in my art, letting go what it should be. Trying to make room to choose with my own inner voice. I am not there yet but maybe it is the journey that is the interesting part
Your art is always about freedom, in my eyes. It paints that slipping inbetween all the abstraction that serve no puropse, into a crack through which ONLY the inner voice can slip to carry on with the journey that matters.
Your comments add to my pieces always.
I am yet again amazed how beautiful you can say things that are true, who said truth was ugly :)
@sukhasanasister I have come to find your words always thought-provoking, deep, informative and impeccably written. I know you put a lot of thought and yourself into each post I've read.
This statement: "Man has become gluttonous for feedom, but he is in error if this leads to detachment. (A flaw in the theory of Zen Buddhism which doesn't matter on a small scale level of practice, but cannot promote a happy civilisation.)" Interesting - detachment. I've tried this on for size and read how monks (and I studied with one for a short time) living in observation and detachment. To detach, go wordless/thoughtless as to not 'attach' karma? The reason given. I found my time with this instruction 'foreign' to my being. Perhaps a little too sterile. I feel more comfortable within the experience of Kahlil Gibran's words...learning through the thrashing around of 'feeling'.
I have also faced my mortality. This experience brought me to the appreciation of life and all that I would miss - what is truly important, what brings joy - it was the simple things that brought me joy, the things that we often don't appreciate or think about enough, the beauty we pass by without noticing, the relationships/love that are the true joys in life.
And then I have had some powerful experiences where I have stepped outside of this world into true freedom. Absolute. Very briefly. Just enough to understand and get a taste. There is a sense of detachment (perhaps it is misinterpreted on this side) but it is not a detachment of 'feeling' - quite the contrary - it is feeling everything all at once and having no judgment about it understanding that all life and movement is one experience - all truth. Thrust back into this physicality, there was definitely a stark contrast - it is a dualistic, dense and even blind existence.
I have for many years, tried to analyze the purpose of this physical life when just outside of this experience is complete freedom and truth. Why doesn't this bleed into who we are more if we are a part of this? What are we getting out of this physical world?
I've come away with the realization that we have many parts having the same experience all at once and different levels of perception. It would be like seeing the world through your big toe - not aware that you have a body.
And what does all this mean? What is the purpose? Why do we have great minds and spiritual teachers that poke us to be more aware? Is the purpose of life to 'free ourselves' from the big toe view of life? Or simply to just feel the grass between our toes. To wonder about the world, create from our deep joys or longings (knowing/feeling the more that we are even though not fully aware)...to get thrashed around a little by our pain and joy so that we can strive to understand ourselves more - to know that we are alive.
Perhaps it is not possible to be 'free' if we do not understand what freedom truly is. I wrote this in my very first steemit article - "Are We Free?"
I think I die each time I have to come to terms with an old ideal/feeling that no longer serves me - but with that comes a new perspective/insight/awareness. And I am mindful that the older a person becomes the less fearful of actual physical death - the more their attention is focused on 'life'...the love and human stories, pictures that they carefully collected throughout there life. To leave this world with yours and your loved one's hearts 'full' would be my interpretation of dying with freedom.
Vibrantly eloquent meditation that echoes my sentiments fully.
I think we share the same love and reservation for monks (of all creeds possibly). And admire Plato. Your last sentence is the premise for my life's work. If I cannot achieve this myself in my real life, I would like to point to this truth by way of a novel. I believe this with my whole heart.
Me, too. :) And thank you.