FREEDOM

Recently, I had a dream.
I was standing in front of a crowd of people. Their faces looking up at me expectantly. I felt it, something very important had to be said. And so I set out to give my speech: “I have a message for you…” The weight of my words heavy, this must undoubtedly be a very important message.

I listened to myself with curiosity: “I have a message for you…” the people who were here to see me, to hear me became more and more agitated.

“I have a message for you…YOU ARE FREE.”

What? That was all? Three words: You are free.

I was disappointed. Secretly, I had hoped that in my dream a deeper truth would be revealed to me. Was the audience disappointed? I cannot remember.

The dream stayed with me, frequently my thoughts wander and remember the dream. You are free.

What does it mean…to be free? Am I free?

Often in my life I have felt the limitations of language as a constraint, as something that separates me from others, rather than connecting me to them. Communication has so often become a means of creating incomprehension. My messages were received incorrectly, and I too could not interpret them, as there were too many possible meanings. No, language does not make you free after all.

I also often perceive my body as restricting. My healthy, strong body that runs, jumps and laughs. I feel its limitations. My fingers grasp something, touch another person, a hunch of connectedness, but our bodies will separate again, we will never be one, we will never melt into each other.

Does freedom come from within? Does it lie in our thoughts — thoughts are free — are they? No one knows my thoughts, so I have the feeling that they make me free, they are my secret. But are the thoughts free? Can I not only think what I know, have experienced what has shaped me all my life? My thoughts tell me stories, sometimes stories of freedom. They are not free.

Perhaps there is an important message in these three words after all, a message that I myself do not yet understand. Is it not the ultimate aspiration of man to be free?

I vividly remember my first philosophy class in upper school. We discussed whether we as human beings could be free. Even then, I strongly believed, that we as human beings were subject to limitations that did not allow us to truly be free.

If we look into philosophy, “freedom” is without doubt one of the great words of many philosophers. For Johann Gottlieb Fichte, for example, the concept of freedom was the foundation of all basic philosophical questions. Martin Heidegger was also of the opinion that freedom is about asking “into the whole” and that the concept of freedom is thus also fundamental to many other philosophical questions.

The word “freedom” in its basic meaning is defined, among other things, as self-possession, the ability to be oneself, also in comparison to others, to the foreign, to the possibly unseen and uncontrolled. In this sense, the word “free” was already defined in Platonism as “possessing the power over oneself”, while “freedom” could be understood as “independent living”.

In determinism, on the other hand, the “free” in the end is the one who no longer wants to be the author of change, who does not even think about the alternative, but has even learned to appreciate the unchangeable. In determinism, free is rather someone who does not want anything anymore, but simply accepts what is.

I wonder, is it necessary to have one single definition of freedom, indeed whether it is even possible to have just one definition. After all, isn’t the one free who feels free?

Or is true freedom to be free of thought, free of the body and free of language?

In the end, I think this is the closest thing to freedom for me:

The freedom to let go of the concepts we have about this world.
The freedom to let go of the ideas I have about myself.
The freedom to let go of my own thinking about how I should be as a person or how life should be.

It is the freedom to just be.

You are free.