Monday, September 17, 2007

True Freedom - Thompson IV

What is true freedom? That is the question I pondered when I just did my Bahasa Indonesia essay. We all know about freedom is; people who studies history knows what freedom is... freedom usually was put to the term when a country gain independence from a conqueror. Freedom also put in many different things like Freedom to speech, freedom to choose. So the basic thing is that using the word freedom is meant that we are free on a certain something that are constraining us.

I have heard a term which when one desire nothing one gains true freedom. I think it is the Buddhist term for enlightenment. Personally, I think people misunderstand this as a true freedom. I read a book once about some story of Buddhist monks, one of them said that "Our mind and soul are just like the mirror, we have to clean it everyday in order to make it clean" here it stated that to make it clean, what it meant is clean from the dust that attach to the mirror which is in this metaphor is the evil in the world . A smarter monk argued that "If our mind and soul are pure there are is actually nothing, therefore no dust or impurities are attach to us" from this argue the monks decided to take the idea of the smarter monk. This means in my theory is that having no desire is not true freedom, they just free from desire, they have nothing that constraining them. What they have is emptiness and nothingness not a true freedom, in my opinion though.

Another type of freedom are the freedom from fate. We born as human, either a woman or a man. We can call that fate, but nonetheless we are not able to free from that fate, does true freedom also included this freedom of fate? We born to live as humans why not animals? we don't have the power to do so thats why we call it fate.

I read some people about True Freedom in a Christianity point of view that "True Freedom is not the freedom to sin but the freedom from the power of sin" quiet an offset what the True Freedom that I have in mind. Even if we are free from the power of sin we are not free from the power of fate isn't it?

What I had in mind about this "True Freedom" is that not a single soul can achieve this True Freedom. True Freedom is obtained by God and God himself. Even if we died we did not gain any "True Freedom". We do not gain the freedom to manipulate time and space or to create a world out of physical reality. Only God is the only one that can do such things. Any comments about this opinion?

-Thompson-

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