The Paradigm Of Freedom
By David Sparenberg
15 May, 2009
Countercurrents.org
Authentic freedom in the 21st century is not limited to politically legislated freedoms, but extends far beyond; toward new and even the most ancient, most forsaken and forgotten, horizons; into the politics of experience. Authentic freedom includes healing participation in the biotic community, embracing the human yet moving beyond the human only. Which of itself presupposes biotic diversity and albeit wounded yet amendable community. Such is to be freedom from market value reduction alone and for rooting deeper while reaching more inclusively, dialogically, into experience-value based on creative individuation and global responsibility. This is the direction our evolution requires if we would avoid impending chaos and prospective extinction.
Seeds of this greater freedom have been planted by some all along and now by increasingly many more with growing momentum, dimension and democracy. So the time is upon us for earth-walkers and seed-bearers to take to the roads of service and for ecosophists (home dwelling lovers) to cultivate the gardens of earth based spirituality, greening and peace. Tools for such work are at hand; some will yet be refined; others will yet be invented.
Often when reflecting on such a subject as this, I find myself making reference to betrayal as a category of historically conditioned and contemporarily accelerated experience. Let me make myself clear on this reference at this point.
We inherit and perpetuate a collective betrayal of our humanity; the mutuality of vulnerability which all life as we know it travels within as interfacings of relationships. In a toxic brew of various degrees of ignorance, inflation and distorted self-image and consciousness, we participate in personal and interpersonal betrayals of our identity; substituting the adventure of paradoxical intelligence, self-overhearing and visionary imaging for a predatory and cannibalistic reduction into social normalcy. This holds true despite whether the social matrix is democratic or despotic or otherwise.
Out of false presumptions and assumptions about our place and purpose in creation, we are enmeshed in betrayals of planetary life which implicates one and all in organizations of recurring crimes against humanity and ongoing crimes against creation. Finally, in what might be termed a sort of cosmic and spiritual bottom line, extravagantly into our misdirection and convoluted devices and systems of betrayal, we are personally and seriously involved in the betrayal of God through the denial of divine pathos and the absence of responses of sympathy, enactments of reverence for life and sustained expressions of compassion. So grave is this condition, so ponderous a burden and so pathologically overgrown that it could readily be spoken of as madness or pandemic disease.
Mindlessly we might yet perish of our multilayered paradigm of betrayals if we do not break it open with a revitalized primitive sanity and affirmative energy, and create patterns of authenticity contributing to a multifaceted paradigm of freedom. Such is a revolution, of course. But of such a kind as to begin with some such lessons as to invest value in what experiences life offers for the sake of consciousness, mending, becoming and belonging. There is therein potential to root into everything we do, all that we are, dream on, and would benevolently and beneficially become.
Only this in closing (for meditation and a depth of apprehension need follow these words): Reality is challenging and we may not yet or even ever have all of the solutions. But there is within a capacity to distinguish between indulgence and genuine freedom and wisdom inherent in our genetic ancestry to bring together freedom and responsibility. What then do we need to change direction? At the inception of a renaissance for the forests and oceans, the atmosphere and surviving species, we human beings need again to listen and to see relationally, to learn anew what some refer to as paradoxical thinking and study in the ways of what others call an emotional philosophy for dwelling poetically with the Earth.
Rilke said it when he wrote in his Archaic Torso of Apollo, “There is no place that does not see you/you must change your life,” and Einstein inferred the same in the context of the advent of the terror of nuclear holocaust, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking. Thus we are drifting toward a catastrophe beyond comparison. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if the human is to survive.” Together these quotations can be equally applied to the ecology as well as polity of this planetary polis we inhabit in the swirling grandeur of cosmic space.
