Now my friends what are your thoughts on being free? Are you free? Do you demand freedom; the freedom to do what you want to do and to express what you think? Have you the sense of being free; free from anger, jealousy, brutality, cruelty, free from the past. Being really free within yourself?
Being free is an act of revolution. It’s a dangerous place to be because you question, you do not accept everything you are told. You certainly don’t become a follower. In this revolution you are alone.
Can you be free if your motivation is self-centred, egotistical?
It seems to me that the essence of our freedom as human beings is psychological. The freedom of the mind. Not just my or your mind, but freedom in human consciousness.
The other evening I stepped outside to walk in the garden and watch the sun as it turned the blue of the sky into a shimmering silver in its decline after a vibrant early spring day. The temperature was already beginning to drop significantly. My attention was caught by the flight of a bird that I hadn’t often seen before, low across the garden towards the field. Briefly the light brown of its top feathers glowed in the sun, then the snow-white of its chest and its wings glistened as it rose silently to enter the woods. With a nod of gratitude I saluted the beauty of the owl in flight.
Being free is a state many of us associate with being outside, in woods, by the sea, watching rivers flow and walking in the hills. Freedom implies space. Space to move, to think and to breathe.
I was at school from 1960 to 1969 and during this time technological change, primarily radio and television, was working its magic, simultaneously introducing new worlds of possibility, freedom and independence, exposing the aspirations and expectations of all with whom it engaged. Horizons were being expanded in living rooms all over the world, young people could see what was happening and were no longer living in cloistered seclusion according to class, wealth, or education.
There was a new kind of equality emerging, slowly but inexorably. However, the dark shadow of exploitation was close behind, for with these new worlds came all kinds of opportunities for making money, for profiting from the unsuspecting, the naïve, the young. Such a market!
Freedom was the word that that echoed from the page, the song, the images of young people dressing, behaving and expressing themselves however they wanted to – free to be themselves. Anarchic and joyfully chaotic.
When I was training as a teacher in the early 1970s, I studied at a college which fully embraced the progressive ethos that had been emerging in the 1960s. It brought with it comprehensive schools, mixed ability teaching and open-plan classrooms among many other things. There was a sense that the child as an individual mattered and, consequently, should be free to learn. This briefly flourished and then died in 1979 when politics took a turn towards authoritarianism. When to be interested in so-called progressive ideas was presented as being akin to the devil.
In 1974 Maggie and I went to hear Jiddu Krishnaurti speak in the grounds of the school he set up five years previously at Brockwood Park in Hampshire. He talked about freedom.
A year later, just a few months after we had qualified as teachers, Maggie and I find ourselves sitting in the principal’s office at Brockwood Park School. Opposite us sits the Principal, Dorothy Simmons, and lying next to her feet is a golden Labrador named Whisper, who is doing her best to control the urge to jump up and foist her affection on us.
We are talking about freedom in education.
‘In my view,’ she is saying. ‘Freedom is vital in the process of learning. However, it is also vital to understand that with freedom comes responsibility.’
There is silence for a moment or two.
‘In fact, she adds, ‘I would go as far to say that freedom is responsibility in action.’
We grow up with ghosts. Of the past and the future – spectres of what has been and what might be. We think we may have glimpsed them out of the corners of our eyes; grey shapes, shadows that are not fully comprehensible. For a moment time has stood still and we are born. Born to that mother, into that family, to that certain section of human society and that moment in the story of the world. We bring with us something – that energy called life. We are alone incompletely, our existence sustained by myriad connections. Each one of us an extraordinarily complex construction. To be alive is an incredible thing. To feel alive… well, that is something else altogether.
And what a time to be alive. When you can see and feel the crumbling of a civilisation as new crises unfold and those that exist intensify. The powerful flex their billionaire bones ordering governments, nations, and their peoples to conform to their half-baked ideas of the future. Greed is everything, feeding on division, and debt holds us in a prison of possessions where death may seen as the only escape. Poisonous opinion, hate, and fear threaten to overwhelm us in a tsunami of anxiety and obedience.
Only a mind that is free can meet this world without being destroyed.
Ho! Andrew. What a joy to be alongside you as the revolution is fanfared! The last sentence feels like it should be, no, has been carved into stone. I recently came across the idea that, where you are fortunate enough to be able to make choices about your life, making them based on what evokes a sense of freedom can be helpful. Really looking forward to the next phase of the revolution!