Undirected freedom: the agent of atrophy

 

If you can’t balance the internal push to assert your almost absolute sense of freedom with the outer restraining pulls of laws, rules and regulations—and can’t prepare yourself to be tamed by the prevalent customs, norms and traditions (the overall collective acceptables) which put duties, responsibilities, laws, injunctions that seem binding and suffocating to you—then you have to abandon the certainties and safeties born of such a customized mould.

If you have the courage to spare your sense of identity from being comprehensively stamped with collective safeties, you have your entire energy to pursue your own path. But one has to be very careful with this untamed spirit or un-caged energy. It’s a storm basically and unless you have a specific path leading to a clear meaning of an alternate reality, the spating fury of this untamed river will consume you. You then become a self-predator—eating your own self.

The whirlpool of random energies is nothing short of a demon. It will manifest in random, accidental, chancy, impulsive bursts—which give the illusion of being the expression of freedom—that will shake, ruffle, push and pull you as per its own weird sense of randomness.

This is as good as—or as bad—going mad. You end up being a king or queen waging a war against your own self, taking it to be a fight of freedom against others. Even the slaves to norms are better than such kings and queens.

So if you believe in absolute individual freedom and take yourself to be free from the cast of social conditioning, you should have an idea about what to do with your un-caged, un-customized energies. You should have a roadmap to create your own version of alternate realities. Moreover, you have to be prepared for reactions, ridicules and judgments. The latter won’t affect you if you have been honest about your path of individual freedom. But these will lance you if you have been dishonest and taken your pleasure dives as expression of inherent freedom because in that case it’s mere escapism—escaping from duties and responsibilities and unjustifiably wallowing in your rights only.

We have to pay, in the form of commitments to the larger collective or to the solitary self, something in the form of duties to allow ourselves the set of rights including the right to the so-called ‘almost absolute sense of freedom’.