The experience of truth, communion with the unlimited fullness of reality and life, is freedom. Truth frees us from the feeling of separation and loneliness, from self-centeredness, from fear and insecurity, from concerns about the past, the future and the present. Truth frees us from dissatisfaction with life and possessive desire, aggressiveness and indifference, which arise when we fiction ourselves disconnected from the world and other beings.

Freedom is the experience of residing in the Infinite, and of having within ourselves no limits other than those we imagine. Freedom makes our lives open processes, exuberant in possibilities, that do not define themselves and exhaust themselves in the identities we build, in the habits we create and in what we think, say and do at every moment. We can always go in another direction and be different. We can always transform ourselves and seek what is best for everything and everyone. We can always evolve. Or we can simply rest in stillness on the bottomless bottom of who we have always been, here and now.
Freedom makes us responsible for everything we do or not, mentally, verbally and physically. Through freedom we are co-creators of the world, which does not exist apart from the way we perceive it and interact in it. Freedom belies fatalism and opens horizons of growth and hope.

Freedom is multidimensional. In order for each human being to fully develop, economic, political and cultural freedom is fundamental, by which one satisfies basic needs, exercises citizenship and expands capacities. But freedom does not exist if we are not responsible for the impact of our actions on all beings and the Earth. If freedom is exercised without respect for the other, human, animal and nature, if freedom is exercised against itself, it is denied and destroyed, for we are all interdependent.

That is why the supreme form of freedom is not doing whatever one wants, but the liberation from ignorance, insensibility and self-centeredness. Freedom lies in truth and flourishes and fructifies in love and compassion.

Author: Paulo Borges. Copyrights iLIDH 2015-