Vision and Purpose
Choice is the foundation of all Four Freedoms. You reclaim your freedom by making new choices and acting consistently to support those choices. Although you won’t get what you want if you don’t know what it is, you don’t have to know exactly what you want before you get started along your path. Your vision becomes clear and your purpose in life will reveal itself to you, if you are making choices, taking action, and learning from your mistakes. Your first step along the path to total freedom is to consciously embrace and reclaim your Four Freedoms. Rereading this book will help you, but doing the exercises will make a greater impact.
Think carefully about what the Four Freedoms are, and then make a conscious choice to fully integrate them into your daily living. Write the names of the Four Freedoms on a sticky note and post it where you will see it. Every day repeat aloud one or more of the affirmations below (or your own versions) as a guide to help you manifest your freedom.
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Integration in a Mate Relationship
A mate relationship is a superlative setting for integrating your Four Freedoms. A relationship is the ideal arena for learning to become whole. Lovers do not complete each other but rather comprise one whole relationship. Not only is committed relationship a testing ground for confronting issues of personal and spiritual growth, it also provides a secure haven in which to do so. In its cocoon, you can cultivate pleasure and explore desire.
One of the most powerful choices you can make on your path to total freedom is to select your relationship as the most important thing in your life. When you make this choice, your relationship becomes a spiritual practice. Three essential qualities of a relationship as spiritual practice are commitment, fidelity, and time. In a relationship covenant, commitment affirms your intention to grow old together. Monogamy provides the security you need to risk being emotionally vulnerable and transparent, so you can open the door to a shared sexual/spiritual ecstasy. Spending lovers’ time together feeds the relationship through such simple activities as daily gazing into each other’s eyes, sending love back and forth, and taking a weekly block of hours to be lovers.
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LIVING A LIFE OF PLEASURE
The true nature of reality is obviously a mystery. There is no “objective reality” to fasten onto as a conclusive guide for living. This can be frightening or freeing, for if there is no absolute certainty, then your reality is up to you. You create your reality through your concepts and belief system.
If you conceive of life as hard, people as self-serving, and yourself as a lone struggler amidst chaos, that is most likely the reality you will experience. If you conceive of life as an adventure, people as fellow travelers, and yourself as an explorer of the great unknown, that is most likely the reality you will experience, and so on through infinite possibilities and permutations. Your perception and experience will follow your belief no matter what the actual circumstances of your life situation.
If you want a happy, balanced reality, allow yourself to cultivate a pleasure perspective. The enlightened master Osho taught that the clearest path to enlightenment is not through hardship but pleasure. Partake of pleasure; realize bliss.
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Developing an Empirical Awareness of the Four Freedoms
You can do simple experiments to comprehend that all elements of you are interconnected.
1. For 30 seconds think a very negative thought, for instance, your partner has left you, you have been fired, or your home has burned down. Stop the thought and turn your attention to your feelings. What emotions have come up in you? Now focus on your body. Do you feel tension or pain anywhere? Notice that just one intense thought has affected your whole system.
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String Theory
The theory of strings, sometimes referred to as the theory of everything,i is considered by many physicists to be the most promising explanation to date for the nature of ultimate reality. It suggests the possibility that there is a connection, as well as a separation, between the realms of the material and consciousness. Both conditions can exist at the same time.
According to physicist David Gross:
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Integrating Your 4 Freedoms
Separation or Unity – What is the Nature of Reality?
The Western world loves to compartmentalize, creating boxes of separation so that the complexities of life are easier to comprehend and simpler to cope with. We separate work from family life, spiritual practice from sexuality, social policy from corporate profit, and art from infrastructure. We manifest these divisions not only in society at large but also within ourselves, separating our minds from our hearts and our bodies from our souls.
Although there are many who have helped instill this pattern of separation, one of the most influential was the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes. Descartes divided everything into two mutually exclusive but interacting categories, “res cognitans” (the subjective realm of consciousness and thought) and “res extensa” (the objective realm of the material world). His distinction was very useful, clearing the way for science to progress rapidly, free of interference from the dogma of religious doctrine.
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