Explicating Myself

 "To me, freedom is choosing to respond attuned to fate, so the moment can blossom in its full richness, reaching with fate's power into the past and future, and throughout all space."

I ended last week's blog post with this sentence. This week, I am going to explain it fully. We'll begin with the notion of "freedom." I was arguing that true freedom has less to do with ego-based choices than is often claimed. Instead, freedom is responding to all that is around me in a given moment in an attuned manner.

What are free people attuned to? Paradoxically, they are attuned to fate. I am using the word "fate" in a manner that does allow for some choice. By "fate," I am thinking of all that impinges on a moment: history, current events, biology, biography, climate, and so on. Most all of this is well outside our conscious control, and even outside of our knowledge purview. There is no way to grasp all that goes into the possibility of a moment. However, we can be "attuned" to these possibilities through faculties other than conceptual knowledge. We can sense, viscerally and intuitively, how to respond to the unfolding richness around us. This is what I am calling "attunement": a response in keeping with the complexity of fate realized through intimacy and not through reflection.

"The moment can blossom in its full richness" when we viscerally and intuitively sense a response that is in keeping with the unfolding complexity that is any moment. We can be clumsy, inappropriate, and self-centered in our responses. We can also respond in ways that allow a moment to realize its possibilities. To take a simple example, when talking to someone who is suddenly at a loss for words and growing flustered, we can quickly come up with possibilities for words that work and that put this person at ease. When we do this, it is often automatic and not the result of reflective thinking. I believe it is visceral and intuitive, and I believe we almost all have done this at one time or another. We are all sometimes wonderfully free.

Ego-centered choice is not as broad, vast, or far-reaching as fate. Fate stretches back through time all the way to the Big Bang and stretches forward into the future. It also stretches across all space. It does so because everything is connected: all human action in a given moment is one of the culminations of the Big Bang, as is planetary movement and an earthquake and a quasar and the building of an anthill. Fate, in the way I am using it, is the unfolding of everything, of the universe considered as a unitary whole. Freedom is acting in accord with this unfolding.

I want to emphasize that we cannot figure out how to be in accord with this unfolding. It is way beyond conceptualization. It stems, instead, from our sense of intimacy with our surroundings and all that goes into them. We needn't think about the Big Bang to respond freely, but we do need to sense how everything is interconnected and working together on some level. 

Do I actually believe everything works together? Sometimes I do; it depends on my mood and how calm my mind is. Then, I sense that there is an unnamed and unnameable whole of which everything is a momentary part that quickly fades away. And this is not to say that there is not strife and violence. Part of this working together is carnivores attacking and killing other animals for food. So it is not necessarily a pretty picture. It is what it is, and it is indifferent to egoistic hopes, dreams, and desires. Responding freely is to respond outside these egoistic concerns, in tune with the whole, which is both well beyond us and moving right through us, more intimate than our own bodies.