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Considering Wisdom #56
A weekly newsletter from BobBarnardnm.com
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Please share this with your friends so we can encourage others to consider wisdom.
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Thoughts on the intersection of Society/Culture, Productivity/You, and Wisdom/Knowledge.
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Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom – and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. Benjamin Franklin
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My golf game humbled me on Monday after doing very well on Friday. I lacked focus and concentration. The rest of the week was regular, a couple of days with lots of Zoom meetings and several empty days. My topic today is freedom, something we say we have and revere in the United States, but something that we seem to understand less and less.
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"True freedom is freedom from our own automatic responses."
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Merriam-Webster defines freedom as the quality or state of being free, such as the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. This is an external (outside of me) definition that doesn't match up well with the society I see developing. This external freedom is fraught with obstacles for many people: economic inequality, education inequality, food shortages, housing inequality, etc. All warts on the fabric of freedom in the United States.
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But Krishna Murti is discussing a different kind of freedom- freedom in our mind. He says true freedom is the freedom from automatic responses to the external world. We react or respond to the external world. When we react, we are not exhibiting being free, according to Murti.
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Or reactions come from our biases, things we were taught by society, not from a free mind determining how to respond afterthought. Our freedom and our ability to maintain it exists when we control our actions and reactions within our minds. Not when we automatically react to an external stimulus. For example, it is easy to see a panhandler standing on a corner and dismiss them as being too lazy to work. But that is more a reaction than a thoughtful response because we don't know their story.
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Another example and a book I highly recommend is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankel, an Austrian psychologist and survivor of four Nazi concentration camps. One of his famous quotes is, "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." This power to choose is the freedom that Murti refers to and the freedom that explains why some people survive significant events and others are devastated by them.
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1. How often do we react automatically rather than thoughtfully?
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2. How often do we let others tell us what to do to be free?
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3. How often do our actions make others feel less free?
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1. Make a short list for reflection on when you reacted automatically rather than thoughtfully.
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2. Reflect on this list and consider the thoughtful response.
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3. Only you can control your responses.
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