Freedom & Responsibility

By Yasuhiko Genku Kimora

Freedom is the will to self-responsibility. - Friedrich Nietzsche

The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.

- Thomas Jefferson

Freedom is the soul's ideal dwelling and proper destiny.

The soul is the highest principle of individual consciousness. Freedom is the state of consciousness in which the soul is not attached to or bound by any of the lower principles such as the senses, feelings emotions, desires, and automatic currents of thought.

The soul’s freedom does not mean that you are not bound to a Principle that is higher than your soul. The soul’s freedom is found when you make all thoughts arising in your soul be bound to a higher Principle or a higher Being of who the soul is the Cosmic Individuation.

You will find that in the act and state of being bound to a higher Principle, which is Freedom itself, you experience authentic freedom all around.

Being bound to the higher Principle, you realize that yesterday has no power over today or tomorrow, that the past has no power over how you live your life in the present or in the future. The past seems to have power only because you give it a power. That power does not come from the past, because the past does not exist in reality.

The past exists only in and as memory, and memory exists only as reference. Memory has intrinsic values and utilities as reference but has no intrinsic power. Without memory you would lose sense of temporal continuity and of self-identity in time. You use your memory to guide your present action.

Yet, memory in itself has no power to dictate or determine your present action. In truth you are free to begin your life anew right now. To know this is the beginning of your freedom-of fulfilling your soul’s longing to be free.

The Responsibility Principle

The Now in which God created the first man and the Now in which the last man will disappear and the Now in which I am speaking-are all the same in God, and there is only one Now.

- Meister Eckhart

Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

-R Ralph Waldo Emerson

Freedom is not a static condition which once achieved can be retained, but is a dynamic state which must be attained ever anew. The locus in which you attain freedom is always and only the Now, which is never a part of time.

The Now in which you attain freedom is not a moment in time but the momentum arising in the Eternal that produces reaction past and resultant future in the apparent flow of time. Thus, to be free is to be in the Now - the eternal, atemporal Now.

Freedom is the soul's ideal dwelling and proper destiny. Life is the temporal (timeless/eternal) present in the temporal (time). The soul is the cosmic medium of Life's teleportation between the temporal and the temporal. Freedom is the state of the soul being that teleportation medium with conscious awareness.

You may ask, “How can I be in the Now and be free?” You can only be in the Now and be free if you be an agent of responsibility. This is the Responsibility Principle. Responsibly is the Principle of Freedom.

Responsibly is the ability to “promise” or “make a commitment” (spond) “anew” (re). Responsibly involves and implies the ability to create a future anew by making and acting from a new commitment.

A new commitment means a commitment that is made anew or recreated in every successive moment of time, in the Now, until an entire new situation arises which calls for an entirely new commitment.

When you are not responsible, you react to the past, from the past, in the present. When you react, your life becomes a repetitive extension and a karmic reenactment of your past.

Reactivity is of time, whereas Responsibility is not. Reactivity arises as an inertial moment in time, whereas Responsibility arises as a generative momentum of the timeless.

The reactive mode of existence is the mode of victimhood in which one perceives oneself to be helplessly swept away by the external forces of nature, society, or history.

A victim is one who, having forfeited one's innate responsibility, sees oneself not responsible for one's lot in life. A victim is first a victim of one's past which, one thinks, has ineluctably and inexorably led one to where one is, for which one claims little or no responsibility.

A sense of being a victim, or victim consciousness, is rooted in the deep recesses of the collective human psyche, the race consciousness, because we presume that the past determines the future while we believe that we cannot change the past. While it is true that we cannot change events of the past, it is not true that the past determines the present or the future.

The past also changes because you can change your present interpretation of past events. Your past is in your memory which only arises in the present. If you change the way how you view or interpret past events, you are in actuality changing the past or your experience of the past.