Freedom & Free Choice: The Seventh Window of Experience

The seventh window is freedom or freedom of choice.  We tend to think of freedom as being free from someone or something.  Free from debt.  Free from disease.  Free from obligation.  In its original meaning, however, the word had much more to do with being free to be someone. Freedom is an inner capacity to bbe who we are, free from inner personal constraints, even though there can be external restraints on our being.  In that sense as Nelson Mandela demonstrated, one can be free even if one is in jail, or living under a dictatorship, or, more immediately, living with a controlling spouse or lover. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," wrote psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl. "The last of human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances--to choose one's own way.

Freedom describes one's ability to choose, not simply where to be, or what to do, or when to do it (for sometimes the choices are restrained), but rather to choose to be, to think our own thoughts, to feel our own feelings, and to choose how we live within the confines of the realities of the world we live in--even if that world is confining and arbitrary.  To be peaceful, loving and passionately present in the presence of another who is trying to control us is our true freedom.  Not to be free in this sense--to cease making personal choices--leads to the loss of our full self-being.

Taken from The Windows of Experience by Malone and Malone.