Innate Freedom

But the effect of society is not only to funnel fictions into our consciousness, but also to prevent the awareness of reality. . .

Every society, by it own practice of living and by the mode of relatedness, of feeling and perceiving, develops a system of categories which determines the form of awareness. This system works, as it were, like a socially conditioned filter; experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter. . . I am aware of all my feelings and thoughts which are permitted to penetrate the threefold filter of socially conditioned language, logic and taboos (social character). Experiences which can not be filtered through remain outside of awareness; that is, they remain unconscious.

Eric Fromm was a 20th century internationally renowned social psychologist, humanistic philosopher and psychoanalyst. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Fromm taught at the University of Mexico, as well as at Michigan State and NYU. He moved to Switzerland in 1974 and maintained a clinical practice and published a series of books. Fromm believed that freedom was an innate aspect of human nature and we either embrace it, or we escape from it. Embracing freedom is healthy and escaping freedom using escape mechanisms is the root of psychological conflicts.

 The main escape mechanisms that Fromm identified are: Automaton Conformity, Authoritarianism and Destructiveness. Automation conformity is changing one's ideal self to what is perceived as a preferred type of personality to conform to society, which means losing or hiding one's true self. We then are able to place the burden of responsibility on society instead of self. Authoritarianism is allowing one's self to be controlled by another. This removes freedom of choice by submitting to the freedom of someone else. Destructiveness, aims to eliminate others or the world as a whole to escape freedom. Destruction of the world is the last desperate attempt to save my self from being crushed in it.

Awareness, as Fromm describes it, is created by me once I allow it to manifest. Several factors determine whether I allow my self to be aware of different experiences. I do pass all I perceive through a belief filter and separate them by associations in order to identify them using an accepted mode of knowing. If my experiences get stuck in one of my filters, I put it in another category and mark it as not real, or a fantasy, depending on what is contained within the experience. I cover my awareness with a blanket of doubt and disbelief in order to protect my self from experiences that are not in my memory, or cannot be associated with another similar experience that is lodged in my body consciousness.

Fromm explains that different society's have specific filters that are filled with escape mechanisms, which inhibit awareness until these filters are reconditioned or are expanded to accept new experiences as acts of freedom. Embracing all experiences and accepting them for what they contain, in terms of awareness, is true freedom. But in order to expand in awareness, I consciously put these escape mechanisms in place in order to experience the pain that results from my own creations. I separate my self in order to conceive awareness. Consciousness is not aware of itself unless it separates and forms contrast in this reality.

 As the 20th century philosopher and Taoist Terence Stannus Gray, who wrote under the pen name Wei Wu Wei explains:

What, then, could be inconceivable, what in fact is and must be inconceivable? Only that which is conceiving, is itself inconceivable, for only what is conceiving cannot, when conceiving, conceive itself.

That means consciousness is always aware, but my ability to conceive that which I choose to filter is restricted by my own actions. Aspects of consciousness remain outside of my awareness, due to my established and staunchly rigid belief structure. When I begin to massage that structure and it becomes pliable and flexible and awareness begins to manifest, I conceive more aspects of my own innate freedom. It's similar to death in one sense, for I change my focus from one reality to other realities and begin to experience all of them simultaneously within an expanded time-space filter. Conceiving awareness is experienced on my own and does manifest at certain energy points in linear time, when I choose to allow my self that freedom. If I don't allow my self to die in awareness then I am a sorry traveler, but an eternal one nonetheless.

In Goethe's words:

As long as you do not know

How to die and come to life again

You are but a sorry traveler

On this dark earth.

The point is the earth is only dark if I conceive it to be, by filtering my experiences through an inconceivable belief system.

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