Question6.com: The gist of our life
16 - What is freedom
We are not free, and we are far from it.
We are told about economic freedom, freedom of association, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of thought.
We are told about all the possible manifestations of freedom. This is our way to avoid talking about freedom itself. We have the same problem with ‘life.’ We talk about the manifestations of life and avoid talking about life itself.
It is the same problem we have with consciousness, life, and love…. We want them. We long for them. We spend our lives searching for them but cannot catch them.
There is a zoo in the Netherlands where the visitors are kept in a dark hallway. They can barely see each other. Along the hallway are open windows. Through one of the windows, you can see birds flying around in a well-lit room. Nothing prevents the birds from flying through the open window and joining you in the hallway. Nothing except the light. The birds stay in the well-lit room and don’t want to explore the darkness they can see outside. The birds are prisoners of the light. Their eyesight, which allows them to see the world, can also be their jail. This also applies to humans. Our senses can become our jail.
Through another window, you can see snakes. There is nothing between you and the snakes except some ice. The snakes don’t come through the window looking for lunch because they would have to go over the ice. The snakes don’t like the cold. They are prisoners of heat.
Those animals don’t know that they are kept prisoners. They would have to get outside their cage to realize that there is a cage.
We are prisoners of our senses like the birds are prisoners of the light, and the snakes are prisoners of heat. We are prisoners of our eyesight, hearing, temperature, and air that we breathe… We are prisoners of our bodies.
- Bergson said that our life is littered with all the personalities that we could have been. We make choices throughout our lives and become prisoners of those choices. As you get older, changing professions becomes more and more difficult.
We need to live in society. Sometimes, society may have to prevail over the individual. We need some laws. Every time we make a law, we remove some freedom and replace it with a rule. The more rules, the less freedom is left to the individual.
Do you remember Plato’s allegory of the cave?
In the third century BC, Plato wrote his famous allegory of the cave. His concern was the importance of education in our lives. To solve a problem is to become conscious of its solution. Education develops our consciousness. We only have to replace his cave with consciousness and his allegory will apply to our 21st century.

Plato imagined people who spent all their lives in a cave. All they can do is watch shadows on the wall before them. The shadows are their “reality”. One day, one of them is set free to turn around and look behind. He discovers a fire and symbols being moved in front of the fire. What he could see on the wall was only a shadow. His reality was only a mirage.
The next step was to let our explorer leave the cave. He discovers the outside world. He finds a new ‘reality,’ a new freedom, and a new consciousness. It seems (to us and today) that freedom and consciousness come together. We cannot blame the people in the cave for not being conscious of a freedom they never experienced. We are conscious of freedom when we experience it.Plato’s message is that we are prisoners and should escape our jail. Let’s get out of our 5% of the material world.
Plato would approve!
That may be one of the purposes of our life on earth: We must regain our freedom.


The woman made him conscious of feelings he could not have imagined. He discovers that his first cave was inside a bigger cave, itself inside another bigger cave. We could say that he was climbing a staircase, and every step up widened his consciousness
Let us water the little seeds:
Freedom, consciousness, and love were already buried in our explorer like seeds waiting to be watered. What happened inside him was like what happened in the nature around him. Seeds are buried in the ground like he was buried in his cave. If you don’t water the seeds, nothing comes out. Nature waters them. They rise. Seeds discover the sunlight and grow in a different world. It is their new reality.
Consciously or not, we keep watering little seeds buried in our subconscious. Every stress in our life is an opportunity to bring something to the surface that will help us overcome our problems. This is how we water our little seeds. This is how we push the envelope of our freedom. The criterion of success is a feeling of happiness.
Adding a second chapter to Plato’s allegory of the cave:
The first chapter that we added was about the love of one person. Plato already knew what would come next. It is the ‘platonic’ love. That means a feeling of love that does not need help from another human being. It is detached from the material world. It is the love of the whole universe! It is how people find peace and harmony. Some people find it in their cat. Some in the flowers. This love penetrates the world like the wind goes through a tree - without getting attached to it.
What makes humans feel alive is the watering of some seeds already existing deep in their soul, such as freedom, consciousness, love. It is by developing them that we can become conscious of a new reality.