Liberating ourselves

Liberating ourselves - by P.K. Odendaal - July 2016

 

Abstract from the film Chicken run:

Mrs. Tweedy:         
It's all in your head, Mr Tweedy. Say it.
Mr. Tweedy:          
It's all in me head. It's all in me head.
Mrs. Tweedy:         
You keep telling yourself that, because I don't want to hear another word about it. Is that clear?
Mr. Tweedy:          
Yes, luv. But you know that ginger one...?
Mrs. Tweedy:         
They're chickens, you dolt! Apart from you, they're the most stupid creatures on this planet! They don't plot, they don't scheme, and they are not organised!

 

What better analogy to use to depict our own bondage, ignorance and hopelessness when we think we are not free. The film as you know is all about these chickens who want freedom and take this one in a million chance that they can escape the chicken pie machine, and in the end they execute their own liberation. I am not quite sure that the writer of the script did not have this deeper meaning of getting out of bondage in mind.

The magic words during the French revolution were ' liberty, equality, fraternity', and after a violent revolution, the revolution's mother was killed, as happens in all revolutions, and they got none of those, simply because it was not an available commodity.

I am, as always, rushing in where angels fear to tread, and today I wish to develop the concept of self-liberation. If there is a concept of self-redemption, as there is, why not also a concept of self-liberation, which there should be?

The concept is that we are free because of our free will, and we go into bondage by using our free will unwisely, thereby getting into a compromised situation. So why can't we not deliver ourselves from that evil?

I have written many articles on freedom, happiness and bondage and insightful is the perspective that freedom, like happiness and bondage, is only to be found in ourselves or more correctly in our thoughts. A person in bondage who thinks he or she is free, indeed is.

What are these bondages other than thoughts, ignorance, fear, compromises, custom, convention, conventional wisdom and self-incrimination which bind us?

The basic problem we have is that we are always waiting for somebody to set us free, to make us happy or to liberate us, whilst we have it in ourselves to do just that. That somebody or group will never liberate us. Even externally liberated people are still in bondage. Most of the people of Russia and the Eastern block are still slaves to that ideology, although they have been freed from it. Most of the people of the free West are still slaves to money and greed, and even slaves of freedom itself.

We are literally what we think, and that goes for all of these: freedom, bondage and fear. When we take a decision today, we are free to decide anything, unless our decisions have already landed us in bondage - ask Adam and Eve.