FREEDOM OF THE SPIRIT Spirit comes before the letter of the law, through the letter of the law,

and beyond the letter of the law. How do we identify ourselves as a self? History and capacity play their role. These are themes for another discussion. So let us focus on our political selfdefinitions, our participation in a body politic at the local and global level, and all those enclaves along the way, precipitates in our historical understanding of how well we can get along together, achieve some measure of our personal dreams, and respect the personal dreams of our fellow human beings. It all comes downs to our sense of well-being, our whole sameness as vessels of freedom. If this is true, there must be a maturing sense of self that grows with us as we become more experienced, as we age. One should suppose, that a more balanced a more open and closed self, would emerge from our personal and interpersonal history, the history of our individuality, our indivisible-duality. There are those who have critiqued the yeses and nos of our long journey into self and our individual upbringing. There is something in these critiques. I, myself, have written about that Salmonic imprint of that longing for some distant shore where there will be a culmination and a new beginning. This can be a serene shore of yesteryear or some placid place yet to come. In either case, it is a motivational necessity, a place of peace, a place where our self fits, is welcomed, and we have an

intimate knowledge of just what it is to be a selfcoincidental being. It is a place of silent knowledge, a place of knowing when we are on the path to the truth of our real selves and when we are off that path. We come to realize that there is only one true path for each and every individual and that the essential for everyone is that mastering of ones own freedom to become what we have come to understand is eternally already there, here, and everywhere. In order to accomplish this free self-expression, we must be free to coincide with that very being of our self. The many idealists and realists, utopians and pragmatists have, for the most part, poorly understood this essential attribute of human nature, of freedom. One could even say all lifes freedoms. They have not grasped the emergence of a self-ownership that provides a beacon for all of ones own personal development and the developments of all others. No one can be subjugated and be free. There have been and there are those convoluted and trying moments when a few or many have come to believe that a form of subjugation is or was in their best interests and yet in the end they find (or have found) that there is a absolute necessity in the having of freedom. [There are those exceptions in cases when a person is a danger to self or others or chooses to malign the peaceful coexistence of our kind by disregarding the sacred concept of ownership, including self-ownership.] We, as rational souls, must have access to our personal freedoms or we cannot fulfill our very own purpose for

being. To think that we are free is incongruent with our very nature. It is only in that free exercising of our very selves that we are free. In our current age, an age defined by machines of every stripe, we have been seduced into a complacency that has shadowed our vision. We have lapsed into an artificial incomplete expression of self, a self that has become accustomed to less than sufficient freedoms in order to self define, to mature and to self express. We must rouse ourselves from our somnambulant adolescence. We are at risk of losing our most profound attribute, without which we cease to be an example of humankind, for kindness is, a rational choice, Any thought or belief to the contrary is a childish whim, one that causes us to wish to be held in a parents all encompassing arms, always protected* and never exposed to circumstances that can challenge us into becoming all that we are. It would be our most grievous mistake. *This is another one of the many reasons for us to promulgate a respect for and a obligation to maintaining families, families where those protected moments foster that innate sense of OKness that allows for one to risk lifes journey by which we learn to wear our selfhood, without which one cannot be free. Don Davison
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