Sunday, February 22, 2015

Can a Free Being Be Created?

Introduction: The question asked above  is given in the midst of endless attempts today by individuals and groups, large and small, that are seeking for freedoms such as economic, social, religious, artistic, personal, political and even more specific ones. But what is actually the state of being free? Its spiritual state? That which would have to be so that it could be  modified in reality by all of  the above? And how is it to be achieved if it cannot be created and must be achieved? And if achieved, how will it be realised? What context would be needed for the attempt to be made? And how is it related to Truth? (see below.) To Love? To Purpose?

Here we begin with some statements of interest:




·        Freedom cannot be bestowed — it must be achieved.
·        Elbert Hubbard, in his essay on Booker T. Washington in Little Journeys For 1908, p. 21; Franklin D. Roosevelt later used this line on the occasion of the 74th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: "In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved".

·        If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
·        Jesus of Nazareth as quoted in John 8:31 (NIV)
·        Variant translation: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
·        Jesus as quoted in John 8:31 (KJV).

·        The great revolution in the history of man, past, present and future, is the revolution of those determined to be free.
·        John F. Kennedy: "Message to Chairman Khrushchev Concerning the Meaning of Events in Cuba," April 18, 1961. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.

And this from Rudolf Steiner:

Now it is possible to attain complete freedom in our inner life if we increasingly efface and exclude the actual thought content, in so far as this comes from outside, and kindle into greater activity the element of will which streams through our thoughts when we form judgments, draw conclusions and the like. Thereby, however, our thinking becomes what I have called in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: pure thinking. We think, but in our thinking there is nothing but will. I have laid particular emphasis on this in the new edition of the book (1918). What is thus within us lies in the sphere of thinking. But pure thinking may equally be called pure will.
(see The Path to Freedom and Love, December 19, 1920.)

And finally, from an unknown source:

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free.


  Drawing on the work of Rudolf Steiner and related authors, I'd like to make a beginning with the question here posed in different ways in my own individual way with the following verse:

Preparing the Free in the Unfree

“You need me!” You need me!”
The Great Lord Lucifer  said,
When before God's Throne so long ago
He strutted with prideful tread.

“You cannot create a free being.
No! Not even You, the God Supreme.
You know it and You must admit it
That creating a free being is for you but a dream.

“But create for me a Paradise Garden
And place a man and woman within,
And I will give you the foundation
For a Free Being to arise from mortalizing Sin.

But when so prepared You must let them be
Free ever to choose between You and me!”

God granted to Lucifer his request
For He knew full well there and then
That later He could send to Adam and Eve His Son,
And through Him gain free allegiance from them.

(But God also knew that would later come the day
When Lord Ahriman  would also try to steal them away.

And for this Great Danger God prepared mankind well
By sending to aid them His Dragon-Slayer Michael.)

10/4/14


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