My Wish for 2021 + What is freedom?

In today’s article, I simply want to reflect on 2020, make a wish for 2021, and as I was pondering on that subject, came a question that I will attempt to answer here: What is freedom?

2020 has been a challenging year for most.

For me, though a good amount of adversity of course, it has been the best year of my life.

I became a father in January 2020, and as someone who grew up without a dad, it has been quite an emotional journey. I will write more about that on the blog soon, but this is not the subject for today.

Here is my wish for 2021.

That we learn from 2020.

There are many things that happened that we could never have imagined.

Seneca tells us:

“Nothing should ever be unexpected of us”.

Marcus Aurelius, another great stoic philosopher (and emperor of Rome at the time) would remind himself every morning, of all the things that might go wrong that day. Not to be negative or a complete bummer, but to be prepared.

To get into the day with the mindset and attitude of: I take things AS granted, not FOR granted, and I am able to respond adequately to all the adversity that comes my way.

That builds self-confidence and true personal power.

Confidence, by the way, means: to have intense trust. Self-confidence, is therefore having intense trust in yourself.

Trust is of course not something you get or just pop out of a hat.

It is something you earn.

You earn trust in yourself by acting and responding to events in your life, thoughts and emotions, with virtue, courage, grace, justice, and self-mastery.

How we have been acting in 2020, will be reflected in 2021.

It’s not just because we are changing calendar year, that everything will magically be better.

IF we have planted the seed of virtue, we will reap a virtuous new year.

Likewise, if we have planted a seed of vice, we will continue with another vicious year in front of us.

Is everything set then?

Well, no, because we have the power and the freedom to choose, how we will act today, and tomorrow, and the next day, in order to create a new, better reality.

Don’t know what the future holds for you?

What 2021 will look like?

Does that make you anxious and stressed? Fearful?

The future is nothing else than the sum of present moments.

There is a reason behind me teaching meditation online, and there is a reason why I posted over 360 guided meditations on youtube and another couple hundred on the podcast.

We need to build awareness in the little moments of every second and minute passing by, and act in a way, that, compounded in time, creates the future we desire.

It is as simple as that.

Meditation is just a mindfulness tool that will help us in that endeavour.
It is not a magic pill that will just make everything better. It is a tool to prepare you, and to train your brain to anchor itself to something, so that you may focus, concentrate, and act with virtue.
By practicing meditation in the morning, you will be able to catch yourself during the day, when you find yourself over-thinking, ruminating, and act outside the bounds of the very values you have set for yourself.

Freedom

As we enter this new year with a few lessons from the old year, I have been thinking a lot about freedom. As we see all the videos going around of “Karens” acting so entitled and professing that not wearing a mask is their right, I am forced to wonder.

I am currently reading a book called Sapiens ( get your copy here, I HIGHLY recommend it).

It is fantastic. If you are feeling a bit sad, depressed and anxious about life, read it. It will give you such a perspective on life and on us human beings, that your problems will just feel SO small.

He talks about the fact that, the way we were able to start living in large societies, we humans had to create myths. Genetically, we are, like all our other big apes cousins, meant to be living in much smaller societies.

And so, we needed to create a “structure” based on “beliefs”, in order for us to live the way we do today. It is really fascinating. How does this relate to freedom, have I lost control of my pen again?

Well not exactly.

He explains that there are 3 big parts of our reality.

The objective reality: a stone. water. Radio-activity. This is objective. It exists, in a biological way.

Then there is subjective reality: this is reality filtered by our interpretations of things. Our tastes, and even the love we feel, is subjective: we don’t all have the same subjective reality.

Before reading the book, I thought that was it, these 2 things.

The author then talks about the third one, and this is pretty fascinating: inter-subjective reality.

This reality is constructed around things that we all believe in, that have no objective reality.

The examples are: the Law — There is no biological objectivity to the law. He gives us the example of the differences between Babylonian law 3500 years ago, and the declaration of independence in America in the late 1770s.

This inter-subjective reality, also contains such things as money, religion, and most if not all of our social contracts.

Another good example, is an LLC company. In our society, an LLC company is an entity, like a person, that doesn’t depend on another person. That is why, if you are the CEO of LLC X, and you go bankrupt, nothing will happen to you and your personal belongings. The responsibility falls onto LLC X (which is a fictional construct made by a few lawyers)

All these inter-subjective reality systems, are meant to make it possible for us to live as a society, but really, they are completely fictional. There is nothing objectively real about them.

Back to freedom now.

What is freedom? What freedoms are we allowed to perform?

Well that depends.

Are we talking objectively?
Are we talking subjectively?
Or are we talking inter-subjectively?

The only thing that makes sense, is, because we live in a society with other homo Sapiens, we must act according to inter-subjective reality, or inter-subjective social conduct constructs implemented in the modern civilisation that we live in.

In that case, the boundaries of inter-subjective freedom, would be at the border to each of our subjective freedom.

Simply speaking, your freedom stops when it tramples on someone else’s freedom.

To come back to the example of the mask, you do not possess the freedom not to wear the mask, since the mask is not there to protect you but to protect others, and that not wearing it bypasses your fellow humans to decide to protect himself or not.

I like the analogy of light. If we get 100% light, we cannot see. It’s just pure brightness, removing any contrast that lets us determine objects, shapes, and so on.

Just like there cannot be 100% light, we cannot expect 100% freedom. It must be bordered by lines that our inter-subjective societal realities have put in place for us.

Here is another way to define freedom, that I find particularly elegant:

Freedom is the choice you make when you step in the gap between stimulus and response.

The stoics talk a lot about response ability, our ability to respond to events in life, external and internal, and we have mentioned it many times on the channel (we will mention it again many many many more times in the close future).

In his book Man’s search for meaning ( get your copy here, it is a beautiful book), Victor Frankl explains, that the reason he was able to survive the terrible years he had to live when he was imprisoned in Nazi death camps, was because of his last freedom.

He said, and I paraphrase, in a way less gracious way, that although they could beat him up, which they did often, just for fun and by human cruelty, they could not beat his mind. They could starve him. They could humiliate him. But they could not get in his mind.

They could not take away his last freedom, which was, the way he chose to react to the situation he was in. Isn’t this mind blowing? He didn’t give up, and when the camp was liberated, he was able to get out of that nightmare. He had made the decision to survive this, in order to tell the world about it, which he did in his books, so that it would never happen again on earth. (Sadly, concentration camps still exist in 2021.)

I will cut it short here, because this post has been way longer than I planned for it to be, and we have a lot more to cover, but let me know how this resonates with you. Send me a tweet or an email. Let’s talk about this.

Channel Updates:

In 2020, I posted a video a day, sometimes, 2. That was a LOT of work, a LOT of time and a LOT of energy.

I am so happy I did, because our channel grew from 1000 to nearly 15000 subscribers / meditators, as well as the email list and podcast.

I have received some beautiful feedback from some of our meditators that have shared their transformations with me. This has been so rewarding, and I am SO HONOURED to be part of your life journeys.

I am not sure that I can keep up the pace for much longer though. I want to, but I also want to provide the best quality content for you, and posting one or two videos a day for another year, does not seem like something I can do right now.

I am working to make this a full time thing, but until I figure out how I can do that financially, I still have a full time job (and a one year old baby).

I have therefore decided on this YouTube plan, at least for the first few months of 2021.

Mondays we will have a sleep meditation, or sleep self-hypnosis session.

I want us to really prioritise our sleep. And I am experimenting with some new forms of meditations that can really help you (even if you are not suffering from lack of sleep)

Wednesdays, my wife Martina will jump in with some breathing exercises. With everything happening in the world today, I cannot stress enough how important these exercises are. As a professionally trained singer and singing teacher, she has been focusing on the breath, and its relation to our physiology and psychology. How it affects our immune system, how it affects our moods and emotions and more. I am really excited about that, as I believe it will be of great value to you.

Fridays, we will continue with our meditations, vibrational, transcendence, and more.

Sundays, we will go live with our meditations. My goal here is really to create a beautiful beam of energy, with as many people meditating together. We go live every Sunday at 10 am EST. Invite your friends!

Ok so I had 2 more things I wanted to talk to you about, but I have taken enough of your time for today. I hope this message was valuable, and I will talk about the rest next time.

Sending you love, and courage, for the year of 2021. Let’s make this the best year of our lives. Let’s dive in deep within ourselves, and apply our values, moment to moment to moment.

Sending you LOVE

Raphael

Originally published at https://www.raphaelreiter.com on January 2, 2021.