What is absolutely essential to us?
So many things or values seem fundamental and indispensable in our lives. Love, Justice, Happiness… for others health, material comfort, inner peace, and fulfilment.
Since March 2020, what has really been experienced as an essential value by a large part of humanity is Freedom. The French poet Paul Eluard probably did not imagine in 1942 how his heartfelt cry for freedom would cross borders, decades, and continue to be written or whispered everywhere, eighty years later:
And by the power of a word
I begin my life again
I was born to know you
To name you
Freedom.
How great is freedom! The freedom to love all beings; not only those that my tastes or my education impose on me. The freedom to act; not as an automaton guided by my desires of the moment. The freedom to think; a thought that is not tied to my culture or my memory. Freedom to be; to be, regardless of the limit of my character. To be all characters. To be free of my own limits. To be me. To be the other. To be all others. To be all possibilities. To be all universes. To be everywhere at once.
This quest for freedom, this search pushes us all forward, every moment of our lives. However, we know that a freedom to do what we want, to go where we want, will not answer this quest. Even if we manage to do everything we most desire, we will always remain dependent on something, which is the opposite of being free. Dependent on wealth that one wants to possess, dependent on chimeras and the hope of a better world that never arrives. Illusions and dreams are also bonds that prevent freedom. And without all these ties, do we dare to face the void?
The void… but what void?
Our most abysmal emptiness is undoubtedly the one caused by the absence of knowledge of ourselves, by the absence of a total understanding of our existence, of its raison d’être, of the functioning of our body, of our relationships with all living things. What is the point of being so-called free if you don’t know who you really are or what you are doing in this life?
Remember Socrates, remember the Temple of Delphi:
“Know thyself and thou shalt know nature and the Gods. Knowledge of yourself, of others and of the universe. Know thyself, which means start by observing yourself. Look at each of your thoughts, your beliefs, your convictions, your emotions and say to yourself: where do they come from? Are they really mine? When did I make them mine?
Check honestly, weigh up each belief you hold.
Our thoughts are usually influenced by memory, by everything we believe we have learned, or understood. On this basis, we analyse, imagine, but all these ideas and thoughts are always the result of what is behind us: wounds, desires, failures. To decondition oneself from all this is to be new at every moment, to leave behind the past, that is to say to “die to oneself every day”.
To find this other way which is not in the manuals or in the psychology magazines, it is useful to clean up our heads by getting rid of everything from the past. For how can you write a new page, an authentic freedom, with old ideas, with beliefs from another time, with various influences that do not come from your own life experience?
Self-knowledge, a long path of trials and painful but also luminous experiences, if accomplished with sincerity and objectivity, leads each person to become aware that he or she is a part of a whole other domain than the one we apprehend with our senses. Each one is a part of a sublime dimension, perfectly free, because one carries within oneself the divine domain which is not “of this world”. And the atom of eternity that vibrates within us is of the same nature as this spiritual field. Thus, to truly know oneself is to learn to know this free atom, to recognise it, in ourselves as in others. Recognising this atom, and therefore knowing ourselves at last, enables us to re-establish the lost connection with our world of origin, of divine nature.
To be free is to be aware of what we are, of this divine origin. To be free is to understand that we carry eternity within us, God. This knowledge is not an ultimate illusion or an attempt to escape from oneself, but an intimate response to what resonates in the depths of one’s being like a distant and nearby call. This call that has always vibrated within us, this nostalgia, had we perceived it, listened to it?
Our eyes, like our other senses, only perceive a very limited and filtered part of life: they watch everything pass by like in old black and white films, with two big black bands at the top and bottom. The whole picture escapes us, the dimensions, the colours, the depth, the sound… All our perception is reduced to a very narrow material plane which prevents us from seeing the whole scenario of our life.
When we have gone through this trying period of confrontation, of stripping away and exposing ourselves, it is possible to rediscover life and all the treasures of wisdom entrusted to humanity, such as the teachings transmitted through the ages: those of the Buddha, Plato, Lao Tzu…
When we open the Bible, for example, discovering it as if no one had read it before or polluted our direct appreciation of the images it transmits, we discover a word of singular modernity, extraordinarily revolutionary, if we are willing to take the trouble to try to understand what is inside, with an open heart.
What does this “book of books” tell us? It says: You have been called to freedom. And also: You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
And this is the opposite of a religious or dogmatic programme, isn’t it?
On this basis, the classical Rosicrucians of the 17th century expressed this divine message again in the original Christ dimension of the Bible, through a sublime messenger: Christian Rosycross, the freedom seeker of all times! He is the prototype of the seeker of infinite freedom, putting pure Christianity into practice.
In the tomb of Christian Rosycross, which symbolically represents the mystery of our existence, the mystery of the New Birth, secret formulas are written, such as the following:
– The Yoke of Law
– The Freedom of the Gospel
The yoke of the law. A yoke is a wooden frame that was placed on the neck of oxen to harness them so that they could pull a cart. The yoke of law is the law of this nature that encloses us and under which we bend, like slaves. This law leads humanity to apprehend the limit of this incarnation, it constantly confronts us with this constraint. The law is experienced by human beings as something implacable and impossible to overcome. But it is also this experience that allows the human being to touch the ground, to take it as a support to be able to rise again.
The Freedom of the Gospel. If we manage to get rid of all the preconceived ideas about the much-maligned word “gospel”, by returning to its Greek etymology, which means “good news”, then it is Christ’s teaching that comes to us, like a universal wisdom that addresses what is purest in human beings in order to free them.
This message appears secret, hidden in the Bible, not so that it cannot be easily understood, or only by a very few lucky people, but because its teaching is presented in the only language, the only possible vocabulary that can express our divine vocation.
We often read this message only with our ordinary eyes. In general, the stories of the Bible no longer really speak to humanity, which is disconnected from the divine nature. Who among you knows that you have an atom of eternity in your heart?
This “good news” therefore presents the essential keys to liberation, that is to say, a method adapted to every human being to attain absolute, irreversible, eternal freedom. This is the message of Christ, which is still relevant in 2022! And this message is anything but “religious”!
Let us make the effort to consider this name of Christ, dusting it off from the layers of interpretations and prejudices that have been piled upon it for 2000 years. Are we able to see Christ as a liberating force, a powerful current of Love? Christ is not a man and it does not matter what the past still represents to us. Christ is an electromagnetic current from the world of eternity that is making its way through time, through our world and into our time. This wave of Love from the divine Kingdom brings knowledge and understanding of the divine plan for humanity. And to know this plan is to enter into freedom.
To perceive this plan and to connect with it, we travel through very different landscapes, through experiences of great richness, with trying moments when everything seems to be a limit, an impassable wall. We walk with snow up to our hips, we swim in powerful counter-currents, the wounds of the past hold us back. We are subject to a law, the earthly law, and must overcome this law by daring to let go of what reassures us to allow the wave of Christ to guide us with his Law of Love.
Who dares to go beyond the boundary of his own conditioning to make this new beginning, that of a new understanding of existence and thus enter into the first and last freedom?
