Something That Brings an Opportunity of Blessing to All

from

Approach To Truth

Uranda   July 30, 1953

What is freedom? Some people seem to imagine that it is freedom to do as they please with their own lives, without regard to the lives of others. Some people seem to assume that it means that there will be a state wherein they can have what they want, when they want it, the way they want it. But if we stop to consider the matter we must realize that if some of us are going to have what we want, when we want it, the way we want it, then others are not going to be in position to have what they want, when they want it. That kind of a pattern means that some of us must be slaves so that some of us can have what we want, when we want it, the way we want it. And if we are all human beings, all a part of one human family, regardless of race or color or creed, then the answer should be something that brings an opportunity of blessing to all—not just freedom for some but freedom for all who will accept it, all who will share it.

So, what is freedom? Freedom from what? Freedom for what? We may say that we would like to have freedom from our aches and pain. Yes. We would like to have freedom from various limitations. We would like to have freedom to live successfully. But if we all have an individual interpretation of what that successful pattern of life is, without regard to others, we are going to run into the same difficulties we have known before.

That pattern of life which gives us greatest joy should be a pattern which gives the greatest possible enjoyment to others. If the true pattern of freedom makes it possible for us to have happiness, it should not be at the expense of happiness in others.

And so, freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Let us start with the freedom to live. Freedom to live does not mean merely freedom to die. Freedom to live does not merely mean freedom to exist for three-score-years-and-ten. Freedom to live means something more than being a slave to circumstance. So, this pattern of freedom must be something which provides the opportunity for dominion over circumstance. And yet human beings have so far been puppets of circumstance. They have been pushed about by circumstance. Rich and poor, high and low, it makes no difference. All have been pushed about by circumstance.

So, this freedom must mean that there is a process of restoring dominion. And dominion means control, and control means that we should be able to begin to live our own lives on a basis that does not leave us subject to the seeming whims and fancies of circumstance. Freedom to live victoriously, effectively, means an opportunity to begin to control circumstance. But if there is to be control, that control must be present in ourselves. All too often human beings try to develop an iron will. They are going to force their own wills upon others and upon circumstance, to try to have that freedom from circumstance or the controls of chance. But that iron pattern of will sooner or later comes to the point of a dictatorship, a dictatorship which begins to ignore the rights and privileges of others. It begins to ignore the fact that others have a right to freedom from subjection to the whims of circumstance.

The only way by which we can begin to find an answer to these perplexing questions which face all human beings everywhere is to begin to find the fundamental principles and laws of being which establish a pattern of relationship between us and Deity, something that can have meaning while we live on earth.

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