It seems to me that some of us are more guided by a mode of living that is more geared to destiny or fate than freedom. What is the connection between the narrative sense, having a coherent history, and fate vs living moment-to-moment, making "free" decisions, but only in an ahistorical almost dream like state of freedom? This type of freedom seems analagous with me to spirit. And a quote comes to mind, probably Kierkegaard, out of nowhere, "anxiety (or freedom?) is a qualification of a dreaming spirit..." I'll have to search through my quotes on the blog to find the exact words on that, but it will be well worth it in this context and considering how fortuitously this quote popped into my head.
If the goal of life is to refine us, to test us, then you may see how unsubstantial are these free moments of decision, so light and airy, so devoid of matter and of bodies, of the corporeal, yes, indeed the ethereal moments of decision, vision blurred as if in a dream, not even the visual field having a concrete anchor. It feels foregin to have decisions made in such a "lightweight" manner - yet this is what freedom (of decision making) in an existential sense conjurs up inside me. The choices that matter. The choices that define us, where we pick one side or the other - indeed, the either/or of Kierkegaard perhaps?
Some of us may have had cookie-cutter, Normal Rockwell histories and rational lives that make sense. Others of us will be dreaming travelers, but they will be free. Those with histories will be good story tellers and the dreamers will be poets and philosophers.
I had a dream the other night that effected me, as amazing as dreams can be. In between the chaos and the bizarre setting of a grocery store near where I grew up and frequented often, as I jostled elbows at a table for some bizarre reason with lawyers, I stood up and told them "The first shall be last and the last shall be first." I haven't read my Bible in a year or more. I also sensed the sadness of aging and the passing of time. I am getting older, my parents are getting older. Those childhood experiences every day acquire more dust, become less relevant, less relatable. People move out of neighborhoods. But the memories remain and float around in warm cheery little voids in our imaginations, where the candle still burns eternally. Freedom is a qualification of dreaming spirit.
I am absolutely of the mind that the experiences we live, and I mean the good ones, the love that we experience, live on in a real and meaningful way. It is and always will be connected with us, even after we leave this world and those neighborhoods behind.
[update] 12/9/11, found the quote:
"Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. The concept of anxiety...is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility. Fore this reason, anxiety is not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit." -Soren Kierkegaard under pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis The Concept of Anxiety
and another
"Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity but in itself. If sin has come into the world by necessity (which is a contradiction) there can be no anxiety. Nor can there be any anxiety if sin came into the world by an act of an abstract liberum arbitrium." -Soren Kierkegaard under pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis The Concept of Anxiety
