Saturday, Sep 20, 2025 at 8:52 PM

So what exactly is freedom? When I say that the message of the Divine Logos is freedom, what does that mean?

There are many different uses of the word "freedom" today, so let's explore this a bit. Let's start with what I think is the most common understanding of freedom, which is the ability to do whatever you want – to freedom to choose.

Do you know anyone who has struggled with addiction? Perhaps you yourself have. I've personally had several close friends and a romantic partner that struggled with drug and alcohol addiction.

Is a drug addict free? They are nominally "free" to choose any action they want, but since they are addicts, they are not really free to do anything that would restrict their access to the drug. Their choices are severely constrained by their addiction. I think we could say they are not free. They may rationalize their actions and claim they are free, but an outside observer would instantly recognize that the addict is in a very real sense trapped.

This is the sense in which most of us are not free. We are slaves of our flaws as human beings.

Now let's talk in modern psychology terms for a moment. Let's talk about awareness and levels of consciousness. Someone who is operating at a low level of consciousness is only responsive to their own immediate material needs – food, water, shelter. These are things at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. As we become more aware of the world around us, we consider broader perspectives, and our level of consciousness is raised. A more aware person considers the needs of their neighbor, their brother, their coworkers, and so on. Someone who is at the level of a saint is aware of the full thrust of history and human nature.

Of course, the end of this "awareness" spectrum is true objectivity. If you were able to know and understand everything and know the hearts and minds of every person that ever lived, your perspective would be that of God.

I would like you to consider this one definition of God. God is the ultimate consciousness and pure objectivity, because the mind of God contains everything, so God alone "knows" what is Real.

Now someone who is persistently stuck at a low level of consciousness is someone who is very much stuck in their own head. They obsess about their own personal concerns day and night. They are incapable of considering the needs of others. They are suffering greatly because they cannot see anything beyond themselves. Everywhere they look, they see their own shadow. This person is grounded in their ego. They are completely ruled by their base desires – hunger, lust, rage. They never or rarely experience a moment of being "outside" themselves. It is an awful existence.

The ego-grounded person stuck at a low level of consciousness is essentially in the same trap as the addict. They are "free" to indulge in their most base desires, but that "freedom" is illusory. In reality they are trapped. They are only able to indulge. They may satiate their urges, but this gives them no lasting pleasure, no sense of completion. Like the addict, they may rationalize their situation and convince themselves that they are "free" and have chosen these circumstances. But they are, and remain, an addict.

What Christ the Divine Logos offers is true freedom. Exactly how He does this will require further extrapolation.

What is this freedom from?

It is in a real sense, freedom from ourselves. It is freedom from our flaws. Freedom from our animal nature. Freedom from the pain of living like perpetual infants, crying in the dark for someone to change the world to suit our immediate needs. With our limited perspective, we humans make many mistakes that cause us pain.

For example, have you ever sat at a red light, fuming that the light would not change? There's no cross traffic, and yet you are forced to wait for far too long at the light. And you're late for work! This is a common feeling of powerlessness in the face of a seemingly arbitrary and random obstacle to fulfilling our personal desires.

And yet as the driver stuck at this red light, you would not be angry or frustrated if you could see the entire system of roads, traffic signals, and drivers as one. From the higher perspective, it all makes sense. So raising our level of awareness frees us from the burning feeling of frustration that comes from spending too much time in our lower instincts.

The freedom we're talking about here is freedom from ourselves. This kind of freedom comes from having proper understanding of what we ought to do. We ought to be patient. We ought to be kind to one another. And so on.

But why?

Going back to the traffic light situation, is it right that the light isn't changing? From the narrow perspective of a single driver, this is a tragedy – I can't drive my car when and where I want. But from the perspective of the engineering crew that erected the stop lights and programmed them in a specific way, it is right for the light to be red because it protects other drivers, maintains order on the roadways, and so on.

The wrong choice in the red light situation is for the driver to become enraged or even worse to blow through the red light and risk a head-on collision. But this is exactly what our lower instincts wire us to do.

Another word for a wrong choice is a mistake. A mistake is something we do because we have flaws. Mistakes of the moral variety can be called sins.

We are all "addicts" to sin. We are not free as long as we persist in sinning. And all sin derives from staying in this low level of consciousness, driven by only our own instinctual drives.

Recall that Christian doctrine identifies Jesus with the Divine Logos – a rational living force that guides and shapes all life and all of creation. If the Logos is rational, as we are told, then as rational beings, it should be possible for us to calculate the "will" of the Logos, at least to a limited degree. I will explore this more in future writings, but in short, we can find the "will of God" in the telos of living things.

And indeed, we can rationally work out the "right" thing to do in any situation, as I have done with the traffic light example. As rational beings, human beings are inherently moral. The answer in all cases is to increase our perspective, close to the God-level perspective. Then the morally correct choice becomes apparent.

Jesus gave us a short-cut to finding this perspective. He told us to simply treat others as an extension of ourselves.

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Here I have tried to de-code and untangle the jargon of Christian religion, to translate it into terms that readers are more likely to find sympathetic and reasonable. Terms like "God" and "sin" feel very archaic in 21st century America. But these are terms that symbolize experiences we have every day, not matter what belief system you subscribe to.

The terminology of Christian scripture feels archaic because it is. It was written for a 1st century Jewish (and later gentile) audience.

Thus it is necessary to do the mental work of translating the meaning of the scriptures into ordinary language, by use of proverb, metaphor, and example. This little blog is my humble attempt to do this.