Freedom, Discipline and Responsibility

Content I found interesting:

This week there is no content recommendations since I did a retreat and didn’t consume anything for two weeks.

I will just share with you a music that stuck with me on the last week. This music has been really important in my life. You probably already know it, but here it goes.

Thoughts and realizations:

I found a new way to interpret the concept of many lives and karma.

I can easily go to the ‘etheric plane’, but I am a rationalist, so I usually see this kind of things as a conception of our own minds and I do not accept any of it as truths. So, here is the idea of many lives and karma through a rational point of view.

Every time we die, we are reborn in another body, and this cycle continues forever until one becomes illuminated, a buddha. Once you become a buddha, the next time you die, you will not be reborn again. Every time you are reborn you start with the progress that you made to enlightenment on your past life, which is your karma. This is the basic concept explained by some eastern religions.

So, hear me out. Every moment of consciousness is a ‘life’, every time you lose your awareness is a kind of death. What’s there more to life than your own consciousness anyway? And when you reach enlightenment, you will be aware the rest of your life, so, once you die, you will die for real, there will be no more death by awareness.

Karma is what you take from your past ‘lives’, if you suffered from a big trauma, if you kill a person or else, it will take many ‘lives’ to recover from it, it will take many ‘lives’ to find peace again. And if you worked to be enlightened in a past ‘life’, the way will be easier on this one.

This is my rational take on many lives and karma, tell me yours!

_____

We usually think we want freedom, but freedom is uncomfortable, and we hate discomfort.

When you are under someone else control, a person or a government for example, life looks easy, you don’t need to make any decision, you can just relax and follow orders. You don´t need to feel responsible for your life, when something goes wrong, you can take someone else accountable, but you will never be accountable.

But, if you take control of your life, if you choose freedom, you must make every decision for yourself and be accountable for them, you will have to take responsibility for everything that happens in your life, that takes a lot of courage. Freedom comes hand in hand with responsibility and it takes a lot of courage to accept responsibility. The more you have freedom, the more accountable you are of your actions, that’s why most people don’t want freedom.

So, if you don’t feel responsible for things that happened in your life, if you blame someone else, you are not free, you are just a slave of your own ignorance, because you choose to be a slave.

If you think that your anxiety, restlessness, or depression comes from anything but yourself, you are not taking responsibility even for the things that no one else but you can control, so, you are not free, you are being enslaved by your own mind.

Real freedom is within.

Freedom is in realizing that nothing from the outside can make you suffer.

Freedom is in taking responsibility for your suffering.

Freedom is realizing that you create your own suffering.

 

It also means that you take control of your life, that you can do whatever you want, whenever you want it.

But freedom can be dangerous if your mind is not trained to be fully determined. If you have freedom but no morality and no discipline, that I think come together, you will lose your freedom fast.

How can you lose your freedom? You become a slave to yourself.

Not having discipline and being able to do whatever you want whenever you want it, will harm you, you will start searching for pleasures and you will be a slave to that drug, that experience, that food, that person, that thought.

If you can do anything you want, you will start by the pleasure, not the pain.

Imagine being on a cruise ship and having no discipline, you will go to the jacuzzi first, not the gym.

So, I think you need 3 things to have and maintain freedom:

_Discipline and morality

_Responsibility for your state in life

_The courage to search for change and to take responsibility

Don’t be a coward and take responsibility for everything you experience, everything, everything, everything, and be free.