A Homecoming Story
A young child may desire more freedom, but what she lacks in freedom, she makes up for in family connections. Eventually, she comes of age, leaves home, and gains more freedom. She’s still connected to family, but that connection does not interfere with her new found freedom. Desiring even more freedom, she goes off to university, earns her PhD, and obtains employment and a compensating salary befitting her educational accomplishments. In other words, she has earned her freedom, but in the process, she has left family connections behind, or, perhaps a better way to say this is she left behind the stifling aspect of freedom-denying family connections. This liberated lady, soon thereafter, weds, has children, and begins anew this process which sustains and perpetuates life and her family linage. But, more importantly, freedom, at every turn, requires a break with the past. Sociologically speaking, these significant breaks with the past are called “rites of passage.” But, for the purpose of this homecoming journey, these freedom generated “rites of passage,” both define and produce new dimensions of freedom – a change in kind, not degree, of freedom.
Freedom is embedded in a process that evolves more freedom, but, in the beginning, this freedom is spread out and weak. Let ~~b represent this weak, but totally connected freedom. In this evolutionary sense, ~~b represents not only freedom, but the freedom inherent in the physical universe (small amount of freedom, lots of connectivity). When freedom breaks with its past, it includes and transcends its own limiting condition (the symbol, ~~b, represents both freedom and freedom’s limiting condition). Since freedom’s structure is preserved across all the changes of freedom, new dimensions of freedom always occur within their own negative space/condition. In other words, when ~~b includes and transcends its own dimension, ~~b becomes b while occurring in its own negative space, or ~b. We call this higher dimension the evolution of living organisms.
Freedom, in this higher dimension, can be compared to the experience of little miss leaving home. When freedom takes its first breath of fresh air, it is akin to little miss surveying a new world, one without parental authority hovering over her head. In this new dimension, freedom continues to expand and the result is the creation of massive amounts of biological complexity and diversity. Life, however, never escapes the conditions that inhibit and limit its expression, nor does it escape the grim reaper’s shout to cease and desist. But, what a success story it has become, there is hardly a place on earth where life cannot survive, but more to the point, life evolves more freedom.
Over the course of evolving brain sizes and mind boggling complexities, freedom, once again, incorporates and transcends the conditions which inhibit its expression, and it does so in a way that preserves structure (the structure that implies wholeness). When living matter escapes the conditions that inhibit and limit its expression, it transcends its own negative environment (~bb) by including it in a higher dimension. We are familiar with this dimension of freedom because we experience it. When non-being occurring in being gets experienced, implied identity gets embedded in a physical event, the higher negative environment of b~b, or being occurring in non-being. In other words, what is being described by this higher dimensional of freedom is self-consciousness occurring in an environment of physical facts. In this higher state of freedom the human being can anticipate future possibilities (imagination), communicate via language, reflect on what is and ask why, analyze problems and solve them, and form judgments. In fact, all the mental processing that gets called “mind” is a by-product of the liberated state of b~b~bb freedom. In a word, self-consciousness implies identity and identity implies knowledge, and all this knowledge exists in an environment that is continually giving up its secrets to inquiring minds that want to know.
Humans, like other animals, assimilate information from their environment as they adjust these schemes of assimilation to better accommodate their environment. What makes humans unique in this process, however, is their capacity to create symbolic models that permits humans to mentally accommodate their environments, at least in part, without stepping out of their “mental space.” Discontinuity or non-being occurring in being, allows mental modeling to occur, and that brings us to another important by-product of b~b~bb.
The time that so perplexed Parmenides, Augustine, and Kant naturally follows from the experience of b~b~bb, or the experience of past in present…..etc. Temporality comes to us by way of our senses and by way of scientific models used to measure time. On an operational level, human time is merely a by-product of discontinuity, but, so too, language, number, logic, and self-awareness is also a by-product of this experience. The human temporal moment then carries within itself not one account of temporality i.e., the video time of sequential physical events; it also carries within itself “the center of action,” as Piaget calls it. Mind and identity are discovered in this “center of action.” Personal identity being that degree of permanence that we experience in the midst of constant flux is also experienced in this “center of action.” But, more importantly, the forward movement of knowledge also follows from the “center of action,” or the liberating space that we call psychological time.
We are born into a world of knowledge and knowing, and knowledge expands as a consequence of time, but the real throttle of this knowing process--the actualization of what is unique in human freedom, lies in our capacity to actualize our own non-being. Simply put, every time we ask a question we actualize in the question our own non-being. Whether we like it or not our knowledge expands, but when we ask a question we accelerate this expansion. Our passive experience of time does not produce a great deal of knowledge, but because we bring the logical relationships implicit in freedom’s structure to bear on an event, we are free to create judgments (and the values which follow from those judgments) concerning the significance and probable cause of an event. These judgments are determined valid across a continuum that ranges from sensation divorced from theory, at one end, to sensation reinforced by the most advanced and respected scientific theory available. There are no guarantees that the answers we propose in response to our questions will match up with corresponding events, yet scientists have a pretty good track record when it comes to the discovery and confirmation of these answers. In experience that is not accountable to scientific confirmation, however, we determine, via our judgments and emotions, appropriate behavior. It is at this level of preferred behavior, this level of "willed consciousness participation" (as it is called by Owen Barfield), that we encounter our potential for the highest order of expressed freedom—our ethical and moral judgments.
In brief, in our ability to step outside of our “mental space” (break with our past) and ask questions, we acquire the capacity to overcome the obstacles that restrict our freedom. When the step up to b~b~bb first occurred there was not much that separated humans from other animals, but after 100,000 years of actualizing freedom’s latent potential, we, the species Homo sapiens, are enjoying a wealth of freedom(s). The history of civilization records, albeit partially, the actualization of this “coming of age process.” To put this in the perspective of little miss—think of all the hard work and sacrifice that she put into her struggle to obtain her PhD.; her task accomplished, she was rewarded with emotional, psychological, and financial freedom. Winning our freedoms is never easy. It begins with an obstacle and, with hard work and some luck, it ends with more freedom. There is one certainty that is inescapable, however; freedom is the rock and we are all Sisyphus; and we remain as such until the end of the journey, the journey home.
