Freedom versus Habit

by Norb Yates

I never believed that I had real personal freedom. I believed I was limited by outer circumstances, events, people and obligations. My habits and my beliefs set the boundaries of what I could and could not do.

Real freedom came from breaking the addiction to my habitual patterns. One particularly powerful response was the belief that information was more important than action, and that more information could somehow lead to happiness. My life was centered on my addiction to understanding and gathering knowledge. Freedom from this addiction came when I looked at all my agreements about knowledge and no longer believed them. Observing how I grasped desperately for knowledge minute by minute was funny, and I laughingly broke every attachment I had to what I thought I knew.

My freedom came by letting go of attachments and by surrendering old points of view again and again. I gradually accepted that life is a mystery never to be understood by the mind, and I was able to see the humor in my resistance to life’s continual changes.

Freedom can be part of our presence whether we are in prison, in a wheelchair, in a cast, or grasping for our last breath of air. Freedom has nothing to do with our actual circumstances. It has everything to do with our ability to wake up, to see, and to break free of the habits and beliefs that were the results of our domestication. When old agreements and patterns are abandoned we are free to respond to life in every moment. When we are free to respond to life fully, we know it.

Truly, it is only our point of view that limits us from recognizing ourselves as freedom in action. When we are free from the pull of knowledge – when we are free from the authority we have given our own thoughts – we are as free and changeable as life itself.