Weekly Training: What Is The Cost of Freedom?

Welcome to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beaton and today we're going to be talking about the price of freedom. What is the price of freedom, both personally and collectively? As we seem to be entering into more and more chaos and uncertainty as the days go on, I feel very deeply that the external events and the crisis and the chaos that we are experiencing in some ways a manifest and an example of what happens internally within our psyche, within our minds, when we descend into our own chaos, into our own darkness, into our own nigredo, as the alchemists call it, the period of blackening, the dissolving of what's there. Some in the spiritual community call this the dark night of the soul. So I'm going to talk about this briefly, but I want to start off with a quote by Carl Jung. He said, people will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all of its exercises, observe a strict regime of diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystics, texts from the literature of the whole world, all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their own souls. So in some ways, I think what's interesting here is Jung is talking about the facing of the soul as a form of liberation. And this is one of the things that he talked about in his work, especially in his later work. I think he even has a book called Man's Search for a Soul. I think I might be botching that title, but in a lot of his work, the actualization of the soul was a part of the human endeavor, that we have lost this tether and this connection to growing down, to growing downwards, right? To sort of deepening our roots and that we have become obsessed, addicted and inundated with brightness and positivity and the light and ascension. And we live in some ways in an ascension culture. And so freedom really, in what I'm about to say, comes at the cost of a few things. Freedom comes at the cost of being willing to descend, right? There is no sort of absolute freedom in pure ascension. It doesn't exist. It's like looking at the yin and the Yang, the peace symbol, the Buddhist symbol, and only having one side, right?

Only having the Yang or the yin, and it doesn't work anymore, anymore. And so just like we develop through good times, we develop internally by learning how to be grateful, learning how to express appreciation for ourselves and the people around us, learning how to be in social contact with those that we can learn from. We also learn and find a deeper sense of freedom in our deepening. And that sometimes is much more challenging. And that can bring us into contact with death, with the dissolving of parts of our ego, parts of our identity, parts of our culture, society. Some of the framework and the structure that we have operated in. So much like our individual freedom is predicated on our capacity to not only look within and find a sort of lack of answers, but to be with the fear and the experience and the sensations that come along with maybe the disorientation or the lostness that one might feel or the depression or the anxiety. And that there is an inherent deepening that the soul yearns for, craves in order to actualize in some sense. And this is a sort of, in some ways, a metaphysical endeavor that we take. But this is one that throughout history, throughout mythology, throughout civilization, has been a part of the human quest, part of the human experience, that the more that we fixate on freedom, the more that we want, crave, and desire freedom, both individually, communally, and collectively, the more that we are asked to descend to strip away the older parts of ourselves. And so this is where Florida Donner's quote comes in. She says, what does freedom cost? Freedom costs the mask that you've been wearing. And this is what we see happening right now. And if you've. Again, if you've ever gone through a divorce, you've gone through, you know, infidelity, where you've been unfaithful and you got caught or you've been lying or whatever the circumstances might be, the freedom and the liberation on the other side is inherently tied to you dropping the mask or letting go of the mask or the death of or the dissolving of the mask that you've been wearing. The framework, the structure that you have been trying to uphold. And this is a very tumultuous thing for us to come into contact with. And so for you as an individual, for all of us as an individual, when we start to really expand psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, there is, in part, a deepening that is required. It is not all good. It's quote, unquote, using air quotes, right? And good in the sense that it's not all light, bright rainbows and sunshine and positive quotes and positive thinking. There is a large part of it that requires us to face death in a way, to face deconstruction and dissolving and to understand that there are parts of us that need to die away. And in a larger spectrum, this is what The United States is facing right now that the mask that America has been wearing, which has been predicated on not wanting to own its shadow, and it's been predicated on not wanting to face the fact that racism not only exists in the country, but has been alive and well. You know, I mean, I was watching videos the other day from. Well, just from a certain source. I like to go onto a bunch of different mediums, but. And it was showing a few different gun and ammunition sales conferences and stores, and there's multiple people that have set up at their table patches and stickers of swastikas and symbols of Nazism and fascism and white supremacy. Right. And. And we see this all the time. And so I think one of the things that America is coming to contact with is that the freedom that it is supposed to stand for is now coming into contact with the fact that the mask that it's been wearing, sort of hiding racism and fascism and pretending like it wasn't there or doesn't exist, is now coming to the forefront. And it's now having to be sort of dealt with and faced and, you know, dissolved in a way, and who knows what that will look like? But this is, in some ways the aspect that plays out within us, that we have to sort of confront the predator that has been going on within us. When we are seeking a deeper kind of freedom, it is normally because we are feeling constrained in some way that we feel beholden to or under the strong arm of something much larger and much more powerful than us. And in mythology and in alchemy and in alchemical psychology, and there's many different versions of this, they talk about the Predator, and the predator is this aspect of the mind or the psyche that wants to sort of hold parts of us hostage. And so when we are seeking freedom and we aim to take off the mask that we've been wearing, the mask that we show people, the mask that has helped us hide our insecurities, the mask that has helped us keep our anxieties at bay, or pretend like we haven't been depressed or that we're in the wrong relationship or that we're a really good person, but truly, behind the scenes, we're not terrible, but we're certainly out of alignment. And there's all sorts of mischievous behavior that's happening behind the scenes that doesn't align with the mask and the character that we portray out in the world to people. And so this is the cost of freedom, my friends. This is the cost of freedom. The cost of freedom is that we have to come into contact with letting parts of ourselves die away and dissolve. And this is a very challenging thing because those have been the habits, the rituals, the routines, the ways that we've interacted with people, the ways that we've dealt with our own pain, the way that we have created connections, the way that we have hid unsavory parts of ourself that we don't want others to see. And so we have to let those parts start to fade. And we have to do that by admitting that that has been the mask that we've been wearing, that we have individually been wearing this sort of facade or mask that has been protecting us and in some way or pretending to protect us, that has been hiding these insecurities or these lies or these unsavory parts of ourselves that we haven't been able to love or come into contact with, that we have been maybe dissatisfied or unhappy, whatever the case may be. And this is the case as well, I believe, and this is just my personal opinion in America, where the mask is sort of coming off this illusion that Americans have been free. I mean, the, you know, I think George Carlin said it best. He said it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. I mean, large portions of the population have not been free for a long time. And the system as we've seen it over the quarantine over lockdown that we operate in is fundamentally flawed and broken in some ways. I mean, you look at. Just for instance, I made a post about this the other day in my stories that got a tremendous amount of attention and some controversy. But you know, a lot of people were grateful for me broaching the subject. But just since March or April of 2020, since the beginning of the pandemic, the 660 billionaires in America approximately, have gained over $640 billion.

Worth of.

Worth of their net worth, right? So these, these individuals $640 billion richer. And so the mask that America has been wearing has been this ideology that the system is fair, the system is there for everyone, and it's now coming into contact with the mask that it's not that that's been a fraud in some ways, that that's been an illusion in some way that many people, because of their skin color, because of their ethnicity, because of their religious preference, because of their gender, have not had a fair shake. And a lot of that's bubbling to the surface on top of the fact that part of the American mask has pretended that racism hasn't existed that, that white supremacy hasn't been a part of the founding of this country and has tried to sort of sweep that under the rug. Much like, you know, getting caught with your secretary or, you know, with your boss or with your next door neighbor and pretending like that didn't happen. You know, sort of gaslighting your partner and pretending like that that didn't exist, that didn't happen, and that they were seeing things. Things. Right. And so we at an individual level and at a collective level are sort of coming to this. This not only not really reconciliation, but this reckoning that is, has and has been sending us into chaos deeper and deeper. And so the cost of freedom, the last thing that I'll say is that we have to be willing to experience.

Chaos and crisis and dissent in order to experience freedom. We have to come into contact with the quality of chaos and crisis and dissent and not rebuke it, not reject it, not sort of, but against it and wish that it wasn't happening. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I have seen, talked, worked with individually or in groups or connected with online that for weeks and months perpetuate this of. I don't want to feel this way. It's like, well, you know, part of the problem is that you don't want to feel that way. Part of the issue is that you don't. You're rejecting feeling that way. You're rejecting feeling the heartbreak, the grief, the sadness, the fear, the anxiety, the depression. Right. Many of the challenges that we experience come not in the, the symptom itself, but in the fact that we do not want to train ourselves in the art or in the skill of being with the unsavory parts of ourselves internally and being with the unsavory parts of ourselves externally and being with the unsavory parts of ourselves as a collective. And that's very much what we're seeing right now. So I hope that this supports you. I would just say start with your own personal freedoms. Start with your own personal freedoms. What masks have you been wearing that are starting to dissolve and erode and fall away? What parts of you have you been holding onto that you know are holding you back and restricting you in attaining a greater kind of freedom within yourself, within your life, within your connection to soul, within your sexual expression, within your ability to financially be satiated, within your ability to produce and create and build and explore and be deeply, deeply connected to purpose. What mask has been getting in the way? So that's just a question for you. To explore. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this, and if you did, as always, please share this episode with someone who might need to hear it. Until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.