Nobody can give it to you or take it away.
Nobody can give it to you or take it away. They can suppress it, they can obstruct it, they can restrain it, but they cannot take it away. Only you can give it away, surrender it, renounce it.
You give away your freedom by suppressing yourself, by doing what deep inside you feel is not right, something you do not want to do, you will sense it.
As such, nobody can give it back to you. It does not belong to you.
I remember reading a letter of an American marine that he wrote from prison after refusing to go back to Iraq for the 3rd time. After coming back for the first time, he no longer believed it was the right thing to do and did not want to go back there, but he gave in to the pressure, to the fear of going to prison, being judged as a coward and so on.
I remember reading a letter of an American marine that he wrote from prison after refusing to go back to Iraq for the 3rd time. After coming back for the first time, he no longer believed it was the right thing to do and did not want to go back there, but he gave in to the pressure, to the fear of going to prison, being judged as a coward and so on. The next time he was told to go, he stayed true to himself; he refused to go back and ended up in prison. I never forget the last words in his letter. “It is strange, I am sitting here, writing a letter from a prison cell, but never in my life I have felt so free.
Freedom is a sense of internal peace. It is a mindset, listening to your conscience, to your most inner voice. Even if you are physically constrained like the marine, you can still be free.
We need to honour our inner, emotional, spiritual selves. We cannot deny its existence. We all feel it, especially in the time we feel fully alive.
Such moments can be expressed as being one with God.
Talking about God, we say she is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscience. If this is true, then God is within everyone and everything; it is within you. Listen to your inner voice expressed by emotions, sensations, and feelings. This is how your God is communicating with you.
Let’s think about the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”.
If God is everywhere, so within you as well, following orders against your conscience (your inner voice of God) is putting the ones giving orders before God.
By surrendering our freedom, our free will, giving someone authority over ourselves (and the God within us), we are putting them before God.
Old recorded wisdom included in Judaism, Christianity, Islam warns us about such behaviours.
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