Somewhere in the rabbinical heritage, the following story is told about Moses. After the Exodus and several weeks in the desert wilderness, Moses went to God in prayer with complaints about the hardships of this environment and especially about the stubbornness of these people with whom he had to deal. Moses was especially distressed with how hard it was for these people to give up their Egyptian enculturation and learn something new in keeping with their devotion to the God who supported their delivery from slavery. At the end of these passionate complaints, Moses asked God, “Why did you lead us out into this dreary place?” God in this story is said to have answered, “Moses, it was you who led these people out of Egypt.”
This is just a story, but all we have about Moses is just a story. The stories we have were were first written down around 1000 BCE about an event that some modern scholars calculate happened around 1290 BCE. So a lot of oral telling took place for about 300 years before the Exodus event was put down in the written records we now see in the Bible. And the story telling about Moses and the Exodus continued to be expanded upon for several more centuries. So what really happened in a scientific sense is pretty murky. Nevertheless, what happened to this people as a revelation of lasting truth about Profound Reality is more clear, however controversial that revelation may be. Following are a couple of paragraphs on my view of some of the core truth of that revelation.
The Exodus from Egypt was not a work of the universe acting through the lives of a selection of humans; it was the vision of one solitary man put into action by sharing his burning-bush vision with others of his clan and then enacting that vision with them in the tough obstacles of real world history.
At root, Moses’ vision was about the nature of history, the nature of human life, and the nature of Profound Reality. Here are elements of that revelation that are most important to me: The life of a community of people does not unfold in some prescribed way. Social arrangements do not have to stay as they are. History itself is massively open to human agency. Such truths as these were seen by the Moses followers as more than wild-harried ideas swinging through the head of this imaginative Moses. I view Moses and his listeners as believing themselves confronted with fresh understanding about the way that historical reality actually works. The religious heritage that Moses shared with his Hebrew clan of slaves surely informed his interpretation of his “burning that did not consume.” Later writers called this a message from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With such a vision, Moses aroused his people to their freedom to live differently.
This simple but profound revelation of raw freedom has characterized the best disciples of Moses unto this day. As the old stories tell, Moses continued with his history-making free responses by laying down ten guidelines for how this wilderness society had to be conducted if they were to continue to be as a society built upon trust in this Profound Reality that gives to ordinary humans the freedom to determine the course of time. For 40 years, so the story goes, Moses made grim, but lively and realistic choices that produced a group maturity that enabled continuation after Moses’ death. Another charismatic leader, Joshua, lead this people into a wider destiny beyond this desert cradle of their social infancy. However crass the stories of Joshua may seem to our contemporary moralities, without this transition into that wider history, we would never have heard of the Exodus revelation. I see the raw essential freedom of our human essence as one of the awarenesses revealed in that Exodus event.
The Power of Human Freedom
Obviously, our human freedom is not infinite in its historical power. Human freedom is a limited power that must work within a much larger set of powers. Obedience to Reality is required to enjoy this Reality-granted freedom to change the course of human events. This Profound Reality of the biblical devotion has been said to have Infinite Freedom. And that Mysterious Power of Infinite Freedom is said to be granting to us living humans a limited, but meaningful role in choreographing the outcomes of our human dance on planet Earth. To say that what we humans face in life is just a dance of outward and inward forces about which we are only the watchers is a half truth.
We aware watchers are with that very capacity for awareness also granted (or graced with) a freedom to make history-bending choices. Also, this blessed freedom can sell itself out into patterns of bondage to the various delusions that are made possible by our big-brained minds and our advanced awareness. With our freedom we can create a “bondage of spirit” (as some have called it)—a bondage from which we have to be rescued by acts of Profound Reality. This bondage is like being a prisoner in a cell. In this cell our essential freedom is but a shadow of its fuller self. It is like being limited to walking around within four restraining walls. This estranged human also bends history, but in destructive ways. As Jesus is said to have put it, “A good tree produces good fruit, but a bad tree produces bad fruit.”
Another Story about Freedom
Years ago, I read a novel entitled “The Ronin.” It was a story about an oriental swordsman who was so skilled with his precious sword that he was able to live almost without limitations. He did a lot of arrogant killing to maintain this quality of life. The crisis of the story came about when the full horror of that chosen form of life became clear to his consciousness. He threw his sword as far away as he could fling it, crying out, “I did it, I did it all.” And henceforth he did something different with his great strength—something that was more of use to his social companions. The details of this fine novel provide much more of the raw feelings of this life journey, but even my rough outline tells the story that human life in its essence is freedom, a freedom that is not determined by any other factor than the freedom to access that essential freedom.
You and I may not have done a Moses-level revelatory action of freedom or even a big change from a useless and destructive life, but we may well have come to see that some earlier choice of vocation, or marriage, or group engagement was a wrong turn—a mistake of significant proportion. If searing guilt was not blurred by excuses, we might have been able to cry out with the Ronin, “I did it, I did it all.” In other words, we might have been graced to freely confesses this guilt, and see Reality’s forgiveness for a fresh start, and then grasped our freedom to go elsewhere with our living.
My first personal experience of such a turning point was my abandonment of my father’s plans for me to be a mathematician and physicist for which I was well qualified and become instead a novice religious student and pastor for which I was unprepared. And after I became more experienced on this new path, many other such watershed freedom discoveries and freedom enactments have come my way to be opted by me. Telling my tales of these repentance moments is very complicated and difficult to even remember accurately, but the essence of them lives on as trust in those here and now possibilities that still open in the ongoing nowness of living.
I have no doubt whatsoever that human life is at bottom nothing but freedom. I don’t actually know who I essentially am, for I am nothing at all but the becoming of what I now am not. And such becoming can be a perpetual surrender to freedom.
Living the Life of Freedom
My consciousness includes freedom. Living the life of my conscious freedom means using my mind to create deeds of freedom. My mind is not a block to freedom, but a tool of freedom—unless I am insisting on using what freedom I have to serve the stories and images of my mind.
Anti-intellectualism or any other contempt for my mind is using my freedom to serve an idea in my mind. Anti-thoughtfulness is an estranged idea in my mind created by my freedom to be a slob without the freedom of thoughtfulness. The mind, it is true, contains a host of estranged ideas created by my freedom in my mind—illusions of all sorts, excuses of all sorts, suppressions of guilt, hidings of truth, hopes for the impossible, and this list is endless. But all these unrealisms are not the fault of the mind, but the mental creations of my freedom. The mind is just a wondrous biological servant of my conscious freedom along with my heart and my fingers. All these estrangements from realism are established modes of responding made by my freedom to the possibilities of my life.
It is true that I share most of my estranging thoughts with my culture. We call this “cultural conditioning” as if the cultural did this to us. But actually, we chose to go along with our culture, or we chose not to go along with our culture. In both cases, “we did It.” We joined our culture in these cultural estrangements. And perhaps we also distanced ourselves from some of those cultural estrangements. Whatever we have done in relations with our culture, we did it. Our culture did nothing more than provide us options, plus some pressures to accept these options. We took those options. We did it. We are guilty of every estrangement we have taken from our culture. And we are responsible for any detachments from our culture that we have made in favor of something better. We did that too.
It is so easy to be estranged from our authenticity, because estrangement in every case is simply confusing some humanly created mental content with what is real. Those who argue that the rational is the real, are not noticing the truth that the real Real is forever more than our rationality has encompassed. The Real remains mysterious, no matter how well we have approximated the Real with our imaginative thoughtfulness. Our thoughtfulness is a human creation open to improvements, where improvement in our thoughtfulness means closer to the Real.
Thinking in a dog or in a human is descriptive of the Real, predictive of the Real, and an approximation of the Real. Thoughtfulness in a human is more complex than in the dog, but like the dog our thoughtfulness is essential for our survival and happiness. This thoughtful description of thoughtfulness is not a disparagements of thoughtfulness. The mind of the contents of the mind are part of what is real, but the reality held by the thoughts of the mind can never fully encompass the Real.
“Estrangement” can be defined as confusing a thoughts of the mind with the Real. And “Authenticity” can be defined as a confession of our ignorance about the Real, as well as a freedom of commitment to our partial holds on some approximate truths about the Real.
And as we enter into our ever-fuller awareness of the Real, we will always find included in this Massive Mystery of the Real an awareness of our conscious freedom as an aspect of the Real. Any denial of human freedom with thoughts about a total determinism that excludes human freedom (or even dog freedom) is an estrangement from the Real. Such deterministic thinking is a way of being lost in our minds at the expense of not experiencing the Real. Our experience of the Real includes our freedom. Any true openness to the onrushing Real includes being open to our freedom to respond to the Real.
We are, of course, determined in the sense that we are determined to be, among other things, our conscious freedom that is in itself a life-determining factor. Of course. our lives are much more than our conscious freedom. Nature determines our heart beat, our sleep, and our dreams without any assistance from our conscious freedom. With our freedom we can fight with nature about going to sleep, but sleep is by definition an absence of our conscious freedom. With our freedom we can exercise our body to increase our heart beats. And with our freedom we can recall and interpret our dreams. But only part of our lives can be called “freedom.”
Attempting to handle our guilt by denying it can be our motivation for not believing in a nature that includes our freedom. All of us may wish to deny the many delusory turns we have made with our freedom. We may wish to deny our many losses of realism to some set of addictive behaviors. But instead we could cry out, “I did it!” We could confess our guilt, open to its forgiveness, and accept a fresh start into a more realistic style of living. Indeed, a rediscovery of our freedom begins with confessing our unrealism with this cry of freedom: “I did it!”