Have your Cake and Eat it

• Why should I give up my greatest, and fondest desires to satisfy your sense of moral uprightness and ‘objectivity’?
• Why should you give up your needs to satisfy the desires of others?
• Why should I suppress my own beliefs just because everyone else believes differently?
• Why should you live a compartmentalised life because your friends or family disapprove of your life choices?
• Why should I deny my feelings of self-worth, to preserve your own sense of worthlessness?
• Why should you break up with your partner because of their skin colour, or social status?
• Why should I silence my own inner voice, just so that you can hear the outer voice of your church, mosque, political party, or social club?
• Why should we all forsake our own purpose and authentic selves to become something that we aren’t?

After much contemplation and self-diagnosis one particular word kept popping up, a word that I feel may have a particular resonance with many of you all who will happen to read this post, and that particular word is ‘Freedom’.

Freedom, insomuch that it facilitates the ideal environment and circumstances that we can finally breath that sigh of relief, where we can pull down all the facades and barriers between the many fragmented aspects of ourselves, and each other.

However, there are circumstances, external forces in life that challenges and wrestle for the right to assert themselves as our final and only authority.

The thought of losing my freedom, being subjugated within a particular relationship; be that with a partner, your parents, friends, job, priest, guru, ego or with ‘God’ is frightening, draining and destructive, boiling down own’s own one of sense of self expression to gain conditional love and external approval.

One of the biggest examples of this in my own life were my experiences within the Church, or organised religion if you will.  Where the right to challenge beliefs and dogma, were overshadowed by the questioning of my blind faith, and the invalidation of my own thoughts.

In an environment where you can only supress your own feelings up to a point until you either lose yourself completely, or feeling trapped you search for your own still small voice.  You either ignore your own red flags, ‘selling your soul’ as it were to gain the soul and voice of another, or you hold onto what little of you remains and find a way out of the rabbit hole-only to face resistance, judgement and even the ostracization of others.  In the end you repress the desire to think for yourself, to disagree, to love and to make love, and to touch the soul, and the minds, and the flesh of others.

Not that everyone has this experience, and not that this is indicative of all religious expereinces, as the experience of losing our freedom may be enacted through many different modalities and mechanisms that we as a group of conscious and unconscious beings create.

However,  I believe that we are, as a species are now ever so slowly but surely moving towards a place in time and space where we can all Have our cake and eat it.

What I mean by this is that it will no longer be seen as ‘selfish’ to justify meeting your own desires when they don’t align with others – we will no longer have to hide our authentic and true selves to satisfy the platitudes, and truisms of others.

To have your own desires and the freedom to use your own voice, and flesh with which to speak and act them into existence, despite the voices and actions of others.

Why just imagine the sweet taste of chocolate cake, the texture of Victoria sponge, or the tangy tones of lemon cake?  When you can choose and taste of the many flavours of life that are available to each of our own individual palates?   Just as the notion of ‘Freedom’ to each of us is fluid depending on our experience, growth and evolution, so to is our freedom to change our minds and taste about a particular cake at any time.

In summary, our experiences provide us with the opportunity to grow and to love individually and collectively, but only if our freedom to choose and decide what to be, and how to be according to our own will still remains.  And it is this that will lead to a more authentic, open-minded and loving civilisation, not the suppression of mankind beneath another moral, political, religious or ‘spiritual’ paradigm.