FREEDOM is a fickle thing. If you hold onto the idea of freedom too tightly, you become a slave to your own desire for it; if you forget about it completely, you find yourself a slave to masters you yourself are unaware of. To be free is to live as a free man would without fear of losing your ability to do so. A man can be a slave to his animalistic impulses just as easily as he can be enslaved to his desire to not be a slave.
At the end the best path to freedom lies in the elimination of desire. Of course, primal desires can never be eliminated but must be accepted and brought into the fold of human understanding. They must be tempered and balanced by human intellect; never to run away from them, but never to throw yourself at their mercy. To control the beast without fear is freedom.
Most men don’t know this. They catch a glimpse of the shadow inside of them and do one of two things: they either bury the beast under intellect, forever living as half a man, never knowing their true potential; or, in their stark-raving fear, they dive headfirst into the abyss and throw themselves at the mercy of their primacy.
A free man sees the blackest, deepest abyss inside of him and simply accepts it. Treating that shadow as it is – a part of him, forever and always, a remnant of every hero and villain that has ever lived.
But this is all conceptual talk. This replica of the fault of the former of the two styles of fools I have already described will only lead one to thought, not action. Romanticism requires Realistic action to validate its ideals.
So: feast when the opportunity presents itself, but do not blindly seek it out. If the feast arrives at your doorstep, feed the beast inside of you; let the animal out and live. BUT do not let the joy of primal satisfaction get the better of your human intellect and take control of your actions – the second you succumb to what the beast wants and let it direct your actions, you lose your freedom. Guide your path with human intellect to the moment whence you can let the beast out of its cage – then, deliberately let it out.
Beast and Man are one and the same. Without Beast, Man becomes a shell, a vague intellectual being without passion; without Man, Beast becomes a tyrant, a dictator of actions while remaining himself enslaved to nature.
About the Creator
James Cummings
Improvisation is the truest form of artistic freedom
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