“We are free, to be free.” ~ Nelson Mandela
What a statement from a man who knew all about how to remain free in your mind and soul, even while incarcerated for almost three decades!
What Mandela is saying I think, is that, no matter what our circumstances and no matter what we’ve been through in our life, we can still choose to remain free to be free, as in, we can chose to be free in our hearts, minds and souls.
Many mistake freedom for the ego's will to choose, act and feel in control of our lives. But this is a false sense of freedom as the ego is but one part of our whole psyche. A very important part yes, but there is ultimately a far vaster power in our psyche which is our unconscious.
This was Freud’s and Jung’s particular contributions to psychology, whereby they took the unconscious seriously and gave it its due by acknowledging the immense power it has over our lives. Jung especially talked a lot about relativizing the ego by recognising and working with the unconscious; advocating that we be respectful of this unknown region of our being, and discovering that the only way to real wholeness is by including the unconscious in our therapeutic endeavours and daily lives.
Ego likes to think that it’s “master of its own house” and has complete free will to choose and behave. But in reality it is the unconscious which plays a large part in all of our thoughts, feelings, behaviours and life choices, and it is only through acknowledging this truth and then consciously engaging with the unconscious material that we can ever hope to become truly more conscious of ourselves and the reality of the world around us.
The unconscious lives in us every single day through the following ways: The behaviour of our shadow-parts, our unconscious complexes, inner-critic, our splinter-parts split off during early childhood and traumatic experiences, our body’s experience and responses, our compulsions, addictions, habits, patterns, and our projections.
Unless we face and work through each of these unconscious manifestations we will always be at their behest and thus not really free.
And, on the wider societal and global level the unconscious wreaks havoc every day. We only have to look at all the racism, conflicts, wars, scapegoating, attitudes to anyone “other” to us; immigrants, refugees, other cultures, religions and political views, violence against women, children and those with different sexual and gender preferences.
As Jung so pointedly said: “Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.”
And as if all this isn’t enough, the other consequence of remaining hopelessly unconscious is the tragedy of the forgotten and neglected soul: our deepest essence and essential self remains neglected and un-cared for. The result being we live a life determined by external factors and seductions for the ego, rather than following the true call of our unique soul’s path.
So to return to Mandela, in order to truly stay free in mind/body/soul/spirit we must choose the route briefly outlined above. By giving the unconscious its due we remain balanced in our psyche, less one-sided and therefore more able to choose how we respond to whatever life throws at us. And thus we are free to be free.
© Angela Dunning
Image by StockSmartStart, licensed via Shutterstock
Reference:
~ C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.