The Price of Freedom

What is the price of freedom? We hear about and read about all kinds of nasty stuff that goes on in this world and how there’s a price for freedom. So, what exactly is that price? Who pays it? Is there a monetary cost? A human cost? What? I want to know how that whole concept works.

I think the price for freedom is…nothing. It’s free. Freedom is free. Isn’t that the essence of freedom? To be free of something? How about free of cost? If we pay any price it’s for the opposite of freedom…whatever that one word might be. The opposite of freedom can be described in many ways. We pay for slavery; always have, always will. In the United States of America, we still pay the cost of slavery. We also pay for imprisonment, don’t we? We pay for racisim and other forms of discrimination. We pay for indifference to those around us in need of compassion, of kindness, of simple attention. All of humanity pays these costs. We also pay for oppression and repression. We pay for the pursuit of material wealth and intellectual superiority. We pay for all of these things because all of these things have a definite financial cost that you can directly tie back to them. Yes, they do. None of them are free.

Only freedom is free.

Freedom works at the micro and macro levels. There is the freedom of humanity as a whole, a freedom that so many fight for. That freedom is physical, though, and it is nearly meaningless without the freedom that is created at the individual level. A few years ago, the Dalai Lama was in Chicago, and I was blessed with the opportunity to hear him and see him speak. Among the many precious, priceless jewels he shared with us was the story of a fellow Buddhist monk who had recently been released from Chinese imprisonment. The Dalai Lama asked the monk if he had known fear. “Yes,” replied the old monk. “As the years passed, I feared losing my compassion for my captors.” That was his fear: losing compassion for the people who kept him imprisoned for over 20 years of his life.

If that is not freedom, then I do not know what is.

I do not diminish the sacrifices others make so that I can sit here and write this. I do not mean to diminish the suffering of those who have been imprisoned, who have been tortured, who have been brutalized in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. There are as many stories of sacrifice as there are stars in the sky. These stories are told the world over and have been told for centuries. I honor those who put themselves in harm’s way to liberate others. I know and love many who have either served in the military in the past or are serving, at this moment, in far away lands. Their sacrifices, though, are not for the freedom that eludes so many of us. Spiritual freedom cannot be granted to you by another. It must be discovered by each of us individually.

In the end, I seek only to find true, spiritual freedom for myself and, if so honored, to help others find a foothold on their own path to freedom. I wish this for my family, for my friends, and for any human being who walks this Earth. We all desire security and the right to pursue our own futures. We also all seek to belong, to grow, to feel the interconnectedness at work in the Universe.

This is the essence of true, spiritual freedom.