Aphorism 34
What is the free-spirit? The genius, the artist, the philosopher, the infinite player, the saint, the revolutionary, the lunatic, so forth and so on, are all imperfect and incomplete manifestations of what in its fullest being is known as a free-spirit. A free-spirit is all of these things at once whereas each of these individual guises is only a portion of the whole. The world has seen its fair share of true geniuses, true artists, true philosophers, and true saints, without ever having seen them all together in the manifestation of one individual. What all of these individual guises (the genius, artist, saint, etc) share in common is the ability, proclivity, and tendency to disrupt the ordinary boundaries and reality tunnels of those about them. All of them represent an energy that cannot quite find its place in society. These partial reflections of the free-spirit are untimely beings, spirits that are ahead of their times, pulled from the future to dwell in the past. That is why the villains of one age may be heroes in hindsight. However, the free-spirit is an eternal creation. It is not ahead of its time, nor behind its time—it is beyond time.
Aphorism 35
The brilliance of the free-spirit radiates so brightly that unless one has eyes for it, one will be blinded by it. Aphorism 36
The free-spirit is a God among mortals: completely incomprehensible, existing on a different plane of existence, and largely unable to relate to others. When it speaks, it is likely to be misunderstood. Where it walks, it is likely to unsettle the earth. The free-spirit is a madman. Aphorism 37
The free-spirit is a powerful force. The free-spirit is feared because of its destructive side. Like a tornado among straw houses, wherever it goes it upsets the delicate and fragile network of lies, assumptions, beliefs, and reality tunnels that a society has constructed. It is a threat to stability, comfort, security, and power. But the free-spirit is also ridiculed and marginalized because of its creative side. What it creates is so new, so weird and anomalous, that the herd around the free-spirit simply is not ready to handle, comprehend, and utilize it. Over boundary-defined individuals are antiquarians at heart: they preserve the past and project it into the future refusing to compromise with change. The common majority, the herd at large, are over boundary-defined and cannot but help to judge this free-spirit as evil. Aphorism 38
“The strongest and most evil spirits have so far done the most to advance humanity… What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Aphorism 4Aphorism 39
The free-spirit is judged by those around him, yet, is in possession of him/herself to such a degree that the free-spirit does not reciprocate the act of judging. The free-spirit is beyond judgment: it understands that its higher perspective cannot be grasped from the ground. The free-spirit has been awakened to the fact that everyone has a unique reality-tunnel and that no individual reality-tunnel has any claim to objectivity or superiority. Therefore, the free-spirit does not impose its reality-tunnel on others; what it does is this: it resists the error of judgment, kindly tries to nudge others in a new direction, to expose them to a world beyond their reality-tunnel, but at the end of the day accepts each and every person for who they are. Aphorism 40
Who among us has enough compassion to live without judgment?Aphorism 41
The business of culture—all cultures—is the preservation and pedaling of its own agenda. Culture attempts to suppress free-spirits rather than cultivate and nurture them because the creation of a free-spirit is a threat to its own stability. The continued success of a culture relies on the ability to keep a docile and monotonously driven populace within rigid boundaries that maximize its own success and power while eliminating variability. Aphorism 42
But of course, many individuals pose as a genius or artist or saint but in reality are as prosaic, base, and as commonplace as the rest of us. Countless charlatans act like geniuses, philosophers, and artists, with their personas. Distinguishing the free-spirit from one pretending to be a free spirit is not a difficult task. The imposter does not possess the same force of character, the same radiance of energy, or command the same type of vibration that seems to resonate forward throughout reality announcing its presence. True free-spirits radiate brilliantly with courage, innovation, and novelty. They are so awe-inspiring to us that we feel like infants among giants in their presence.Aphorism 43
The free-spirit is a rare manifestation. Their scarcity is rivaled only by their magnitude. Aphorism 44
Depressingly so, the vast majority of human beings are born with anchors that they will never overcome. A small percentage of them—those that are the most rebellious and defiant at heart—will free themselves from the anchors but have no sense of direction thereafter. Then an infinitesimally smaller fraction of those that were able to liberate themselves will come into themselves and become both the captain and the crew of their own ships. But even these individuals have a difficult time of taking command and staying in command of their ships. There has yet to be a soul on this planet who has not vacillated between commanding and being commanded.Aphorism 45
Once it is awakened, there is no lulling the free-spirit back to sleep. The threshold has been crossed, the bridges burned, the new spirit transformed, the old spirit reduced to ashes, and there is nowhere to go but forward, upward, and outward. The creation of the free-spirit is a permanent change. Once the free-spirit is awakened to the reality that it, and it alone, can be the master and commander of its reality tunnel, it will no longer be appeased by its inherited boundaries. Aphorism 46
One cannot unknown the truth that one is at the center of the mandala. Aphorism 47
The nature of the free-spirit itself is not static: it will continue to change, play, and move with reality as it sees fit but the free-spirit will never be tempted back into blind, obedient submission, never be fooled by the allure of objectivity, and will never, ever, sacrifice its own integrity by returning to its old habits. Aphorism 48
As spiritual beings, it is our duty to evolve with the times. As time progresses forward we should as well. Therefore, the luminary, the revolutionary, the genius, of one age may be the common rabble of another. In their time, revolutionaries are often stigmatized as evil and subversive because of their threat to the common order. It is only generations later when the actions of the revolutionary have become commonplace and a new paradigm has replaced the old that the individual goes from being vilified to glorified.Aphorism 49
The transformation from a boundary defined individual into a free-spirit is as dramatic a change as the transformation from Atlas to Prometheus. Aphorism 50
The free-spirit, after all, now lives in a world that is radically different than that which preceded it. It has metamorphosed from a beast of burden to one that plays with fire. It remembers that reality of security, obedience, and direction which has all vanished from its current life. But the old satisfaction and complacency that was mistakenly mislabeled as “happiness” has been replaced by both true danger and true ecstasy. The path of the free-spirit is not an easy one and often times a difficult one. After all, if a normal person falls, its society, context, and culture are culpable. If a free-spirit falls, there is no one to blame but him/herself.Aphorism 51
Who among us possesses this kind of strength?
Aphorism 52
Has there ever been a free-spirit to walk across this earth? Has a true free-spirit ever laid foot on this earth? To the best of my knowledge, a true free-spirit, meaning one that has utterly, completely, and uncompromisingly embodied what it means to take control of one’s reality, has never existed. And yet it remains like an image that we chase after, a mirage, an illusion—but an impossibility?
Aphorism 53
It is like the ever receding horizon. Aphorism 54
None of us may ever fully, truly, and absolutely become free-spirits. But, once awakened, even partially, we are obligated to pursue that ideal. Though we may not become it, we must approximate it. We must seek to approximate the free-spirit, to make of ourselves simulacrums, to make ourselves in God’s image, no matter how imperfect or how far from the ideal we fall. The free-spirit is our ideal: the image we chase after but can never quite attain—the blurred image which upsets and unsettles the strict dichotomy between real and illusory. Aphorism 55
The free-spirit is an illusion, a complete fabrication of the mind. But make no mistake with confusing this with the meaning that just because something is illusory it isn’t powerful. Illusions can be just as powerful as reality—often times more so! The boundary between the real and the illusory is thin and permeable. Real and illusory—yet another boundary that must be overcome! Aphorism 56
The free-spirit, or any of its partial manifestations and scintillations, is an enemy of dichotomies. The free-spirit appears to be an amalgamation of paradoxes and contradictions. In truth, the reason the free-spirit appears this way is because it is able to shift reality-tunnels at will. It is author, engineer, and arbiter of its host of reality tunnels. As beings aspiring towards the ideal of the free-spirit our task is to move beyond our inherited boundaries, to move beyond our old notions of good and evil, real and imaginary, subject and object, being and becoming, time and space, love and hate, so that we can mature and blossom into a being who takes life into his own hands and lives as an artist rather than a prisoner. Aphorism 57
Emerson said, “I see the currents of absolute being flow through me.” To which I say, “I see the currents of the free-spirit flow through us all.”Aphorism 58
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