Now, I want to be clear that I mean much, much more than simply sexual sadomasochism. I see the rejection of freedom all around, and very definitely within me. I look at my own psychodynamic history, and there was simply no room for my own healthy development of a self. It was not just not encouraged, but very actively discouraged–punished is the word–in ways I was completely unable to see at the time and for a long time since.
But I feel, I think with some cause, that this basic process is common. A great many people fail to fully individuate: it is a process of spiritual growth, and our society more or less conflates growth with careers and money, neither of which matter when one is simply acting as an automoton, acting on programming, understanding and truly choosing on a deep level nothing.
Plainly, in many ways we are constrained, as many silly people love to point out. Yes, of course, there are genetics and family and social milieu. In principle, this is not in any way a different constraint than that in other days assumed by the process of a deterministic astrology.
What I have stipulated often is that we have the freedom of “non-statistical coherence”, that of making choices which define who WE choose to be, choices that may be small, but put us in a different slot than the one for which we were destined, and that choice can include fully ACCEPTING the path we are on, embracing it, making it our own. There is a space we can perceive, and in which we can feel freedom of being. I have sensed it many times.
All evil and all good comes from this process. Evil is simply the rejection of freedom at the root emotional level, regardless of what the mind says. As such, it is a rejection of existence outright, both that of oneself and by emotional implication that of others. At a root emotional level this contradiction between the fact that one is alive, and that one cannot LIVE causes both all manner of cruelty, and toleration and even embrace of that cruelty.
I saw all this in a dream. I have interesting dreams.