July 4th is not far off. Everybody's going to be talking about freedom. It's a subject that comes up quite often for me, not from a national point of view, but really from a human point of view.

There's "Freedom From": which means freedom from oppression, freedom from hunger, all those sorts of things.

Then there's "Freedom To":freedom to perhaps have agency i.e. the ability to act on one's own, freedom to vote, and so forth. It's a different angle from "Freedom From.”

Yet there's another point, something my mentor shared with me a number of years ago. I asked him once, "Sam, what's your primary purpose?" He told me, "To be free to experience what is."

To which I said, "What?"

He meant that he wanted to be free enough psychically, emotionally, and psychologically, so that whatever was happening, he could be present to it. He could be free to experience as it is, whether it's grief or sorrow or joy. It doesn't matter.

Now, in order to do that, we have to clean up a lot of things that constrain our freedom, everything from belief systems that don't serve us, cultural imprints, family imprints, etc.

There comes a moment though when you can really be free to experience what is. That's a magical place. Just ask some of those who demonstrated it: Viktor Frankl in World War Two, or Nelson Mandela's twenty-seven years in prison.

Freedom to experience what is. It's the gold standard. It's very, very different from what we think of on July 4th.