Reflect means grasping the totality of a situation, especially our own role in producing it

 

 

How much unmanaged time do you have?
How free are you?
Do you know what you want? Do you know what makes you happy? Do you know what your motives are? Do you have meaningful choices, choices that really matter to you?

How much discipline do you have?
“Unfree men are horrified by the suggestion of accepting a spiritual regimen. Associating inner control with external tyranny, they would rather suffer than be subject to spiritual authority. Only free men, ready to abandon caprice, do not equate self-restraint with self-surrender.” Abraham Heschel, The Earth is the Lord's, 63

How much economic freedom do you have?
How much time do you spend on money related issues? How much stress do you have over economic issues? Do you have enough money to do what is important to you? Do you work at a job that develops your humanity, or one that stifles your imagination?

How much unmanaged time do you have?
“This scarcity of people with unmanaged time is one of the reasons that...those rare moments when the polity undergoes a change of state into the democratic mode do not last long…They cannot stay there forever: eventually they must return to ‘daily life.’ And ‘daily life’ is the economy, the very control system we have been talking about.” Douglas Lummis, Radical Democracy

To what extent does society limit you?
Do you have freedom from psychological manipulation? From information propaganda?
What social limitations, such as tradition, ideology, prejudices, social norms, do you face? To what extent are you controlled by bureaucracy or technocracy? Do you have freedom of speech and expression? Does surveillance limit your freedom? Freedom from fear? Are you oppressed by government regulations? By the power of corporations?

What is your real desire?
“The liberty of the God who would have his creatures free, is in contest with the slavery of the creature who would cut his own stem from his root that he might call it his own and love it; who rejoices in his own consciousness, instead of the life of that consciousness; who poises himself on the tottering wall of his own being, instead of the rock on which that being is built. Such a one regards his own dominion over himself—the rule of the greater by the less—as freedom infinitely larger than the range of the universe of God’s being. If he says, ‘At least I have it in my own way!’ I answer, you do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your heart; now from the greed of lawlessness of some ancestor you would be ashamed of if you knew him; or, it may be, now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it.”
George MacDonald

Do you have inner liberty?
Intellectually we are secondhand people. We know what others have done and do, we repeat what others have said - the Buddha, Christ, and all the others - we theorize… We are bound by thought, and thought is always old, it is never new; so intellectually there is no freedom in the deep sense of that word… Intellectually we are bound and emotionally we are shoddy, ugly, sentimental, false, hypocritical.” Krishnamurti, You Are the World.
“Nothing is as hard to suppress as the will to be a slave to one’s own pettiness. Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty. Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.” Abraham Heschel