Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life by Gerry Spence

Author:Gerry Spence [Spence, Gerry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780312303112
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Published: 2002-11-15T14:00:00+00:00

To be we know not what,

We know not where.

The irrational fear of death has, of course, a biological purpose. If the species is not blessed with the fear of death, it cannot escape danger. It cannot survive. We hurl the young and foolish into battle because the young have never seen the face of death and are not so afraid. Old men never fight. Old men are old because they have heard the trumpeter and know his song.

Alone.

Without aloneness, without taking the fear of it into the self, without knowing it, what is the use? Birth and death happen there. And life as well happens there. The power of the self happens there. The rest is distraction. The rest is escape for those who have grown afraid of themselves.

I have never known a daffodil that failed to bloom because it stood alone. I have never known a chickadee who failed to fly because it struggled alone in learning the use of its wings. I have never known a man who grew unless he experienced alone time to discover himself.

Alone. Then is when it happens. In silence, alone. The radio off. How could the radio in the car be off? I have seen people panic at such silence, grab for the knob, like a drowning person for the life buoy. When the voice on the radio is off, they are like ducklings who, when the mallard mother has ceased her soft quacking, swim in tight little circles in a great pool of terror. Today telephones are installed in hotels and in many modern homes so that the person seated on the bathroom throne can reach out to the phone and converse with someone, probably anyone, even while he experiences the most common (and blessed) act of being alone. Cell phones now insure us that we need not be alone while we drive, while we eat, while we walk down the street. Our television sets protect us from being alone, even for a few moments in the morning while we drink our first cup of coffee and at night before we crawl into bed. Thoreau wrote in Walden, “I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning, when nobody calls.”

OUT OF ALONENESS-THE POWER OF THE SELF

People who do not experience aloneness have breathed only the stale air of others. But in aloneness I say it happens. I write alone—my gift to myself and to you. I dream alone. I feel, and the feelings are mine, out of my aloneness, out of my belly, out of the place beneath my heart, out of the hidden place where “the he who is me” exists, alone. To find one’s self, to clearly hear one’s self, to feel the crisp, pure texture of one’s self, to be one’s best student and the devoted teacher of the self—there is where the bloom of the person bursts free.

We wish to be swallowed up. “Swallow me up,” we cry to the mob called the system.

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