Chapter 68 - Freedom has no authority.

Freedom brings with it creativity. This has nothing to do with the creation that comes through conflict. There is no freedom if the mind is conditioned. Conditioning is the result of social, economic or religious cultures. When the mind is conditioned, it functions in a very limited specialized area. This functioning, whether it is highly technological or a movement in the field of conditioning, is generally called creativity. This conditioned movement generates its own energy, and this energy is expressed in literature, science, music and the various humanities.

But all this is within the field of conditioning, whether it be narrow or wide. This activity makes a path which is accepted and followed, but again this is still within the confines of conditioning. Man seeks freedom within those limits and the exercise of that freedom is called freedom of will or choice, but it is still directed or shaped by conditioning. It is like a man in prison seeking freedom within its walls, whether narrow or wide. This is not freedom.

Freedom is something totally different. It is the understanding of conditioning both verbally and nonverbally, so that the mind transcends it. This freedom is not in a book or to be found through another, and it is not an ideal. It is not to be purchased through any practice or discipline, for practice and discipline imply sanction and authority. In this freedom there is no direction or authority. This freedom is intelligence and it is responsible. It is not dictated by circumstances or events. This freedom is total negation of the entire structure of the prison which thought has built round itself. This very negation is the positive action of freedom. This freedom cannot exist where there is disorder. It is outer and inner disorder that brings about the necessity of authority, the dictator, the ruler.

Freedom has no authority. It has never known authority. It is not the rejection of authority, but is the non-existence of it. Both authority and law, outer and inner, are put together by thought. The outer authority, sometimes rational, sometimes irrational, has its place and its responsibility; one cannot brush it aside, and the intelligence of freedom knows its limitation and its necessity. The inner authority, which is subtler and deeper, is much more complex. Guidelines, which seem to give certainty and assurance, become a pattern, the norm, which becomes the authority. This authority may be traditional, a person, a symbol or an idea. The mind being aware consciously or unconsciously of its own disturbance and disorder brings about both the outer and the inner authority. A disorderly group soon finds its leader who then directs and controls. The reaction to this is not freedom. The understanding of the nature of this disorder and the disturbance and the going beyond them is freedom.

The acceptance of authority is caused by disturbance and disorder. The effect is the authority, and the reaction to that is to conform or to deny. This very denial assumes another form of authority. Where there is no freedom, there must be authority. This brings about suppression, control or escape, and the very movement of these culminates in a principle or belief, a standard which assumes dominance. The cause is never permanent; the cause becomes the effect and the effect becomes the next cause. When this is clearly understood, not intellectually but actually, then the negation of this chain is freedom. Knowledge has its own authority-experience and memory. But as long as one remains within that field, the creative movement of freedom is non-existent. Freedom is space, and space is order.