on reality and freedom

the sword that kills the man is the sword that saves the man.

when mind and body become one, the man is free.

-Wumen Huikai

reality. a slippery slope to traverse, one that's been well trodden. the ideas of reality, the inner and the outer realities. to be in touch with reality means what? to live selflessly, externally, out of your bones, out of your own mind, to be out of touch with your self? or does it mean to cultivate a world within what is a strained-through version of the world without, to take all visions and sounds and make them harvest for the novel or movie that is the life we live in our heads; reality, in other words. reality, in other words: the goal is to be in touch with both inner and outer but never wholly either, never wholly both. a weak compromise of half and half, a cap-and-trade system of the when, where, and why we choose to reside in whichever reality we decide upon in a particular instant. then again, who's to know? if a battle of realities is going on, no one would notice. the air between people is empty, empty of reality; the inner workings do not freely project into the spaces between us. the only way to convey reality is through speech and body language, which, in terms of barebones reality, never fail to come up short. real reality. real reality is brass tacks honesty, the inner world not distilled, diluted, dissipated, but put forth with honesty. when the inner world meets the outer world in honesty, we have our harmony of internal and external, cerebral and tangible. the inner wilderness can change as a result of the synergy. there is some futility in all of this. there is no real way to externalize your personal reality. langauge has such a loose foothold in both inner and outer reality that to use words to attempt to honestly convey the inner world to the outer would result at best in a half truth. because your words have to leave your body, enter the tenuous air, and filter through someone else's reality. the effect of words can never be a full impact.

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if dreams are as free as they are said to be, then what about the waking life? freedom is a dubious title anyway, as even the concept and the actuality of freedom have boundaries. our freedom comes within the bounds of what we can do with it, our own psychic and physical limitations, boundaries of geography, when our boundaries cross with the boundaries of the freedoms of others like a Venn diagram, freedom on both sides is impinged. the freedom of dreams has its limits as well: the limits of our minds, which are not many but do exist; the fact that dreams must exist within the bounds of sleep and come to an end when sleep ends, and those dreams that carry on past the line of sleep are subject to the same limitations espoused above. if only we could see how freedom fools the wise, how the idea of freedom makes most believe they are actually illimitable. it must be the illusion of freedom that creates real freedom. the idea here is that freedom cannot exist in the outer reality, that our bodies are subject to gravity, distance, and decay; that we can never be truly free out there where the air is unpredictable, unpredictable due to the staggering amount of bodies under the guise of total freedom and with the limitations of space bearing down on them. so then freedom is a trick on outer reality played by the inner. freedom is a state of the mind, the inner reality believing its boundlessness, which in outer reality may be a falsity. to the mind, it truly believes itself to be boundless.

when mind [inner] and body [outer] become one, the man is free.