True Freedom

Freedom is often believed to occur as a pyramid, similar to following Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. First, you become free of the need for food and water, because you have it. Then you gain more freedom as you experience safety and love, again, when you satisfy those needs.
As one approaches to the top of the pyramid to self-actualization, its assumed they have their needs met at each level.
Based on this paradigm, if a person’s food and water were restricted, does the base of the pyramid fallout? Does that person fall down from the pyramid back to where they started? Or maybe it wasn’t a pyramid after all. Maybe if you remove the base, that person doesn’t fall out of self-actualization.
It’s like they became a bird. At some point in their journey, they lost the need for the basics.

Like all things generated from the mind, this paradigm misses a fundamental question.
What if every need could be examined? What if a human lived without need? Does a human really need anything? What would the experience be like to live without need?

There was once a time when these questions seemed so foreign to me. For most of my life, I’ve held onto a belief that all humans have needs. After exploring the depths of my existence, climbing my proverbial Everest, and permanently losing myself, I stand humbly before you to say there is a life without need.

If you could survive on very little and experience bliss, peace, happiness, would you take it?
Or would you choose the life of having an abundance and a surplus? Having more than you consume, but a life full of chasing, wanting, losing, and desiring.

Is living in surplus and being in peace mutually exclusive?

I feel called to dive deep into this matter. A surgical examination of the truth is warranted. I wish to walk alongside you through this stretch of this forest.

What are some things that we have been told we need, but we can live without?
Social interaction. A scientist may say humans are social creatures and they need other people.
Yet, we see countless examples of people choosing extended periods of isolation to go all in on a task.
In fact, many of those people purposely create periods of isolation as a tool to get ahead, to sharpen their skill, to find truth.
Furthermore, expanding on this matter, one can be around people in a social environment, but never interact with them in a meaningful way. People living without social connection is more common than we think. They are walking around in big cities or living on a farm in this moment. Proximity t0 other people and interconnectedness are unrelated.

We have been told that we need a purpose.
Lets carefully examine this statement about our purpose. How much high-quality interrupted time are we spending on our purpose?
Most people spend their day at work to make a paycheck, partially serving their own interest and often serving someone else’s interest. They come home, eat, and unwind while consuming internet content or TV, numbing themselves and then falling asleep. The sophisticated few will arrive home and quickly pivot to another task. But even then, how much high-quality time are they truly spending on their purpose?
If they come home at 5 and they sleep at 10,at best they have 5 hours to work on their purpose.
And that’s not counting eating, taking a shower, preparing food, brushing their teeth.
It’s rare to find a person who’s truly walking a path where they are committed to their purpose.
Most people are not pursuing a purpose. They are just trying to survive to the next day.

Do humans need water and food?
To some level, but much less than what we have been led to believe,
The constant consumption of food has undoubtedly led to the obesity epidemic. Bariatric surgery and ozempic are commonplace. Both work by physically or chemically restricting how much one can eat. How much food do you really need? Better question, one that you can explore today. How much can you live without? If examine seriously, the results are impressive. Most of what we eat is elective.

Let’s examine deeper need, a need that’s often tied to our ego: the need for intimacy, sex, and validation.
Society will say, men need sex and women want attention.
By every societal measure, we see humans acting in ways opposite to this proposed biology.
Marriage is at an all-time low.
This is not because of geographical limitations or limitations in meeting people.
If anything, financial freedom and technology has improved our ability to make a connection with strangers. This should lead to an increase in marriage, if that is something that humans actually want.
But based on every societal study, there are more single, sexless individuals now than there ever were in recent history. The rate of cohabitation and people having children are both at historic lows.

If sex, intimacy, and relationships are primal needs, why are so many people okay living without it?
At this moment, people have the social and economic luxury to choose whatever lifestyle they wish.
Technology, in many ways, has allowed humans to live just as they want. The ones who wish to be social have more opportunities than they can take. The ones who wish to be reclusive, can do so with ease. 
If humans are social creatures that need sex and relationships, why are those things at an all-time low?
The purpose of these questions is to examine.

I strongly want to say that I’m not telling you to do anything or believe in anything.
At a certain point, I questioned and I self-experimented every need, desire, and belief.
In this section of the forest, the path revealed an opportunity to me for freedom, an existence without need, without desire.
Along with it was an opportunity to see the world as it is, instead of how it should be, in way that I never experienced before.

After all, desire clouds our judgement and our vision.

There is an understanding that life doesn’t happen to me. It happens around me. It happens to my body.
But my spirit is free. It’s unfazed. It’s untouched by life’s turmoil. My spirit needs nothing. Its peace is always available to me.

As long as I’m attached to needing something, I will never experience freedom. My desires could not be conveniently packaged into the paradigm of need.

In order to be free, I released everything, my desires, wants, attachments, needs, and self image. What I didn’t know was that this freedom lived within me, my entire life. It has been wanting to surface, but I had been distracting it with temporary worldly desires.