Freedom

FREEDOM

A Guidebook

Lynne Gordon-Mündel

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2008 Lynne Gordon-Mündel

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the author.

For information:

Three Mountain Foundation

1048 Desmond Drive, Kamloops, BC

V2B 5L1

Telephone: 1-250-376-8003

Email: domenica.tmf@gmail.com

Contents

Introduction

Recognizing Illusion

What If

MYTHS

Flesh and Bones

Health - The Myths

Intelligence - The Myths

‘Good and Evil’ - The Myths

Relationships - The Myths

The God Myths

More Myths

BEYOND THE MYTHS

Our Hearts Know the Way

Demythologizing

Remembering

Listening

Fishing Boats

Strengthening Spiritual Muscle

Allowing

Dreaming

Relaxing Interpretation

Recognizing Projections

Caring

Honesty and Self-revelation

Visualization, Prayer and Ritual

Group Ritual

Consecration

Movement, Voice and Daily Work

Revolutionizing Relationship

Feeling and Emotion

Gratitude

The Lover

Art

You Are Necessary

Stillness

Freedom

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INTRODUCTION

Throughout the years people I work with have asked me to create a manual outlining the steps toward the freedom they find in our retreats. They ask because what they experience in retreats touches deeply. People recognize that there is something they have been longing for and have known in their hearts was possible. Once they touch it they do not want to lose it.

When people say, as they often do, that they want to ‘hold on to the feelings’ they experience here, I remind them that they cannot hold on to this experience; they have to let it go. Instead of holding on they must understand that during these gatherings we reach a level of awareness that requires a gentle but constant focus, a focus that results from years of discipline and growing understanding of the fundamental physics of creation. I remind them that to develop that focus in themselves rather than rely on me they must take up a practice; they must humbly, diligently, and with perseverance include that practice in their daily lives. I remind them also however that, in time, if they truly want freedom, it is their future. It is their destiny. I remind them that the quickening, the enhanced sensitivity, the feeling of lightness, the clarity and strength of conviction, the aliveness and love for one another, are their birthright. The level of awareness of which they catch a glimpse – for an hour, for a day, for a week – is the potential future of humankind and if they wish to participate in this more consciously evolved future, there is a discipline that will take them there. It is this discipline that they have asked me to outline.

I have been cautious about outlining steps to freedom. The path is unique to each person and I do not want to create a dogma; I do not want to make up a set of rules to follow. In practice I provide steps all the time, and tools, but to each individual I give different steps and different tools, in differing order, according to where that individual is in the current moment.

At my retreats I do not give instructions; instead I assist the participants to relax into the authority of their own unique relationship with life. Their relationship, not mine; yet not separate from mine. I do not rob them of their authority, their creative center, their place of power, yet I invite them into relationship with me. This is an art I have developed – to help people come home to themselves through relationship. It is an art I have developed over many years of experience with thousands of people. It works; it serves their lives and the lives of those around them.

Therefore, although it is not possible to paint a complete picture of the adventure – because Freedom is unique to each being – I can offer the fundamentals. Thus the following guidebook.

RECOGNIZING ILLUSION

The first step on our pathway to freedom is taken when we notice that we are confined. Until we see the walls around us we are not motivated to look beyond them. Until we sense something beyond the walls, we adapt to bondage instead of looking for a way out.

A long time ago someone told me the story of a young boy born in captivity. He and his mother had lived all of his life on the dirt floor of a dungeon that was almost completely underground. Only a narrow barred window let in the light of day. During the long hours of their imprisonment the boy’s mother told him stories of the life she had known before she had been jailed, stories of life in the world she remembered. She illustrated the stories by drawing pictures on the floor of the dungeon. The boy loved these stories; they fascinated him and he asked his mother over and over to repeat them. And so she did, time and time again, throughout his childhood, because he loved them so much.

One spring day she was looking through the bars of their prison toward the budding branches of a tree, its fresh green tips barely visible above the nearby buildings of their enclosure. She spoke with longing in her voice saying to her son how she wished she could escape from here to again see the whole of the tree – the thick lower branches rising from the powerful trunk, the spreading roots relating with the earth. She longed to walk in the forests, feel her feet bare in the green grasses, roam the hills, wade in the streams, the lakes. The boy looked at her in dismay: Why would you want to go there? he cried. Why would you want to leave our pictures, our stories? They are so beautiful – why would you want to go? It was only then that his mother realized that the boy had taken the pictures to be the highest reality possible. He knew nothing else. She tried to describe to him that there was more – so much more – but he could not hear, so distraught was he, believing her to be not understanding, not appreciating or loving what they had. He argued that they were safe in their home, had all the food and warmth they needed – not like in the stories where people were starving, or cold, or wounded, had to keep moving, changing relationships. Here in their dungeon home they could see the stories without the pain. He saw his mother now as disloyal, betraying, because she wanted to leave.

The mother could not help him understand because he had absolutely no context within which to understand what was beyond the walls, beyond what he already knew.

As a race, as humanity, we too are confined, and tend to cling to our prisons. What is the nature of our confinement, and why is it so hard to see?

This book describes our confinement, helps us see the container that prevents growth. The walls that imprison humanity at this stage of evolution are powerful but illusory; they can melt away through understanding. Nevertheless, few people are yet ready and willing to move beyond them. Perhaps, instead of clinging to the familiar, as did the boy in the dungeon, you are one who senses the unexplored human potential.

WHAT IF?

We have been raised within illusion, within a complex mythology so pervasive, so familiar, so deceptively safe, that it is invisible to most people. The purpose of these initial chapters will be to expose some of our myths, thus challenging the ideology that keeps us imprisoned.

Let us begin with the myth that tells us we begin when we are born and we end when we die. This idea has spread throughout our planet. Its influence is almost completely unconscious, yet its effects can be seen around the globe.

How would the environment of our planet change if all of us, including world leaders, were suddenly to realize that they can participate in their own evolution, consciously, with unlimited time within which to become anything they wish to become, to create their bodies, minds and effects as they choose? How would people act toward one another if they knew that their thoughts and actions when in tune with the natural flow of evolution will be long-lasting, will be of benefit to all humanity, and all life, and will endure into the future? How would they choose to serve life if they knew that they exist as creative consciousness enduring throughout time? Contemplate this earnestly for a long time. Walk with it. Roll the potential around in your mind. What happens when we relax the idea that we end when we die? Do you begin to see how an unexamined myth can influence?

Relaxing this myth we free up our vision; we see new pathways, new potential directions. We observe human development from within a larger context and we begin to understand ‘personal growth’ in new ways.

What if your ‘personal growth’ – your development - happens not just in the finite form that you now inhabit, but throughout time and space? What if you are consciousness evolving throughout eternity? What if, as consciousness, you find you have unlimited potential after your body dies? What if you then were to see that you have been, all along, in charge of your own destiny, author of your experience, sculptor of your own body and mind? How would that affect the way you live right now? What would be important?

What if we are, together, a continuum of consciousness with infinite potential for co-creation, intended to develop ever more adaptable forms – bodies that grow stronger, more agile, more free throughout the eons – evermore capable because they are in tune with natural evolution?

What if we were to question the idea that humanity needs technology for the species to evolve? What if technology obscures our natural potential? What if the power of consciousness, recognized, honored and understood, is more effective than technology, and less cumbersome? What if the