Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography · 20 of 34

XII. I am Free

Freedom is harmony with Law. Law is not only universal, but beneficent. I deny my past condition of servitude. I am no longer bound by the chains of appetite, passion, impulse, custom, creed, fashion, societies, politics, traditionalism, or the animal nature. I deny their power. Only the spiritual self is free, and I recognize that as my real ego. I deny the bondage of matter. It is no longer a prison-wall. I repudiate the tyranny of the senses. They are my servants; no longer masters.

Insight

Freedom is harmony with Law. Wood opens the meditation with the same definition that Stoic philosophy had built its ethics on for six centuries — Epictetus in the Discourses says repeatedly that the free person is the one who has aligned the will with what actually is. The list of what Wood denies (appetite, passion, impulse, custom, creed, fashion, societies, politics, traditionalism, the animal nature) is recognizable Stoic ascesis without the Stoic name. The closing scriptural anchors are also chosen with care: where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17) and the law of the spirit of life made me free (Romans 8:2). Wood is doing Christian Stoicism in plain English — and the practice it generates is closer to Marcus Aurelius’s daily exercise than to anything in popular nineteenth-century Protestantism.

I open my mind to truth, and welcome it from whatever quarter it may come. I assert my supremacy over outward circumstances, and deny the power of both physical pain and pleasure. My consciousness goes beyond the body and all its belongings, and dwells with the divine and spiritual self.

“Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

“He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.”

“For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and death.”