From Rebellion to Obedience: The Two Levels of Freedom
I remember when I was eighteen years old I bought my first book at the Berkshire Mall in Pennsylvania after seeing a late-night infomercial from Tony Robbins.
It was summertime and I would read it in the backyard in the afternoon sun.
There was an exercise in the book that asked me to prioritize my values in order to become more self-aware of what’s important to me.
The answer was clear. My number one value, by far, was freedom.
I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do or how to do it. I would henceforth make my own rules and create my own life.
I was convinced I had the freedom to create my own reality and I would rebel against any system that tried to control me.
The narrative of a heroic rebel fighting for individual rights is the foundational basis of American culture: our novels, our movies, our history books.
Each person with the freedom to pursue their own individual happiness.
I would be a freedom fighter. I would rebel against any system trying to oppress my individual freedom.
I rebelled against the government, the school system, the religious institutions, the corporations, and most essentially, my own parents.
Why follow any of these institutions or listen to what they say? I saw them all as filled with corruption and hypocrisy. I would follow whatever was true inside me, and liberate myself from The Machine.
Then something quite amazing and perhaps unexpected happened.
Through a long series of profound spiritual experiences, soul-searching, psychological and theological study, a transformation slowly began to take root.
I encountered and deepened in relationship with a supreme, all-knowing, all-loving intelligence infinitely greater than myself.
In other words, I found God through the teachings, and the transmission, of Christ.
For the first time in my life, I found an absolute authority I could fully trust and wanted to give my obedience to.
Why should I follow someone like Deepak Chopra when I can follow Christ? It’s not much of a comparison.
Here’s the amazing paradox.
I discovered in this obedience to God lies a much greater and more profound freedom than I ever had before.
The mind becomes free from needing to figure it all out, from obsessively trying to control external circumstances, from old patterns of anxiety and fear.
The heart opens in a state of effortless forgiveness and loving compassion.
The nervous system resets. The physiology of the entire body drops into a profound place of deep safety, rest, and rejuvenation.
There’s a sense of becoming as scripture calls it, ‘a new creation’ deeply at home in the Now, with full trust in an unfolding plan that cannot be, and doesn’t need to be, comprehended by the mind.
Every challenge I face is an opportunity to continue to deepen that trust and faith in relationship with God.
In the same way that we can look for love in all the wrong places we can look for freedom in all the wrong places too.
The greatest freedom doesn’t come from having lots of choices. The greatest freedom actually comes from having no choice at all.
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