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Examining freedom, then, we have to examine why people do not attain it easily or understand it. They do not attain freedom because their attention is fixed upon barriers. They look at the wall, not the space on either side of the wall. The body could be considered to be an attention-demanding organism. One might believe that its total function was to command interest and attention. It is so interesting that people do not conceive that just behind them lies all the freedom anybody ever desired. They even go so far as to believe that that freedom is not desirable and that if they could attain it they would not want it. One is reminded of prisoners who occasionally go so sufficiently “stir-crazy” as to demand, after their release from prison, confining walls and restricted spaces. Manuel Komroff once wrote a very appealing story on this subject, the story of an old man who had served twenty-five years in prison, or some such time, and who on his release asked for nothing more than the smallest room in his son’s house and was happiest when he could see someone on an opposite roof who had the appearance of a guard, and who actively put bars back on his window. One could consider that a person who has been for a long time in a body to have such a fixation upon the barriers imposed by the body, that once a Scientology practitioner tries to remove them the person puts them back quickly. You might say such a person is “stir-crazy,” yet the condition is remediable.
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