Freedom via liberating indifference

Don't you care about this?
How can you be so insensitive?
Why don't you show more interest in this?
What's wrong with being deeply involved?

Ordinarily we think of indifference as a bad thing. We've got voices in our heads that espouse the guilt trips listed above. We equate indifference with cynicism, coldness or rudeness. We assume we are supposed to be anything but indifferent.

Our past history can hold us prisoner. We let something that happened to us define our destiny. We let the incident determine our fate and luck. We can hear ourselves pronounce our prison term anytime we speak of what always or never happens to us. We already know there's no way it can happen any differently. Our life is a done deal that cannot be broken or renegotiated. We've cast a spell on our lives that brings along a series of unfortunate incidents.

Rather than think about this self-imposed imprisonment every day, we put our captivity into our unconscious. We keep the defining incident in denial and pretend we are free of our past. We don't realize we're living in our past, repeating our past and confined to what happened in our past. We opt for pseudo freedoms that give us the feeling of escaping without the fact of being free.

The first step in becoming really free is to make what I've just described conscious. We get out of denial and into "what is". We face the facts of what happened and what a big deal we made of it. We become realistic about how we've trapped ourselves in patterns we don't enjoy or outgrow.

The next step is to put the past behind us. It's no longer true for us. It can stop defining our fate and destiny. That previous incident goes from denial to "what is" and finally to "so what". We've become indifferent in a liberating way for us, the people in our lives and our future experiences.

With our past really behind us, we can face forward. We can explore what-if questions. We anticipate what will use our talents, energize our passions and expand our horizons. We discover challenges we want to put ourselves up to and opportunities we want to face. We can imagine ourselves in these situations and play out scenarios of creative fulfillment in our minds. In the process we get the feeling "I can be this, do this and get these results". We've spawned some serious freedom.