I watched the hawk circle in the valley below Fishers Peak. It seemed majestic, soaring effortlessly, patching the green below with a dark shadow as it neared earth before circling and gliding again. In my imagination, I wandered to Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and thought of independence and freedom – the image of rugged individualism we prize in our American culture. We have a special day to worship it each year – July 4 – just a few days away.

As I mused about this freedom, this magical mirage dissipated in the inrushing tide of scientific knowledge. There really was not much freedom there at all. Only in my mind did this fanciful notion have much reality at all.

Though not an authority on birds, I can’t see much freedom there at all. There certainly appears to be rugged independence, though only we as human beings are foolish enough to surmise that we are not dependent on the rest of the world we live in. What survival information that didn’t come via hard wired instinct in genetic coding came from the “learn at the cost of life itself “ instruction it experienced as a small chick. And then there was probably some additional learning as new capability and skills developed and were honed with repetitive practice. And if circumstances drove it hard enough, it would attempt to learn again as part of its ongoing instinctual will to survive.

I doubt a bird has much free will or choice at all. Though it seems to have aspects of both, it is probably not so. Much of its day is governed by deeply ingrained habits, allowing only small variations in behavior to accommodate the obvious variations in the local environment. The controlling chords of its life are eating, sleeping, procreating, and letting the body do its thing; there’s not much potential for thinking beyond those basic themes.

The unifying consciousness that permeates all existence doesn’t have much opportunity here to exercise the creativity that is the manifestation of freedom. Experience, rather than presenting a new opportunity for a different solution or expression of life, is quickly sorted and folded into the deep ruts of habit that “already know” everything important about “that.” Because there is little capacity for self-reflection, there is little opportunity to see the habits that foreclose a different response.

In people too, experience is quickly captured into feelings, memories, perceptions, concepts, and grooves of thinking that govern most of what one actually does. Choice in these circumstances often comes close to the illusion that mechanistic behaviorists insist it is. We are mostly lived by habits we never even see. Yet, I’m persuaded that the opportunity for free choice based in consciousness really exists. Like the undefined, unformed, unborn potentially of an unobserved quantum event, there exists an instant in experience where consciousness can creatively collapse the probability wave into different states than it has assumed in the past. The inability to pay attention to what is happening at the moment, though, or habits that preempt awareness, will foreclose the opportunity to do or think anything much different than what we’ve thought or done before.

If we want to be creatively free, we cannot mimic the hawk we admire as the symbol of a free independent spirit. We have to see, and then transcend the habitual ties that bind and blind. We will have to quit our myth that we are already free and independent. Those who have seen the plenum of potentiality with its freedom consistently remark that it’s the best bargain they ever made – worth any price they paid, and infinitely more.

Thank your Ms. Hawk for your sermon on freedom. May you find the freedom for your mind to soar with the creative grace your body already knows.