You all say that you want freedom, and yet you keep attaching to what is around you.
In order to be free, you have to release your attachments. You do not have to give all your worldly possessions away, but you must release their hold on you.
Free means to not be bound.
In order for you not to be bound, you release all that you have been bound to. Of course, you have not really been bound. You just thought so, and that has been enough to keep you bound. Binding is mental.
Even surrounded by prison walls, you are free.
Even in a prison, you can let go of attachments.
Perhaps your attachment is to how things are supposed to be. Attachment is either to the past or to the future, for you live on them rather than in the present.
What you are attached to, you keep fighting for. You keep fighting to hold it. You even fight for freedom, but freedom cannot be fought for. Fighting is opposed to freedom. Fighting keeps you bound.
Only freedom frees you.
Freedom is openness. Nothing in your pockets. Hands palm up.
Your eyes open to all that is in their view.
Freedom strolls through life.
Unfreedom is a struggle. Unfreedom battles.
You who struggle with life have not yet freed yourself.
Do not wait for another to free you from your bounded thoughts. Do not even wait for a God in the sky to free you.
I set you free long ago. You have yet to accept that.
Lack of belief in freedom is belief in trespass.
You cannot own freedom without allowing the same to others. This is the crux of your question. It is your dilemma.
You may be afraid to let go because then someone else will have what you let go of. Like a dog with a bone, you may be tired of chewing it, but it is your bone, after all, and if you let go of it, another will pick it up and run away with it, and it won't be yours anymore.
Boundedness is limited vision. It is a dim view.
Open your heart, and you will begin to know freedom.
You have the freedom to embrace all that life gives. Freedom doesn't pick and choose. That is limited freedom, and freedom limited is not freedom.
So long as you think your life has to go a certain way, you have abandoned freedom.
Freedom for you begins with new thinking.
So long as you expect, you are not free, because then you are bound to your expectations.
You have the idea that when you become enlightened, all of life will be just as you think it should be. All will go your way. You will commandeer your life. That is your expectation, that all will be golden. You will have been good and become enlightened and, therefore, you will get everything you want. Life will be smooth, and your wish will be life's command.
Where did you get that idea?
Life is not laid out for you like a set of clothes for you to put on in the morning.
Do not judge your life by what goes on in it any more than you judge yourself by what you wear. Or do you?
You are here to give to life. It is yours before you. There is a path before you, and you tread one step at a time. Life may be laid out before you, but you cannot deliberately lay it out piece by piece. You follow life. Life does not have to follow you. Whatever transpires in your life, you are not less, and you are not more. Freedom lies in your being free far beyond what lies around you.
Christ was misunderstood, but he had great understanding. Christ was imprisoned. But what walls, what nails, could imprison him? His body was crucified, but what could crucify him? His body was defamed, but what could defame him? He was denied, but what could he ever deny? His physical life was taken, but he was not. He did not die to give you everlasting life. His body died letting you know that life was ever everlasting. His death told you what was already true. He saw what you did not, and he never lowered his eyes from truth. He did not give you everlasting life. He gave you knowledge of it. And that was a great gift he gave.
He did not look upon his life as his. He saw it was Mine on loan to him on Earth for a brief time. He was not attached to his life. He was attached to following Me but not to what I could give him. He forever had Me in his eyes, and he pondered the depths, and he saw himself in Me.
What limits did not Christ break? He saw none, therefore, he was free. He saw vastness through My eyes, and that is what you are learning to do. Yes, you.
Whatever disarray you find yourself in, you are learning My vision and My thoughts, and I am gladdened.