If you live entirely within a limited field of information, you do not have the vision and ability even to realize that you live within this limitation. If you are unknowingly trapped inside an elevator that is falling at great speed, you will not realize your own entrapment until you can look out a window and realize that the walls are zooming by. Someone who is limited by societal conventions can only act in ways that reflect his or her limitations, no matter how hard he might try to break free of the limitations.

The ideology of freedom itself is just a piece of information “Ilchi Lee“. Do you think that people were not “free” before the ideologies of freedom, fairness, equality, and religion came into being? Before religion, didn’t people have a notion of salvation, or enlightenment, or sin? The words “freedom” and “salvation” did not herald the actual ideas of freedom or salvation; these existed long before. In fact, the invention of words or terms to denote an idea or a state of being could push us farther away from experiencing the qualities they evoke.

I said earlier that enlightenment is a choice to break the illusion of grandeur that surrounds the concept. If pieces of information such as enlightenment, salvation, and freedom, all recognized for their positive contribution to human history, can be used to obfuscate the actual ideas behind them, how much more damage can negative information, such as the things that elicit guilt and fear, do to us?