Spirits of Light and Darkness: Ontological Independence and the Freedom to Choose

What if the deepest freedom is not changing the world around us, but choosing the field of consciousness in which we live?

Every Fourth of July, people celebrate independence. We remember revolutions, declarations, constitutions, and the birth of nations. This year, however, my thoughts have turned elsewhere—not toward political independence, but toward something quieter and perhaps more difficult to attain: the independence of the soul.

After more than forty years in clinical depth psychology, listening to thousands of dreams and accompanying people through grief, trauma, joy, illness, and transformation, I have gradually come to believe that much of human suffering arises not only from our wounds, but from our conscious and unconscious participation in fields of consciousness that continually regenerate suffering. We enter these fields almost without noticing. They shape perception, influence relationships, and quietly convince us that resentment, fear, shame, or despair are simply the way the world is.

Maturity, it seems to me now, is not learning how to escape these fields. Such an escape is neither possible nor desirable. Rather, it is discovering when, how, and why we may step out of them without abandoning life itself. I have come to think of this as ontological independence: not merely freedom from emotional reactivity, but the freedom to participate differently in reality.

The Field We Choose to Enter

Years ago, a man I will call James came to therapy carrying a dream he could not understand. He described standing inside a crumbling house in a neglected neighborhood, surrounded by decay but unable to leave. When I asked what the image evoked, he simply shrugged. Nothing came. We sat together in silence, the dream resting between us without interpretation.

Then, without warning, the electricity in the building failed.

The office fell completely dark.

Coincidence? Perhaps. Yet anyone who has worked deeply with dreams knows that there are moments when inner and outer worlds seem to echo one another in ways that invite attention rather than explanation. We remained silent for another minute before James looked toward the faint light filtering through the window blinds.

"I know," he finally said. "It's me."

He paused before continuing.

"My darkness swallowed the building."

Taken literally, his words were impossible. Psychologically, however, they revealed something profoundly true. Over many months he had become increasingly consumed by old grievances, disappointments, betrayals, and injuries that, while often real, had gradually become the organizing principle of his inner life. Every conversation returned to them. Every relationship was interpreted through them. His attention continually fed a field of resentment that eventually came to define reality itself.

That morning we did not spend our time reviewing each painful event. We had already done much of that work. Instead, we sat quietly with a more unsettling question: Who might he become if he no longer organized his life around the field of suffering he knew so well?

Near the end of the session he looked directly at me.

"I'm not sure what I'll do," he admitted. "Darkness is familiar. I know how to live there. Freedom..." He hesitated. "Freedom frightens me because I don't know who I would be without all of this."

Those words have stayed with me for years because they illuminate something I have witnessed again and again. Human beings do not cling only to what is pleasurable. We also cling to what is familiar. Even suffering can become a kind of home. The prospect of genuine freedom often asks more of us than continued misery, for it requires leaving behind an identity carefully built around injury and entering territory where we no longer know ourselves.

The following day James sent a brief message thanking me for our work together. He explained that therapy had helped but that he could go no farther. He assured me he was safe and simply wished to stop. I never saw him again.

Like many therapists, I wondered whether I had somehow failed him. Yet as I carried those questions, a dream arrived with remarkable simplicity. Its message was clear: Each must walk their own path. This is yours to understand. Then move on.

There was sadness, certainly, but there was also release. I quietly honored James in my own way and allowed him to continue his journey while returning to my own. His freedom included the freedom to choose differently than I might have wished.

Dreams That Teach Another Way of Being

Looking back over the dreams that have accompanied me during the past six months, I now see that they have been teaching the same lesson from many different directions.

One dream invited me to leave institutions whose rituals had become spiritually empty, where forms remained but living presence had quietly departed. Another revealed the subtle imprisonment of ideological certainty and suggested that genuine thought begins only after we loosen our identification with inherited positions. Still another relocated an old maternal complex, not by defeating it but by placing it where it belonged rather than allowing it to occupy the center of psychic life.

Other dreams carried the lesson further. They reminded me that marriage is not merely another relationship to manage but the center of gravity around which the rest of life quietly revolves. They showed me that patients may remain lifelong companions in memory without becoming psychological burdens that I continue to carry. They brought me home after years of searching elsewhere for what had, perhaps, always been waiting nearby.

Even the simplest morning ritual acquired new meaning. Descending to the room where I practice yoga, preparing coffee, inhabiting the body before entering the demands of the day—these no longer felt like habits of self-care alone. They became deliberate acts of choosing the field from which consciousness would meet the world.

Seen together, these dreams were no longer isolated symbolic experiences. They described a philosophy of living.

Ontological Independence

Psychological independence asks an important question: How can I become less reactive? Ontological independence asks something deeper: What way of being allows life itself to flourish?

The emphasis shifts from symptom reduction to participation in reality. The question is no longer simply how to manage anxiety, resentment, or fear, but whether we are willing to lend our consciousness to the fields that continually amplify them.

This is not withdrawal from the world. It is not indifference, detachment, or spiritual bypassing. One may remain deeply engaged in family life, committed to a marriage, devoted to meaningful work, attentive to the suffering of others, politically aware, spiritually alive, and actively involved in community while quietly refusing participation in fields that feed endless outrage, envy, shame, ideological possession, or chronic grievance.

That refusal is not passive. It is among the most active choices we can make.

The depth psychologist Michael Eigen once observed that we sometimes hide from life in order to avoid death. Perhaps another way of saying this is that we often cling to familiar suffering because genuine freedom asks us to become someone we have never before been. Every authentic transformation contains a small death: the relinquishment of an identity that once protected us but no longer serves life.

The spirits of light and darkness remain with us. They always will. Every day they invite our participation. We cannot abolish either one, but we are not without freedom. The deepest freedom is not found in changing other people or controlling the circumstances of our lives. It is found in recognizing that consciousness itself possesses the remarkable capacity to choose the field in which it will dwell.

That, it seems to me, is the quiet meaning of independence.

Not only on the Fourth of July, but every ordinary morning when we awaken, breathe deeply, set our feet on the floor, and decide once again which way of being we will bring into the world. The soul's greatest freedom is not escape from reality. It is the courage to participate in reality in a way that allows life, compassion, and consciousness to flourish.