To the pure, all things are pure. To the defiled, all things are defiled.
Someone asked me if I thought freedom was an external thing, or and internal thing. I think it’s both, but I think the internal is far more important and foundational.
If you don’t have internal freedom, you won’t experience external freedom either. You won’t be able to see it or feel it when it’s looking you in the face. If you do have internal freedom, external bondage won’t be nearly as bad, and external freedom will be fully experienced.
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to expand your external freedom, but knowing the way the relationship works should direct you to put the bulk of effort on internal freedom first.
In my favorite book, The Great Divorce, the characters who spent their lives working on righteousness found not only the afterlife, but their entire earthly life also to have been heaven. Those who let themselves decay morally found the opposite. Not only was life on earth hell, but even when they experienced a heavenly afterlife it felt like hell to them. You bring with you what you are, and you read it back into your past too.
I can get glimpses of this in my present life. I’ve been married to my wife for twenty years. When we’re both behaving as we should, it genuinely feels looking back like every moment of our marriage has been bliss. In those rare times when we are nasty to each other, looking back on our marriage paints a less favorable picture.
This isn’t to say that perception is reality. But what’s going on inside us limits and colors our ability to experience aspects of reality.
This is why we must always cultivate righteousness, freedom, truth, and beauty in us. It is for our own good. If we do, then we can really experience these things when we meet them. If we do not cultivate them inside us, we will miss them, or worse yet, experience them as torments. If we do, it will always have been good. If we don’t, it will always have been bad.