Friday Focus #4

TRANSCRIPT

So welcome to Friday Focus. I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this one today, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the word free. What do we mean by free when something’s free or not free?

I don’t think the law of reciprocity allows for something to be absolutely free.

If you get a free offer, it usually means that there’s something behind it.

If you’re offered let’s say if I were to offer someone a free therapy session, I would probably expect them to give me at least a testimonial or a referral to somebody else. Not entirely free. I might not charge for it. But in fact, free is not what most people do.

In the supermarket you get ‘buy one, get one free’. You’re not buying one get one free. You’re buying two at half price each. And the supermarket is shifting more product because they want to get rid of it.

I was thinking about the air that we breathe. Is that free? Well, not really, because to breathe, we have to eat. We have to create the energy which allows us to stay alive and breathe. And to do that, we have to do something. We have to give something in order to get the food that we need to eat  to be able to breathe the air that we need to live.

And certainly, if you want to fill up your car tyres or maybe a diving cylinder, then air is not free. Compressed air has to be pushed into the cylinder or the tyres, and that takes electricity. And you usually have to pay for that air. So air is not free either.

There isn’t really anything out there that’s free. And I see on the web, I see a lot of people in groups of various types saying, how can I get such and such a piece of software for free? Where can you get a good free appointment scheduler? Where can you get free software to do this or free apps to do that?

And when you go on your phone, there’s lots of apps that aren’t actually free. It’s free to download. That means it means you don’t have to pay money for them. But actually, when you do use a lot of this stuff, it’s not free because you’re spending time using it, you’re spending time on it.

And I’m finding a lot of difficulty with this word free because it’s misleading. It takes people down into the wrong paradigm. It takes people down into the idea that you shouldn’t have to pay for stuff. Well, perhaps you shouldn’t have to pay for stuff. And in fact, money is really an artificial construct anyway.

So if we take the whole idea of money out of it, then there is no such thing as free. Everything is an exchange in one way or another. You’re exchanging your time for something else.

And in both cases, if you’re working with someone, let’s say if you’re giving someone a hypnotherapy session, it’s your time and it’s their time. You’re exchanging a lot of your time and knowledge and you’re giving them something and they will either give you something back in terms of barter, like maybe I would exchange a hypnotherapy session for someone coming to fix my shower or something like that. Because there’s lots of things that you can do. You don’t have to involve money. But the idea that you do stuff for free doesn’t really sit well with me. A lot of people talk about, well, we have a free national health service.

Well, we don’t actually, because we pay through the nose, through our taxes for it. And a lot of that money that we put into that is mismanaged and mispent. Anyway, we don’t have a free health service. We just pay for it in a different way than you would if you’re in another country,

in other countries, you pay for the health care that you get directly and not indirectly like we do in the UK. So this whole concept of things should be free. You shouldn’t have to pay for them and you should be looking to get something for nothing. And that is not possible. That does not work with the laws of the universe. It doesn’t work with the law of reciprocity. Because for everything you do, every action you take, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. For everything you give, there is an equal and opposite receipt.

You receive, you give, you receive, you give. That’s how it works. There is no receiving stuff for free and there is no giving stuff for free because if you give stuff away, you’re giving something away. That’s not free to you. If I’m giving something away without charging money for it, then I expect, generally speaking, I know that something is going to come back to me in another way.

So for Friday, focus this weekend, think about your concept, your paradigm of free. What does free mean? It means one of two things. It means free of charge. In other words, you don’t have to pay for it. Or the other, free is freedom to do whatever you want to do.

Now there’s a different thing. This is going to go a bit longer now because I thought of something else. We are all free to make our own choices. We all have freedom. Regardless of what society you live in, regardless of what laws are placed upon you. You are free to choose whether to obey those laws.

You are free to choose whether to interpret them in a different way. And you’re also free to go somewhere else where those laws. Can’t don’t apply. So freedom of thought. And we can all think whatever we like, because as far as I’m aware, there isn’t really a way that anybody else can tell what you’re thinking at the moment.

We’ve lost our powers of telepathy. There may be one or two people around who can still do that, but not many. We’ve lost our power of being able to know what somebody else is thinking, probably just as well, but we can think what we like. But we may not be in some societies able to express those thoughts.

And we talk about freedom of speech, but we don’t really want freedom of speech because there are a lot of people out there who will say things that other people don’t want to hear. There are a lot of people out there who incite violence and hatred and all sorts of things.

Do we want is freedom of speech? Is freedom for them to say what they want to say? That’s important. Perhaps it isn’t. So think about this word, this idea of freedom and freedom to do, to be, to have what you want. Or freedom, or the concept of getting stuff for free. And put a comment below if you’ve got something to add to this, because, as I said at the beginning, I’m struggling a bit with this concept of free.

And any comments will be very welcome. So that’s Friday. Focus. See you next week.