A Path to Personal Freedom

This book is about our universe, our most recent science, our spiritual search, our experience, and how all of these support the once crazy idea that we are here to live lives guided by the uninhibited expression of personal freedom. I define freedom as letting go of those things in our lives that block us from experiencing our birthright, which is living fully within the flow of this infinite creation—a flow that is shaped by a deep type of connectedness that we sometimes call Love. When I published my first book on this topic, The Architecture of Freedom, some readers requested a shorter version. This book is a response to that request. While the ideas in this book are not critical for living, they certainly can help make our lives much more enjoyable. Our primary purpose is to explore, express and share our individual and unique gifts so that all of us, together, can know and fully experience life’s amazing possibilities. When we resist this calling our lives appear difficult, dangerous, and limited but, when we embrace our true purpose, everything changes and our lives begin to flow perfectly. Even if we change nothing, collectively, we will still be fulfilling this role perfectly. However, there are an infinite number of ways to experience life and, as this book illuminates, we each have the absolute power to choose our own personal experience. In fact, each of us is the only person that can determine our experience because no one else is even involved. Living our lives with this different awareness, one in which we fully understand that each of us is an important and integrated part of something much greater than our old and obsolete vision of separate competing individuals, will powerfully influence how our lives appear and feel. We literally have the ability to change the appearance of our entire world by learning how to change our deepest hidden beliefs.Human culture has evolved three distinct pathways for collecting, assembling, and saving knowledge. First, we gain knowledge from our direct, everyday personal experience. Next, we have our cultural and spiritual traditions that have been passed down through the generations. Lastly, for over 2,000 years we have built a great body of knowledge through formal scientific study, research and experiment. While all of these three directions can help us to better understand our lives and creation, each direction, in isolation, also has aspects or parts that can seem incomplete or even wrong. Historically, these three important information sources have often appeared very different and separate, at times even in conflict or contradiction with each other. It is only recently that we have started to recognize that there is a substantial convergence or overlap: a common region where experience, spirituality and science actually share the same expansive vision. Since spirituality, experience, and scientific study all represent our attempts to understand truth at a deeper level, the region where they intersect and overlap should provide fertile hunting ground. To this end I discuss personal experience, my own and others’; our spiritual traditions, and our paradigm-changing science of the last one hundred years. I show how all three of these traditions point towards the same ideas–actually a single, unified idea that is disguised as many to work with our mode of thinking. While some of these ideas are technically un-provable because of their very nature, I will show them to be fully supported and reinforced by each and all of these three very different traditions. When we examine our cultural history in more detail, we find that many existing and ancient cultures have traditions that include the recognition of a similar expanded vision for life, traditions that closely parallel the discoveries of our most recent science.

Tim Cross is an architect living in Austin, Texas. He is also a trained ecologist. Before turning his attention to architecture, he taught high school physics and worked in the field of environmental science. He served in the Peace Corps and in the late 1970s he was the Environmental Advisor to the Government of Fiji. However, throughout all his adventures, his primary passion has always been to learn as much as possible about this amazing experience called life. This book series began as a simple letter to his two daughters, but quickly grew into something quite unexpected. Though Tim is an architect, his books are not about architecture. They are, instead, books about personal and cultural freedom, and how the actual architecture of our universe fully supports each and all of our personal journeys towards freedom. He defines freedom as letting go of those things in our lives that block us from experiencing our birthright, which is living fully within the flow of this infinite creation-a flow that is shaped and interconnected by a deeper type of Love. Tim is now at a place in his life where his only remaining desire is to allow his experience of Love to deepen. These books are living and evolving records that describe what he has learned and what he continues to learn about living in this amazing and infinite universe.