I just want to say one last thing @rick and then maybe not come back to this topic for a longish time.
I might differ from Claudiu (unless I am misrepresenting him), in the sense that I think that all these ontological matters are fine to ponder and investigate as a feeling being and are far from resolved. Potentially they may never be resolved to everyones satisfaction – even amongst actually free persons. After-all the relationship between consciousness (or thought) and matter is something that has been an enigma for millennia and has occupied all the worlds best minds. Saying that however, the world has not had actual freedom until quite recently. I am not fully actually free. I might well change my tune once my experience of the universe is like Richard’s. Such an experience my well cut through the fog of philosophy and I have had intimations of it.
RICHARD: Not so … the stuff of this body (form) is the very same-same stuff as the stuff of this infinite and eternal physical universe (form), in that I come out of the ground (form) as a variety of carrots and lettuce and milk and cheese and whatever (form), combined with the air (form) that I breath and the water (form) that I drink and the sunlight (form) that I absorb. As such there is no ‘isolation’ or ‘division’ whatsoever and as this flesh and blood body (form) I am this very material universe experiencing its own infinitude as a sensate and reflective human (form). This very physical universe is also experiencing itself as cats and dogs and all other sentient beings (form).
Where I agree with Claudiu, is that actual freedom is all about praxis and not theory. As a feeling being I lost count of the number of times I had the intellectual smirk wiped off my face by a PCE that made all my proudly thought out schemes laughably redundant - along with the ‘me’ that thought them up. If you haven’t had a PCE in quite some time and are interested in actualism, then what is the point of all this stuff? If actualism becomes solely a vehicle for philosophising (as it can become when a morality is fashioned from it), it is such a terrible waste.
No. You have to make a choice.