Our freedom is the freedom of a caged bird.
When a child is born, he is born as a pure consciousness, pure awareness; limited by no ideology, belief, concept, idea, tradition, religion, label, etc. He doesn’t recognize himself as male or female, Christian or Hindu or Muslim, white or black, fat or thin, etc. He is just fully present in his pure being and that’s what actual freedom is.
But the thing is that freedom is not earned, that can be understood as a gift given by existence, and because that freedom is not earned, the child is not aware of that freedom, that freedom doesn’t have any wisdom in it, just the innocence. There’s no wisdom that the freedom to just be, the freedom of being one with existence holds the highest value and therefore, should not be traded with anything else.
But slowly and steadily, the freedom starts disappearing as the child starts trading it away for all the alluring bondages that the world has to offer.
Soon, the boundless sense of being “nothing and everything” is reduced to a limited sense of being “something.” The child is no longer a vast openness but a boy or girl, white or black, tall or short, handsome or ugly, intelligent or dumb, capitalist or communist, Muslim or Hindu, etc.
As soon as the child starts identifying with the things that society taught him, the freedom is lost and with age, the boats of enslavement continue to tighten and it reaches a point where even the sense of being enslaved is lost, only the illusion of freedom remains.
Can you imagine being so enslaved that one starts conflating the enslavement with freedom or the reality of life?
Muslims think that they are free, so do the Christians, the Hindus, the Sikhs, the atheists, the capitalists, the communists, etc. In reality, all of them are slaves to their respective ideologies or belief systems, all of them worship the structures they have built around their belief systems. No ideology can set you free. It’s the very nature of ideology to limit the holder to a certain viewpoint.
As long as we limit ourselves to a nation, a culture, a tradition, a religion, a ritual, a caste, etc. we are not free. Why? Because when you have the capability of being limitless and eternal, being confined to some limits and bounded in the psychological time is nothing but enslavement.
We think that we are free because we have covered the fact of our enslavement with the veils of ignorance. We are not aware enough to recognize our boats.
The freedom that we think we have now is similar to the freedom that a bird locked in a cage has. Yes, that bird can still fly in the cage but unless it sees that there is a huge open sky outside, it will never be aware of the height to which it can reach.
Don't think that someone else has put you in a cage. You alone are responsible for your slavery, no one else.
An animal can be enslaved by putting it in a cage, but a man is different. He can be enslaved even if he is moving free from the physical side, and he can be free even when he is kept in prison, because man's freedom is concerned not with the body but with consciousness.
Jesus, who is being crucified, is free, not a slave.
Socrates, who is being poisoned, is free, not a slave.
Nanak, who is grinding wheat in Babur's jail, is free, not a slave.
Buddha, who is eating stones from the people, is free, not a slave.
And by freedom I don't mean political freedom. Real freedom comes from within, not by uprooting governments or changing systems outside. Man has been seeking freedom from outside for centuries and that is why he has always been a slave.
Recognizing one's slavery is the first step towards revolutionizing life.
And when one acknowledges his enslavement, when one acknowledges that all the freedom that he takes for granted now can be taken away easily by some outside force, one starts working toward the ultimate state of freedom that no one can take back.
That freedom is not of the body or of the mind, but from the body and from the mind.
Enslaving someone who identified with body-mind is as easy as clapping your hands. As long as you are identified with body-mind, it’s easy for others to provoke anger, lust, greed, fear in you and if others can do that easily, how do you call yourself a free person?
A body-mind identified person is a remote-controlled machine and the remote is in the hands of the others. Is this freedom?
That’s why those who broke through the clutches of body-mind say that real freedom exists beyond both of them.
Ancient Eastern texts call it moksha. Buddha calls it nirvana.
The freedom that’s independent and none can provide to you except you.
Think about it: If you believe that your freedom has to be snatched away from somebody else’s hands, then given the right circumstances, it can be snatched away from your hands too.
As long as you don’t recognize that only you can free yourself, you will always be enslaved. A borrowed freedom is no freedom at all. The only freedom that exists is the one that emerges from within.
The flower of freedom that blossoms within the gardens of your heart is the flower no one can pluck.
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