Living in Bondage

 

Photo Credit: Zikoko

Living in Bondage

Man lives in bondage, and the bondage is not imposed by others, it is self-created. It is created because we are afraid of the insecure. In the name of security, we create a bondage around ourselves. Yes, it gives a feeling of cosiness, warmth, safety, but it is all false because sooner or later death will take it all away.

Because of this we never explore, we never go beyond the boundaries of the familiar. The familiar is very small and we go on moving in the familiar, in circles. Our life knows no growth, because growth can only happen if we move not in circles but in a line. If we are linear then there is growth. If we go around in circles, we go on repeating the same thing again and again.

Freedom is possible because we have made our own prison. We can get out of it any moment that we decide to. It is only a question of decision, of courage, of guts. Freedom is the ultimate value in life. Nothing is more important than that, because out of it comes everything else that is valuable. Love arises as a fragrance, joy arises, meaning arises; for the first time, life becomes tremendously significant. And one is constantly moving beyond the known, going into the unknown. Life becomes a thrill, an adventure. But we have made life just a dragging affair. It seems safe, it appears secure, but there is no security, no safety anywhere. They are impossible.

Only death is secure. We cannot take anything away from a dead man — or can we? even death cannot do any harm to him, he is already dead. In his grave he is so absolutely secure. Because we are so obsessed with security, we have made our houses our graves. We don’t live in them; we only die in them slowly, surely; it is a gradual kind of suicide.

Sannyas means freedom, freedom from all self-created securities, safeties. In the beginning one feels afraid, scared, that is natural, but once we become attuned to the insecure and we know the joy of insecurity then we never look back to those old toys that we used to think were keeping our life secure. And they were not securities, they were simply prisons, chains around our being.

Life begins only when we become free from all kinds of bondages: the bondage of nation, the bondage of race, the bondage of church — ideological, social, political, religious. 

When we become free from all these imprisonments, when we simply drop all that, we have been told is important, when we simply drop all that we have been told to believe in; when we neither believe nor disbelieve, a great freedom arises in our being. That freedom is sannyas; and that freedom then takes us higher and higher towards the ultimate.