What does Freedom Mean to You?

 

What does Freedom Mean to You?

When we hear the word freedom in the modern context, it is all about rights – freedom of expression, freedom to practice one’s religion, freedom to protest, freedom to do this, that and the other. Never mind if your freedom tramples on someone else’s freedom. The ego only recognises what is ‘mine’ and to hell with what is ‘yours’! The media, the political world is up in protest – freedom is under threat, democracy is dying in some of the most robust democracies – the irony being that people shouting about threats are not being arrested and thrown in jail in such democracies – whereas countries like China can get away with murder and still not be held accountable – look at the Uyughir issue. In fact, the Islamic countries talk about threat to their religion in all countries except in China, where it suddenly becomes an internal problem!

As far as I am concerned, for me freedom means becoming free from bondage to the physical body – that can only happen with subduing the ego! As you progress on the spiritual path, you realise that the religious practices of every religion are nothing but bondages – they bind you rather than free you. You are stuck in religious dogma where right and wrong are defined as per standards laid down 2000 years ago. Like the saying goes one man’s food is another man’s poison – so what is right for one may be wrong for another. Who decides right from wrong? Societal standards? These standards are set up by ‘modern’ society – all you have to do is go into the tribal areas and see how simply they live in nature – for them God is nature as it provides them everything that they need for survival. It is modern society which corrupts the soul by giving modern solutions to so called ‘problems’!

As you dive deeper and deeper into your own inner core through meditation you find everything dissolving into nothingness – nothing matters but the state of your own being. In this state you feel light, buoyant, joyous, peaceful and free at last. Here there are no boundaries as you find the void which leads you into dazzling light – in this stage nothing is good or bad and you are not limited by any constraints. You get released into that state of void and realise your limitlessness – the freedom to roam at the speed of thought. If you recollect Rabindranath Tagore’s poem – ‘The Mind is Without Fear…’ you will realise what I am talking about. That is the freedom Rabindranath Tagore was referring to when he ends his poem, “Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”