Freedom

Freedom is something all of us want. We all have our definitions of what freedom is.

Let us consider Freedom as being the opposite of imprisonment. For whatever reason someone commits a crime. Sometimes this could have been also wrong judgement. So one lands up in prison.

All the freedom one possessed is now lost.

The initial days of the prison life is very confusing, there is no focus, there is delusion, there is experience of surrealism. The initial days of fear are overcome eventually. Prison life becomes routine.

One has to simply go in cycles, day after day, without any purpose. The only purpose if any is to get out of the prison.

It takes a while to realize that there is really no purpose of the prison. And that there is no object inside the prison that can give real happiness. The only happiness can be freedom. Any event or object that makes us forget that we are in the prison seems to give us happiness. But once the reality is remembered, those objects no longer make us happy.

Life continues. Over a period we forget that we were once a free bird. We become "institutionalized". And you either "get busy living or get busy dying".

One among us somehow continues to remember his free life. He continues to hold on to hope. After realizing that a normal good behaviour will not get him freedom, he plans secretly on an escape.

He makes an attempt, if hes lucky he gets out and is free. If he is unlucky, he gets back to a much more rigorous imprisonment. Making his freedom almost impossible.

One fine day, based on his extremely good conduct, a prisoner gets released. He is back into the free world. He is extremely happy. This happiness is permanent , since he is no longer a prisoner. He need not get to the prison any more!

No matter what the means, he is now free. liberated. Once he is free, he has a natural tendency to help the prisoners inside to escape. Some do follow his tips and get out. But most others who are now completely institutionalized, do not listen to him, they are either convinced that he will get into trouble, or he has lost his mind.

The person who has tasted freedom, doesn't care about what all happened to him while in prison, He doesn't care about how he was wrongly convicted, or all the unpleasant, undesirable events that happened inside. All that matters to him now is he is no longer a prisoner. he has a full life of freedom to live.

Life without the true knowledge of Who I am, is like prison. Life itself is not a prison. The world and its worldly objects are not imprisonment, but the life that is experienced without the self-knowledge is like imprisonment.

People take all kinds of efforts to get out of the sometimes meaningless, repetitive life. But all such actions results in them becoming more and more entangled. and it takes more and more effort to get a glimpse of the happiness that used to be available abundantly in childhood.

There is not a single person who looks back at "good old times". For most of us those "glorious days are over". There are few among us, who appears always happy, like a child is even in adulthood, even when all kinds of trouble is surrounding the person seems unperturbed. He is a hopeful person. He knows there is a way out.

He follows the time tested methods to obtain the self-knowledge systematically. One fine day he realises who he is! Once the truth is known, once the reality is experienced, the life becomes a joy. The very same life and its objects and events that one experienced before, becomes a source of enjoyment. the intermittent and diluted happiness that became rarer by the day, now suddenly became abundantly available.

Once a person gets the true knowledge, all the events of an ignorant past become instantly irrelevant. All the so called unhappy and undesirable events are a now non existent past. there is now a whole new life to lead with full of freedom.