On life’s journey we all search for freedom…freedom from poverty, freedom from lust, freedom from fear, freedom from sorrow, freedom from oppression, freedom from illness, freedom from our responsibilities, freedom from our own limitations…
On the dusty road of life’s dream and reality, where things are rarely vivid, do we ever feel completeness from the path we have chosen or the path fate has laid out for us?
I suppose, on our flight to freedom we all seek ‘progress’. But it is often our fear or our definition of progress that holds us back. In today’s hyper connected world where we are constantly bombarded with fearful headlines, discouraging outlooks, and collective despair; it is hard to be inspired and stay motivated to truly free our minds and stay focused on progress.
As a society, more than ever, we tend to look at life as a glass half empty…we are constantly looking for instant gratification! We are increasingly judgmental, short sighted, and afraid to take on the tough roads to create anything long lasting. In a world where we constantly keep judging our ‘progress’ by ‘what’s in it for me’, it is hard to achieve true personal or collective ‘freedom’.
This particular Sunday morning, I flip through an old book by Ta-Mo (founder of Zen Buddhism) on the freedom of mind.
A very long time ago, I surrendered myself to the universe, as I believe that there is no other force as powerful as your mind being tuned with the language of the universe. We may not be able to control all that goes around us, but it is our mind that can guide us to our freedom regardless of our surroundings. Ta-Mo writes in one of his passages:
Behold the Mind
By standing upright
Touching Heaven
And sinking into the Earth
Subdue delusion
With fearlessness
And palms pushed forward.
Behold the Mind
While pushing the sky and the mountains.
Separate them and you will
See the authentic Mind
And find the awakened spirit.
Uproot the mountains
And you will find peace
That flows from a genuine place
Within the Mind.
Use this peace to find awakened spirit.
Behold the Mind!
That is the only answer.
And that is how the Shaolin monks define ‘freedom’.
No matter wherever and however we look for our freedom, we can be assured of one thing – the quality of life and human interaction cannot be judged in any quantitative way because it’s constantly moving and shifting. You can only trust that you are essentially correct; that you are generally in the right direction.
Eventually, you arrive at your destination or, more often, somewhere close to it. The journey, especially one of self-discovery, is the most important thing. The destination becomes secondary.
Ta-Mo goes on writing:
There is no self or other ultimately,
No right or wrong ultimately;
You can only be essentially correct at any point in time and space
All things are part of a cycle.
They are constantly in motion.
We should not get paralyzed by our desire for the destination, as the destination is often not as important as how we guide ourselves along our journey towards freedom.
I wish for you to find your ‘freedom’…
At the end, you are the ‘the master of your fate’: you are ‘the captain of your soul’…
