Today I quit my job and in a week or two, hopefully, I will be on my way back to India and home sweet home! I feel truly liberated, joyous, light, and FREE!
Good for you. Call me sometime before you leave...for when you are gone...I can't chit chat with you for sometime.
Is that true freedom? While it is sometimes necessary to escape tough situations, you will never find abiding joy through trying to mould external situations. Someday, you will have to find it in yourself, right where you are. Whether in the midst of the din of the marketplace, or the soundless Himalayan caves, your blissful nature is with you always. Nourish it with mindfulness.
I feel you may be free politically, we may be free from the control of others, but unless free from your own mind and internal bondage, we are still slaves.
I guess you have to ask yourself what "is" actually free, can it be free, or is it a mere error of awareness.
The body makes demands, but you don't have to be a slave to the body. Give it what is needed to function with health and vigor, but don't pander to its every desire. If you can be at peace independent of the state of the body and mind, that is a great freedom.
Much easier said than done. The body demands many things continuously - food, shelter, even air. Also, even the greatest yogis and seers are subject to ageing, disease and death - cf. the case of Ramakrishna Paramhansa.There is absolutely no way we can be entirely free of it all. One can get detached - but is that freedom in the true sense?
If you want to be free from the need of food or water, you can do severe tapas to gain Haadi Vidya, which mitigates your desire for food and water. If you want to be free from cold or rain or heat etc, you can do tapas to gain Kaadhi vidya, which is a special siddhi that allows your body to be not affected by seasonal changes. You could be skeptical when it comes to the existence of these siddhis, but it is said in the scriptures that spiritually advanced individuals can gain these siddhis. However, even after you gain such siddhis it does not mean you are truly free from the body. I think this is the essential paradox, if you stop the body's need for food, you are doing it to stop the body's pain of getting food? so , you are doing it for the body, so it could be said that you are still bound to the body. Some say that the jiva is never free. It is either bound to the spiritual world or to the physical world, there is no freedom for the jiva as it exists to only serve the creator that has created it.
Before I would believe in these powers I'd have to see some definite concrete demonstration that they do in fact exist. But even if they do, there's still death. And there's the fixity of the forms we inhabit - we can't choose freely to have this or that bodily feature for example. I'd say we can get some relative inner freedom, but that's as far as it goes in the present stage of evolution. But that inner freedom is definitely worth having.
Wow, this sure turned into an interesting discussion Yes, the body is always subject to suffering, needs, disease etc. But when we come to experience that we are not the body, then we are no loger to subject to it. The body's needs are taken care of as Dharmadillo said. In terms of the physical, of course absolute freedom is never possible. It is foreign to the nature of the physical world. But the spirit is by nature free and so inner freedom is always available. Indeed, as Jedi said, when was I ever bound!?
Well Bhaskar - you said you were 'free at last', so I'll leave it to you to answer that one for yourself
