When it comes to mental freedom, are we truly free? Have we unshackled and unfettered from what can be euphemistically termed as mental slavery, Ravi Valluri asks.
Recently two prominent Bengali politicians (hailing from the Trinamool Congress Party) were in the news. Apart from their political achievements, they chronicled Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore’s prescient poetry. First it was the suave speaker Saugata Bose, during the debate on intolerance in the Parliament and subsequently Mamata Banerjee, the Chief Minister of West Bengal when the election results deluged the state like an avalanche.
Both narrated this much feted poem of Tagore to the assembled parliamentarians and media respectively which was heard attentively: ‘Where the mind is without fear ….into that heaven of freedom my Father let my country awake.’
In this prodigious poem, Tagore implores God to awaken the country to seek emancipation from the foreign yoke. However the poem entails more than a mere physical liberation of the country. It seeks to reinvigorate the fossilised and chained human mind. This poem with amazing psychological contours attempts to breathe freshness into the mind’s otherwise lustreless and cranny corners.
The soulfulness of the poetry emphasises on the flowing river of thoughts as opposed to stagnant perceptions, banishment of unimaginativeness from our lives, an augmentation of intellect, exhorting the collapse of narrow sectarian walls where human minds are entrapped and cocooned.
Tagore implores upon discarding the existing repugnant traditions and customs where Indians /humans behave as mere marionettes. Human mind seeks perfection, the eternal truth and the road is travelled only by traversing the clear stream of reason and logic, not stumbling over the parched blocks of desultory thinking. The clarion call of the poet is to awaken the ossified minds of the countrymen which had been hitherto bound in chains for centuries.
Gurudev deploys both physical and psychological metaphors to arrest the mental atrophy which set in and ignite the passion for freedom during the rendition. But what does freedom denote? Simply put, it is the power or right to act, speak or think as one wants.
Obtaining freedom from slavery is certainly an achievement, considering that several third world countries attained it quite recently. But are we truly free from within and without? Have human beings unshackled and unfettered from what can be euphemistically termed as mental slavery?
Many centuries ago a monk pined to become a tutee of an enlightened Zen Master. He made several trips to the Master to join the fold but the forays were all in vain. One day the Master was seated along with some burbling students on the banks of a river. The monk once again approached the Master although fearing reproach by the learned one. But to his amazement the Master took him by the scruff of his neck and pushed him into the river. The monk screamed as his lungs were filled with water and he became breathless.
The Master pulled him out of the river and tersely remarked, “Come to me when your mind has the volume and capacity to acquire so much knowledge as your lungs had space for that much air to survive.”
The deducible meaning of the perspicacious Master was that the monk proffering to be a student needed to break free without any baggage of the past and be truly free from all thoughts and dilemmas. Human mind and thoughts are perennially imprisoned by a variety of factors and we are presumptuous enough, living in a delusion that freedom of thought and speech has dawned on us.
The laws of nature imprison us from the time of our conception. We inherit our cells and acquire traits from our ancestors. That is our DNA and also our RNA. The next schooling takes place in the womb of the mother. This is our first cradle of thoughts. The feelings, emotions, fears, phobias, dangers, efficacious and antipathetic thoughts get supplanted and ingrained in our system through the umbilical cord. Parents also pass on genetic and hereditary disorders which also fashion thought processes.
Buddha says, ‘We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.’ Therefore the environment and thoughts of the mother are so very important. Her thoughts bear a dramatic footprint on the offspring and thereby the impressions are created.
Our thought process gets conditioned and brainwashed by our upbringing. We inherit all the dogmas, ideologies and attributes through the indoctrination done by our parents, the religion we are born into or adopt either by choice or coercion, the pedagogy imparted by schools and colleges, the spiritual leadership we choose to follow and the economic model chosen by the country which we inhabit.
The world may be ‘flat’today but is a prisoner, dare one say a toy of the print,social and electronic media. We are propagandized by the number of ‘Likes’ on Facebook and the number of selfies taken with celebrities. Gizmos decide the thought process coagulating in the gardens of our minds.
Humans should awaken to the reality that the political and economic elite decide the course of our ideologies and both present and future and not the other way round. In such a peppery situation how free are our thoughts and speech?
Humans constantly react to situations and seldom pause to respond. We live in a comfort zone where the mind is not challenged and there is no aperture to enter unknown frontiers nor are we skilled to learn new crafts and make a critical assessment of welcome or unwelcome situations.
Are we indeed free thinking people, or are we living under the illusion of freedom?
However humans need not despair. There is a ventilator towards free will, choice and attempting to be creative, imaginative and to appreciate unalloyed freedom.
Through the regular practice of Pranayama, breathing techniques like the Sudarshan Kriya and by the practice of meditation both the hemispheres of the mind develop over a period of time and humans can once again be ‘Born Free’ and luxuriate in the ‘Freedom of thoughts’
