Skip to main content

Freedom to Choose

In my discussions with my friends, one point that comes up quite often is the role of attachments in our lives. How will we be motivated to live life in the absence of attachments? In that case, we will not have any relationships. Without attachments, life will be dull.

I have a very simple question to ask. Do we play only for the sake of winning the game or can we play for the sake of fun of playing? I feel that best play is where there is nothing to win or lose and yet we give our best. The best artistic performances are where the artist is performing for the sake of expressing himself and not for the sake of earning money or getting a round of applause. The best scientific discoveries are the ones where the scientist is searching for the truth just for the sake of knowing and there is no commercial interest.

The soul has entered the human body. The soul is always free. Free of all types of attachments. It is fully aligned with the divine will. It wants to manifest the widest possibilities on the earth. However, the body is full of ignorance and inertia. While making the decisions, on the one hand, the soul wants to express freely, on the other hand, the body sticks to its own inertia. The soul wants freedom and the body wants pleasure. Sometimes, the body delays gratification and decides to work hard in anticipation of the pleasures at a future date and we confuse this hard work with free expression of the soul. So long as there is a desire to get immediate gratification or delayed gratification, it is definitely not the expression of the free soul.

However, each one of us definitely gets the moments every day when that soul expresses freely. If we are a little aware of those moments, we will start cherishing the freedom of the soul. With constant cherishing of freedom, there will come a stage when we start questioning the demand of the body for gratification. That questioning results in examination. A choiceless observation. Where we see things as they are. We see what constant gratification is doing to us. Where is it leading us? The very act of questioning, examination, and observation makes us aware of the trap. The moment we are aware of the trap, we are free of the same. The more we question, examine, and observe, the more of it gets dropped. However, there are layers and layers of ignorance hidden in the depths of the unconscious.

Each moment, we have a choice to listen to the chirping of the birds coming from the windows or to play loud music and dance to its tunes. Our conscious and unconscious minds have layers and layers of music that can play all our lives and yet they will keep playing the new soundtracks. However, there are always moments when this loud music stops at least for some moments. These moments bring an opportunity to connect to the chirping of the soul. We have the freedom to choose in each of the moments.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weak Minds

 I don't know what Rama would have felt like when he developed Vairagya looking around at the temporariness of life, and all the material objects. He had the blessed company of saints like Vashistha and Vishvamitra who could answer hundreds of his questions with example and their experiences. King Dashratha was spiritually mature and therefore rather than snubbing the Vairagya of Rama, he could request Vashistha and Vishvamitra to answer the questions asked by Rama. When Siddhartha had similar questions in his mind, he had nobody to answer and his father, in fact, tried to keep him away from the questions about life. That is the strategy of probably the entire society today. If you can not answer the question, prove the question itself to be wrong.  That is what happens to anybody having these questions about the purpose of life. The first response he gets from society is that all these questions are a waste of time. In the entire history of humanity, we have not been able to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Choice of Happiness

I often wonder as to what is the meaning of equality? Some are born into families that can spend thousands of crore rupees to make their kids happy, and many can not buy enough food for their kids and their kids sleep hungry stomach and still remain happy and grateful. Some travel by private jet while many have to travel in the locals like cattle. Some own many buildings worth thousands of crores while many sleep on the streets. If somebody knows how to manipulate the systems, the sky is the limit in this world. However, all these hold true, if we believe that happiness is a by-product of money. In fact, I see that the reality is quite the contrary. First of all, life is much more than money. There are 12 houses in Astrology representing 12 different dimensions of life. The first house represents health, the second wealth, the third initiatives and younger siblings, the fourth vehicles, properties, and everything that comes as a result of our initiatives, the fifth new direction, and k...
2 comments
Read more

Use of AI to understand the purpose of Life

I was listening to an interesting debate on the following YouTube link that ignited a series of thoughts in my mind: https://youtu.be/o2aAx3wk6dg?si=qLSwKnR0Cp4TyLPC It is interesting to imagine a world where we can get almost everything done with just a command right from driving a car to flying a plane, doing the homework to making presentations for the meeting, taking care of the plants to taking care of the parents, getting the food cooked to get the surgeries done.  After listening to the discussions, I was quite amazed at the idea of delegating the decision-making to the AI and investing our time in exploration. Decisions about whatever is in the domain of known may be taken by the AI in the future and human beings may be busy exploring new possibilities.  However, how will AI make the decisions? Suppose, during the Ramayana times, AI was fully developed. How Kaikeyi would have taken the decision? I believe for AI or anybody to make a decision, the desired goal has to be...
Post a Comment
Read more