Freedom from fear
Young speak
By Hitesh

THE true nature of freedom is elusive and is limited by the extent of our thoughts. Freedom is something, which makes a difference in a life lived and a life passed. Freedom is the ability to live life as a choice rather than as a compulsion. Exercising a choice does not mean following our whims. Tradition as well as rebellion binds us in narrow perspectives. While bondage of tradition is more obvious, bondage of rebellion is subtle and may give a false sense of freedom. A farce rebellion is externally oriented and involves a lot of attention-seeking from an audience group. It deprives our lives and its acts do not bring joy. True rebellion is more internally oriented and transforms the environment through example. It exorcises our mind of the barriers of tradition and prejudice created by society.

The shaping up of a mind requires a lot of introspection and honesty. It is easy for us to fool ourselves to believe in being free and all the while remaining chained by circumstances.

Without a sense of freedom we do not see our lives and of others as a choice. The underlying belief becomes that every action is a decree and going against it shall require use of force. There is no such thing left as free will, as the emphasis shifts on having our way through aggressive or passive-aggressive behaviour.

While positive aggression is more in line with honesty, it is passive aggressiveness, which dangerously robs us of our freedom. To a passive aggressive person manipulation is a way of life. Such a person does not pay attention to the thoughts of others, let alone listen to them.

To extremely aggressive behaviour is also not freedom because it is not an act of choice. What really happens is that a person discards one set of traditional rules to adopt another set of rules defined by the peers or some other group to which he seeks allegiance. This very act of submitting a mind to a set of external rules makes us a slave.

Freedom is easily lost to our fears, inhibitions and pygmied thoughts. Fear and freedom are antithetical; one survives at the cost of other. Conquering of our fears is what gives us real freedom. Fear is something, which stops action, lest the results it may bring cause us to lose something we possess. It can be the fear of losing our job, losing a person or losing our identity which forces us to act in ways which take away the joy from living. The more the need to possess, the more is the fear of losing and more is the enslavement of our mind.

Possessiveness is of many ways. We can be possessive of material things like money, prestige or of our spouse, lover or friend. We often confuse possessiveness for love but a deeper understanding reveals that the two stand opposite to one another. Love tends to nurture by giving unlimited freedom to the other person and by removing fears of the loved.

On the other hand, possessiveness seeks to bind; it seeks to confirm a person to his wishes by use of explicit or implicit threat in the form of emotional blackmail, seduction and use of sympathy. Possessiveness can also be of belief, thoughts and identities.

Though every kind of possessiveness deprives us of freedom, it is the possessiveness of our identities which really locks our mind.

Our society wields the most powerful influence on an individual’s freedom. We act as per our social conditioning in all matters of life. Earlier the social influence was caste-based but now it is more class-based. The social class of a person defines most of his choices, including whom he is going to love, what is going to be his attitude towards relationships and what constitutes success. We are always measuring ourselves through the scale of society so that our life becomes a series of struggles aimed at gaining acceptance by the next higher class. In such a situation where most of our actions are guided by our societal expectation, how can we proclaim ourselves free? Freedom is destruction of all prejudices, including our positive assertions, but we who constantly seek to enlighten ourselves through methodical accumulation of knowledge, which is nothing but fortification of our conclusions, create more walls to operate within.

It takes lot of courage to do away with acceptance of society and seek true freedom and it can come only if we realise that we live only once. Millions of souls squander the gift of life, while reaching a mediocore level of consciousness through experience limited but threat of stigma. We confirm and then expect a certificate of happiness from society so that we can display it to others, making them envious of us; little do we realise that our mortification is of the same level as theirs. Our values and virtues are a result of our intelligent effort, which captures the rules of earning respect and thus systematically approaches greatness. In the process, it stifles our heart from where true joy can evolve. We become the politically correct, varying only in the degree. Our happiness too becomes a function of conformance to acceptable imagery and situations of happiness. We respond to others with compassion, which too is based on the socio-political constitution that decides whether such a response is called for or not. The same set of rules drives our passions too.

All this may seem cynical but the search of truth and freedom calls for negation of all conclusions because a conclusion is an end and thus by nature limiting. It is only when we seek to see ourselves increasingly naked, do we approach freedom. the creation of defences, covers and shields us from attack but renders us insensitive to the experience of life. To realise the subtle force of tradition, though one may not have the courage to break away from it at that instant, is in itself a big step.

Consciously discovering fear and transcending it, takes us closer to freedom and can create miracles. It was through the elimination of fear that Mahatma Gandhi was able to tackle the British head on and almost single-handedly brought a nation to freedom.