You seek freedom relentlessly because you are here for a mission, and if the mission has not been recognized, if even the need for the mission has not been recognized, then you will feel the desire for freedom without knowing what it means, what it is for or how it can be satisfied. This is freedom for something very fundamental.
The desire for freedom from things will certainly continue, for the world is a hazardous place and anything can happen to you. It is unpredictable. And so, there will continue to be the desire for freedom from things—from loss and deprivation, from loneliness and isolation, from poverty, from illness and from death itself.
But the real impulse for freedom is the freedom for something. For this is something else, speaking to a deeper part of you, representing a deeper part of you, not simply a mechanism for establishing yourself in the world and securing your position. This is something else. If you have not felt it yet, it is because you have not gone deep enough within yourself. You are still functioning at the surface of your mind, at the level of thoughts and desires, fears and beliefs.
Of course, many people are trapped at the surface with all of its terrors and great attractions. But that is only the surface of your mind and only the surface of your life. For your life is about something more profound, more substantial and more permanent.
People are busy constantly. They are preoccupied constantly. They live in a noisy world around people who are preoccupied constantly. So many people have not had the opportunity or taken the risk of listening more deeply within themselves.
Here it takes great disappointment or the loss of things that are desired to sometimes break the fixation of life on the surface, to take you down deeper within yourself where there is a deeper current of your life—a current that is not guided and determined by the world, a current that is not conditioned or dictated by your immediate circumstances, a deeper direction, like the deeper currents in the ocean that are not affected by the winds of the world, the deeper currents that are moving water all over the planet. They are not affected by the daily weather.
As is the case with you, there is a deeper current in your life. You cannot understand it intellectually, but you can feel it and begin to recognize there is something within you that is more profound and more mysterious than the catalog of your thoughts and beliefs, your desires and your fears.
Once you begin to discover this, you have begun the first stages of a long and profound and fundamental journey in life. Until you feel this deepening, you are just sort of fooling around at the surface. You are just standing around the temple. You have not entered in. You are listening to the world and not to a deeper voice within yourself.
Until you make connection to this deeper current of your life that represents a deeper Knowledge—a deeper Mind within you, a Mind that has been created by God to guide you, protect you and enable you to fulfill your mission in the world—until you can begin to experience this and recognize it and follow it, then you will be a slave to the forces in the world and to your own fears or ambitions.
There is no freedom here. Even if you live in a country that gives you certain political freedoms, even if you live in the freest country, you are not free. You are captive. Your mind is dominated by the preoccupations of the world, by the mental environment in which you live and by all the forces within that mental environment that determine what you will think, what you will choose, how you will behave, what you will do to seek approval, what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is not good, what is appropriate and what is not appropriate.
All of this will be conditioned into you and though you may think you are free and you may validate or accentuate your individuality, your thoughts are not free. Your emotions are not free. Your ideas are not free. Your motivations are often not your own.
You are a slave to other forces. You are a slave to your need for approval from others, your desire for relationships and romance, your quest for meaningful work, your need for validation from others and your fear of others. You will be herded along like you are part of a herd of cattle, not knowing what you are doing, why you are there or what it means, just going along, living each day, just going along, staying preoccupied, trying to stay happily stimulated, but always afraid of the shadows—afraid even of yourself; afraid of your deeper feelings; afraid of your deeper awareness; afraid of the mystery of your life; afraid of the world and the innumerable things that could deprive you, harm you or destroy you; afraid of the future and afraid of the past—running now, trying to seek something that you do not even understand, running from yourself, unable to be quiet in the moment, unable to settle down and unable to face things.
Is this not a condition of everyone around you? And when you meet someone who is not governed by these forces, are they not exceptional? Do they not stand out from everyone else, in contrast to everyone else?
How few people are self-aware at this deeper level, who are standing apart from the great rush of human ambition, from the great rush of people seeking wealth and personal advantage. And, of course, those are the lucky ones. Everyone else is struggling to survive, struggling to meet their basic requirements, holding on, hanging on.
Goaded by the fear of poverty and deprivation, people are driven to seek endless amounts of wealth and reassurance for themselves. This is pervasive in the world. This is the condition of the human family. This is the state of the union for the human family.
All of the addictions, all of the depression, all of the poor mental and physical health you see around you is a product of this desperation and this disassociation that people have with themselves and with the greater purpose that has brought them into the world.
There must be a fundamental shift in your understanding of freedom. Said most simply, your freedom here is to find your purpose and to fulfill it. All of the other freedoms that you seek—the freedom for stability, the freedom for certainty, the freedom to find out the truth about your life, the freedom to think, the freedom to feel, the freedom to know, the freedom to express yourself, the freedom to go where you need to go, the freedom to become educated —even the freedom to survive is for this greater purpose.
If you take the desire for freedom to its full expression, if you take it down to its absolute foundation, it is about this. To finally come to this realization after you have tasted the pleasures and the sorrows of this world, after you have tried to fulfill yourself with people, places, activities, holidays, hobbies, sports and every other form of distraction that may be available to you, when you finally come to yourself, whether it be from a great disappointment or a sudden realization or a lucid moment in your hectic life, when you finally come to this, you will realize there is a greater need within you and that it cannot be fulfilled by all the desperate attempts at happiness that everyone around you is attempting and committing themselves to.
