Through self-awareness, meditation, and conscious practice, we can transcend inherited limitations
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom,my Father,
let my country awake
In this prodigious poem, Gurudev Rabindra Nath 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 in freshness in the mind’s otherwise lustreless and cranny corners.Tagore implores us to discard and tear apart the existing repugnant traditions and customs, where humans behave as mere prototypes and marionettes.
The human mind seeks perfection, the eternal truth and the road travelled is only by traversing the clear stream of reason and logic and not falling in the stumbling blocks of parched and desultory thinking. Gurudev deploys both physical and psychological metaphors to arrest the mental atrophy which set in, and to 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.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, fearing reproach by the learned one. But to his amazement, the Master took the monk by the scruff of his neck and pushed him into the river. The monk screamed as his lungs filled with water and 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 law of nature imprisons 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 over a period of time fashion thought processes.The world today is a prisoner of the print, social and electronic media. We are propagandised by the number of likes on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the number of selfies taken with celebrities. Gizmos decide the thought process coagulating in the gardens of our minds.
Humans should awake to the reality that the political and economic elite decide the course of our future and not the reverse. In such a peppery situation, how free are our thoughts and speech? We live in a comfort zone where the mind is not challenged and there is no aperture to enter unknown frontiers; nor are we upskilled to learn new crafts and make a critical assessment of welcome or unwelcome situations. However, humans need not be so despondent.
There is a ventilator towards free will, choice and attempting to be creative, imaginative and to enjoy unalloyed freedom.Through the regular practice of pranayama, breathing techniques like the Sudarshan Kriya and by the practice of meditation the hemispheres of the mind develop over a period of time and humans can once again be ‘born free’ and have ‘freedom of thought’.
(The writer is the CEO of Chhattisgarh East Railway Ltd. and Chhattisgarh East West Railway Ltd. He is a faculty of the Art of Living; views are personal)