FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

FREEDOM OF THOUGHT

Article Published in Free Press Journal: MUMBAI

Recently two prominent Bengali politicians ( hailing from the Trinamool Congress Party) were in news. Apart from their political achievements they chronicled GuruDev Rabindra Nath Tagore’s prescient poetry. First it was the Teflon speaking Saugata Roy during the intolerance debate 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 and the head is held high;Where knowledge is free;Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;Where words come from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the deary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action……..Into the heaven of freedom, my Father,let my country awake.’

In this prodigious poem , GuruDev Rabindra Nath Tagore implores God top 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 the chained human mind. This poem with amazing psychological contours attempts to breathe in freshness in 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 and tearing apart the existing repugnant traditions and customs where Indians /humans behave as mere prototypes and marionettes. 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. 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 igniting the passion for freedom during the rendition. But what does freedom denote actually? 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 were granted quite recently. But are we truly free from within and without? Have humans 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 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 were 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 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 dilemas.

It will be compelling to contrast a zoo with a sanctuary. A zoo is a place where animals are in bondage and captivity and humans get attracted for purposes of divertissement.  While  a sanctuary is a place where man is caged and animals move freely as if they were in their natural habitat- The Jungle and is viewed with suspicion by the predators. In both the situations either man is immured or animals are incarcerated. Similarly human minds and thoughts are perennially imprisoned by a variety of factors and we are so presumptuous and living in a delusion that freedom of thoughts and speech has dawned on us.

Law of nature imprison 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 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 and thereby the impressions of the child get 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 in 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 in.

The world today is a prisoner and a midget of the print ,social and electronic media. We are propagandized by the number of Likes on the Facebook 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 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?

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 upskilled to learn new crafts and make a critical assessment of welcome or unwelcome situations.

Are we free thinking people and have we in reality earned our freedom?

However humans need not be so despondent. There is a ventilator towards free will choice and attempting to be creative , imaginative and 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 develops over a period of time and humans can once again be ‘ Born Free’ and have’ Freedom of thoughts’.