FREEDOM

by Suhotra Maharaja




To summarize, a person is an eternal being with limited freedom of
choice. His awareness of what choices lie before him is shaped by
time-bound material phenomena, which include experiences that are
physical, emotional and mental. The phenomena a person now experiences
are in reaction to his past actions. These reactions are plotted by
the demigods in accordance with three modes of work. Due to his past
work within these modes, a person presently has good, mediocre and bad
physical, emotional and mental experiences. All such experiences are
temporary.

In the midst of the matrix of my experience, what do I, a person,
ultimately seek? The answer is freedom. "What light is to
the eyes," said a wise man, "what air is to the lungs, what love is to
the heart, liberty is to the soul of man." Everybody wants liberation,
Srila Prabhupada explains, because that is the constitution position of
the soul. Constitutionally, we are eternal, complete in knowledge, and
full of happiness. But the experience of matter suppresses the
experience of our original nature. Now we find ourselves subject to time,
ignorance and misery. Innately, we all yearn for freedom from that
suppression.

Three false conceptions of freedom

A liberated person is free to make real choices. Real choice is
possible where there are options of real satisfaction. Unfortunately,
the matrix of our experience does not permit us free choice. Why? The
answer is quite simple: we are eternal, yet the options available to us
in this world aren't. We want the experience of unadulterated bliss,
yet the options available to us in this world are mixed up with
distress. Choice as we know it now, within the matrix of our present
experience, is insubstantial. We select shadows--of love, social life,
recreation and so on--that appear and disappear in time. Yet within
the confines of our experience, it seems very difficult for us to
understand that we have no *real* freedom of choice. The matrix even
supplies us with three notions of freedom--in goodness, in passion and
in ignorance. Unfortunately, they are not real.


"Freedom" in the mode of goodness

Though it too is ultimately false, the *sattvic* (good) conception
of freedom is superior to the others. Here, a person aspires for
freedom by knowledge and morality--virtues that greatly boost the power
of detachment. But as Srila Prabhupada warns, knowledge and morality
do not grant us authority over our senses, namely the eyes, the tongue,
the nose, the ear and touch. Even in goodness, consciousness remains
*subject* on all sides to physical, emotional and mental phenomena
arising uncontrollably out of good, bad and mixed fortune. A learned,
moral person experiences those phenomena in an analytical, self-
composed manner. Being detached from his experience, he may think
himself liberated. But he is not really liberated if in the name of
goodness he remains habituated to a life of imprisonment within mundane
sensation. In *Raja Vidya*, Chapter Seven, Srila Prabhupada explains:

Goodness is also a kind of contamination. In goodness one
becomes aware of his position and transcendental subjects,
etc., but his defect is in thinking, "Now I have understood
everything. Now I am all right." He wants to stay here. In
other words, the man in the mode of goodness becomes a first
class prisoner and, becoming happy in the prison house,
wants to stay there.

Our two natures

Our first nature, the substance of our person, is eternal spirit.
Our second nature, as Srila Prabhupada often pointed out, is habit.
For example, we have the habit to rejoice or lament our change of
fortune. In the language of *Bhagavad-gita*, this habit is *dvandva-
moha*, the bewilderment of duality, which captivates all creatures born
into the material world. In a lecture, Srila Prabhupada gave the
illustration of a man crying over the death of a son. Who in the world
will not cry if his son dies? Even a man of learning and morality will
cry at such a loss. "It is habitual," Srila Prabhupada said. But a
man in the mode of goodness tries to be philosophical about it.

In the ancient world, philosophy meant primarily the intellectual
method of distinguishing the spirit self from the habits of body and
mind. Philosophers of the classical Mediterranean culture, which sired
European civilization, knew that our first nature can be made well or
unwell. The first nature is made well by the cultivation of virtue.
Conversely, as one loses his virtue, his first nature sickens.

In the Latin language, like Sanskrit, the root *vir* means
"strong;" hence virtue is the quality of a strong, healthy spirit. In
European culture there are four classical virtues, foremost of which is
*sophia*, true knowledge of the self beyond time. The others are
fortitude, justice and temperance. In Vedic culture too there are four
similar virtues: truthfulness, austerity, mercy and cleanliness. These
are fostered when we refrain from gambling (including mental
speculation), intoxication, meat-eating and illicit sex.

Attachment to truth is essential to detachment from matter. Above
all, truth means the timeless truth beyond my temporal self-image. The
image of myself as a father of a son is "true" in a biological,
psychological and social sense--*but in fact it is not true in the
highest sense* because my role as a father is only temporary. It takes
real virtue to admit this.

As he laments the death of a son, the grief of a virtuous father
is tempered by a sober insight into the deeper meaning of his change of
fortune. He knows that what is given and taken away by the demigods is
not his own, for the eternal soul can possess nothing that is
temporary. Hence, misfortune for a good man is not really bad. It
often serves a lesson healthier than good fortune can, since in so-
called good times we tend to forget that nothing in this world can
last. As Philosophia, goddess of Greek and Roman thought, declares in
*The Consolation of Philosophy* by Boethius: "But if you could see the
plan of providence, you would not think there was evil anywhere."

The world is so planned that misfortune follows good fortune.
The childless King Citraketu felt himself greatly blessed by providence
when at last his wife bore him a son. Shortly, in a palace intrigue,
the baby was poisoned. The king was emotionally crushed. But the sage
Narada showed Citraketu that this loss was the very same gain he'd
celebrated days before. Thus the son was "good" and "evil", "friend" and
"enemy", the object of both the king's happiness and distress. When he
understood this, Citraketu really gained something--detachment.

For one detached from material gain and loss, "being" is far more
important than "becoming" (a father, for instance). No matter what
good or ill fortune comes with time, the virtuous person chooses
timeless being--his spiritual substance--over any material situation.
On the other hand, a man of weak virtue is attached to the ebb and flow
of his destiny. He sees the appearance and disappearance of pleasant
and unpleasant experiences within time as good or evil. Because he is
blind to his own *karma* under the wheel of fate, he supposes fate to
be blind chance. Or he supposes there is no fate at all, that success
is tenacity of purpose, and failure the reward for laziness. In any
case, his habit is to identify his self with the matrix into which his
person is poured, and to identify his self-interest with the
experiences he finds in that matrix. Thus he, who is pure spirit,
becomes dependent upon the shifting arrangements of matter (*prakrti*).
Such is his bad habit.

When a man becomes increasingly dependent upon and controlled by a
bad habit, he is said to be addicted. That addiction is sin. Sin is
persistent ignorance of our first nature. Sin develops from meat-
eating, illicit sex, gambling (or mental speculation) and intoxication,
four kinds of behavior that corrode virtue.

"Freedom" in the mode of passion

In the world of time, the mind hunts for sensual delights that are
in turn hunted by old age, disease, death and rebirth. Yet it is our
habit to cherish the restless mind and senses as the agents of our
hope. From this habit a passionate philosophy of freedom develops, one
that some thinkers call "instrumentalism."

An instrumentalist is a person for whom the "instrument panel" of
the mind and senses is the only valid source of knowledge. He believes
the human being can find with the help of these instruments the answer
to the complex problems of material existence. Man is distinguished
from other creatures not by his virtues but by the complexity of his
problems. Human questions of right and wrong, true and false, can be
solved only on the basis of useful facts, for usefulness is the measure
of truth. Theories of the soul and its virtues are useless in practical
affairs. Therefore they are untrue. Theories are to be judged not by
their "goodness" but by their consequences: what results they give us.

The passionate instrumentalist uses his mind and senses like
tools, to locate and dig up treasures buried deep within material
nature--riches, rare pleasures, sources of energy, cosmic secrets--that
he hopes will serve the needs of the human race. His outlook is
*prospective*, since his faith is invested in the future. Thus
"becoming" is far more important than "being."

But what will he become? He will certainly not become free. His
future holds countless births and deaths, for the philosophy of
instrumentalism is simply the philosophy of embodied existence. For
example, aerospace technology has made it possible for mankind to fly
high in the sky. If in the human body I convince myself that the most
important problems of life are those that flight can solve, I deserve
no better than to become a bird in my next life.

"Freedom" in the mode of ignorance

The person in the mode of goodness seeks freedom in being rather
than becoming. The person in the mode of passion seeks freedom in
becoming rather than being. The person in the mode of ignorance seeks
freedom in non-being, or nihilism. He is *retrospective* in his
outlook, in that in his heart he nurses unending dismay, anger and
frustration about his past experience. Thus he sees hope neither in the
present nor future. He chooses to cancel out further involvement in this
world by negating his personal self. There are demanding, highly
disciplined philosophical systems dedicated to losing one's self; but in
today's Western world, many people try it the easy way, through alcohol,
drugs and suicide. Now, there are other angry, frustrated individuals who
are not content to passively extinguish themselves. They want to drag the
world down with them. Through aggressive, violent behavior and the
oppressive domination of others, they seek freedom from the trouble of
having to think rationally about the purpose of life. Striking out at the
world in blind hatred and trampling it underfoot is just a motif of self-
annihilation, as is clear from the examples of history's famous tyrants like
Caligula and Adolf Hitler. Thus, whether he takes the passive or aggressive
path, the nihilist's goal is to eradicate all differences in his life, which
means to eradicate life itself.

A creed of voidism is, *ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit*--"Every being
in so far as it is being is made out of nothing." If my being is nothing,
then neither my self who chooses nor the world of choices has real
importance. For a man in goodness, it *is* important to always choose
internal well-being over entanglement in external variety. For a man in
passion, it *is* important to entangle oneself in external variety; yes,
more important even than internal well-being. But for a man in ignorance,
all this is not worth the trouble.

Good people struggle to be free from the loss of the self to
material attraction. Passionate people have no problem with losing
themselves in that way. But they struggle to get free from the
problems that result from their attraction to matter. The ignorant
person claims freedom by disclaiming the importance of the struggles of
goodness and passion. He thinks eternal life and worldly happiness are
impossible, and the effort to attain them is a waste, an absurdity, a
nothingness. In *Caligula*, the French philosopher Albert Camus
wrote,

Really this world of ours, this scheme of things as they
call it, is quite intolerable. That's why I want the moon,
or happiness, or eternal life--something, in fact, that may
sound crazy, but which isn't this world...This world has no
importance; once a man realizes that, he wins his freedom...
And yet I know...all I need is for the impossible to be.
The impossible!

On one side, Camus advocated the *tamasic* freedom gained by
rejecting life in this world. But that freedom is negative.
It is like getting rid of a persistent headache by chopping off the
head. On the other side, he admitted this is not what we *positively*
want and need. We want and need positive freedom *to do the
impossible.* And what is this impossible "which isn't this world",
which isn't the matrix of our present experience? As explained before,
it is the freedom to choose among options of real satisfaction, options
formed out of the nature of eternal existence, complete knowledge and
pure bliss. But to one in ignorance, because it is impossible, it is crazy.

Real Freedom

*Srimad-Bhagavatam* 3.25.15 explains how a person can be bound by
and liberated from the three modes of nature:

*cetah khalv asya bandhaya
muktaye catmano matam
gunesu saktam bandhaya
ratam va pumsi muktaye*

The stage in which the consciousness of the living entity is
attracted by the three modes of material nature is called
conditional life. But when that same consciousness is
attached to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one is
situated in the consciousness of liberation.

Choice, the essential function of an individual's consciousness,
is defined here. We have two options: to choose to associate with the
three modes of nature, or to choose to associate with the Supreme
Person.

If we choose the modes of nature, we are entrapped by them (the
word *guna* means "rope"; each of the modes is a strand of a rope that
binds the soul within the matrix of temporal experience). Once so
trapped, the soul's dynamic essence, his power of choice, alternates
rapidly back and forth between material dualities: mind and matter,
intelligence and foolishness, good and evil, light and darkness, male
and female, young and old, sickness and health, heat and cold, pleasure
and pain, happiness and distress, wealth and poverty, beauty and
ugliness, excitement and boredom, sobriety and whimsy, sanity and
insanity, honor and dishonor, fame and infamy, birth and death, up and
down.

As long as the soul continues to chooses between duality, the
*ksetra*--his field of material activities--is perpetuated life after
life. Choosing to associate with the Supreme Person unties the knot of
bondage to material duality. As we shall see, liberation in
association with the Supreme Person affords the soul unlimited
opportunities of substantial choice.

(From Suhotra Maharaja's book "Transcendental Personalism")