I have always loved an ancient story:
A man, a great man, a fighter for freedom was traveling into the mountains. He stayed in a caravanserai for the night. He was amazed that in the caravanserai there was a beautiful parrot in a golden cage, continually repeating, “Freedom! Freedom!” And the serai was in such a place that when the parrot repeats the word “Freedom!” it goes on echoing in the valley, in the mountains.
The man thought: I have seen many parrots, and I have thought they must be desiring to be free from those cages… but I have never seen such a parrot whose whole day, from the morning to the evening when he goes to sleep, is spent in asking for freedom. He had an idea. In the middle of the night he got up and opened the door of the cage. The owner was fast asleep and he said to the parrot, he whispered, “Now get out.”
But he was very surprised that the parrot was clinging to the bars of the cage. He told him again and again: “Have you forgotten about freedom? Just get out! The door is open and the owner is fast asleep; nobody will ever know. You just fly into the sky; the whole sky is yours.”
But the parrot was clinging so deeply, so hard, that the man said, “What is the matter? Are you mad?” He tried to take the parrot out with his own hands, but the parrot started hitting him, and at the same time started shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” The valleys in the night echoed and re-echoed… but the man was also stubborn, he was a freedom fighter. He pulled the parrot out, and threw him into the sky; and he was very satisfied, although his hand was hurt. The parrot had attacked him as forcefully as he could, but the man was immensely satisfied that he had made a soul free. He went to sleep.
In the morning, as the man was becoming awake, he heard the parrot shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!” He thought perhaps the parrot must be sitting on a tree, or on a rock. But when he came out, the parrot was sitting in the cage. The door was open.
I have loved the story, because it is very true. You may like to be free, but the cage has certain securities, safeties. In the cage the parrot has no need to worry about food, has no need to worry about enemies, has no need to worry about a thing in the world. It is cozy, it is golden. No other parrot has such a valuable cage.
Your power, your riches, your prestige – all are your cages. Your soul wants to be free, but freedom is dangerous. Freedom has no insurance. Freedom has no security, no safety.
Freedom means walking on the edge of a razor – every moment in danger, fighting your way. Every moment is a challenge from the unknown.
Sometimes it is too hot, and sometimes it is too cold – and nobody is there to take care of you. In the cage, the owner was responsible. He used to cover the cage, when it was cold, with a blanket; he used to put an electric fan close by when it was too hot.
Eric Fromm has written a book, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as The Fear of Freedom). THE FEAR OF FREEDOM. The title seems contradictory. Everyone thinks that they like freedom; everyone thinks that they are endeavoring for freedom– in this world and in ”that world” also. ”We want MOKSHA– liberation – we want to be freed from all limitations, from all slaveries. We want to be totally free,” they say. But Eric Fromm says that man is afraid of freedom. We want it, we go on saying that we want it, we go on convincing ourselves that we want it, but deep down we are afraid of freedom. We do not want it! Why? Why this duality?
Freedom creates fear, and meditation is the deepest freedom possible. You are not freed only from outward limitations, you are freed from inner slavery – the very mind, the base of slavery. You are freed from the whole past. The moment you have no mind, the past has disappeared. You have transcended history; now there is no society, no religion, no scripture, no tradition, because they all have their abode in the mind. Now there is no past, no future, because past and future are part of the mind, the memory and the imagination.
Then you are here and now in the present. Now there is not going to be any future. There will be now and now and now – eternal now. Then you are freed completely; you transcend all tradition, all history, body, mind, everything. One becomes free of the fearful. Such freedom? Then where will YOU be? In such freedom, can you exist? In such freedom, in such vastness, can you have your small ”I” – your ego? Can you say ”I am?”
You can say, ”I am in bondage,” because you can know your boundary. When there is no bondage there is no boundary. You become just a state, nothing more… absolute nothingness, emptiness. That creates fear, so one goes on talking about meditation, about how to do it, and one goes on without doing it.
All the questions arise out of this fear. Feel this fear. If you know it, it will disappear. If you do not know it, it will continue. Are you ready to die in the spiritual sense? Are you ready to be NOT?
Whenever anyone came to Buddha he would say, ”This is the basic truth – that you are not. And because you are not you cannot die, you cannot be born; and because you are not you cannot be in suffering, in bondage. Are you ready to accept this?” Buddha would ask, ”Are you ready to accept this? If you are not ready to accept this, then do not try meditation now. First try to find out whether you really are or you are not. Meditate on this first: is there any self? Is there any substance within or are you just a combination?”
If you manage to find out, you will find that your body is a combination. Something has come from your mother, something has come from your father, and all else has come from food. This is your body. In this body you are NOT, there is no self. Contemplate on the mind: something has come from here, something from there. Mind has nothing that is original. It is just accumulation.
Find out if there is any self in the mind. If you move deep, you will find that your identity is just like an onion. You peel off one layer and another layer comes up; you peel off another layer and still another layer comes up. You go on peeling layers off, and ultimately you come to a nothingness.
With all the layers thrown off, there is nothing inside. Body and mind are like onions. When you have peeled off both body and mind, then you come to encounter a nothingness, an abyss, a bottomless void. Buddha called it SHUNYA.
To encounter this shunya, to encounter this void, creates fear. That fear is there. That is why we never do meditation. We talk about it, but we never do anything about it. That fear is there. You know deep down that there is a void, but you cannot escape this fear. Whatsoever you do, the fear will remain unless you encounter it. That is the only way. Once you encounter your nothingness, once you know that within you are just like a space, shunya, then there will be no fear. Then there cannot be any fear, because this shunya, this void, cannot be destroyed. This void is not going to die. That which was going to die is no more; it was nothing but the layers of an onion.
That is why many times in deep meditation, when one comes nearer to this nothingness, one becomes afraid and starts trembling. One feels that one is going to die, one wants to escape from this nothingness back to the world. And many go back; then they never turn within again. As I see it, every one of you have tried in some life or other some meditative technique. You have been near to the nothingness, and then fear gripped you and you escaped. And deep in your past memories, that memory is there; that becomes the hindrance. Whenever you again think of trying meditation, that past memory deep down in your unconscious mind again disturbs you and says, ”Go on thinking; do not do it. You have done it once.”
Buddha used to try many devices. Sometimes someone would say to him, ”I am afraid of trying meditation.” And this is a must: the master must be told that you are afraid. You cannot deceive the master… and there is no need – it is deceiving yourself. So whenever someone would say, ”I am afraid of meditation,” Buddha would say, ”You are fulfilling the first requirement.” If you say yourself that you are afraid of meditation, then something becomes possible. Then something can be done because you have uncovered a deep thing. So what is the fear? Meditate on it. Go and dig out where it comes from, what the source is.
All fear is basically death-oriented. Whatsoever its form, mode, whatsoever its shape, name, all fear is death-oriented. If you move deep, you will find that you are afraid of death.
If someone came to Buddha and said, ”I am afraid of death, I have found this out,” Buddha would say, ”Then go to the burning ghat, go to the cemetery, and meditate on a funeral pyre. People are dying daily – they will be burned. Just remain there at the MARGHAT – cemetery – and meditate on the burning pyre. When their family members have gone, you remain there. Just look into the fire, at the burning body. When everything is becoming smoke, you just look at it deeply. Do not think, just meditate on it for three months, six months, nine months.
”When it becomes a certainty to you that death cannot be escaped, when it becomes absolutely certain that death is the way of life, that death is implied in life, that death is going to be, that there is no way out and you are already in it, only then come to me.”
After meditating on death, after seeing every day, night and day, dead bodies being burned, dissolved into ashes – just a smoke remains and then disappears – after meditating for months together, a certainty will arise: the certainty that death is inevitable. It is the only certainty really. The only thing certain in life is death. Everything else is uncertain: it may be or it may not be. But you cannot say that it may be or it may not be for death. It is; it is going to be. It has already occurred.
The moment you entered life, you entered death. Now nothing can be done about it. When death is certain there is no fear. Fear is always with things which can be changed. If death is to be, fear disappears. If you can change, if you can do something about death, then fear will remain. If nothing can be done, if you are already in it, then it is absolutely certain that fear will disappear. When fear of death had disappeared, Buddha would allow you to meditate. He would say, ”Now you can meditate.”
So you also go deep into your mind. And listening to these techniques will be helpful only when your inner barriers are broken, when inner fears disappear and you are certain that death is the reality. So if you die in meditation there is no fear – death is certain. Even if death occurs in meditation, there is no fear. Only then can you move – and then you can move at rocket speed because the barriers are not there.
It is not distance that takes time, but the barriers. You can move this very moment if there is no barrier. You are already there but for the barrier. It is a hurdle race, and you go on putting up more and more hurdles. You feel good when you cross a hurdle; you feel good that now you have crossed the hurdle. And the idiocy of it, the foolishness of it, is that the hurdle was placed there by you in the first place. It was never there. You go on putting up hurdles, then jumping over them, then feeling good; then you go on putting up more hurdles, then jumping. You move in a circle and never, never reach to the center.
Mind creates hurdles because mind is afraid. It will give you many explanations as to why you are not doing meditation. Do not believe it. Go deep, find out the basic cause. Why does a person go on talking about food and yet never eat? What is the problem? The man seems mad!
Freedom means tremendous responsibility; you are on your own and alone.
Rabindranath is right:
Freedom is all I want,
but to hope for it I feel ashamed –
because it is not a question of hope,
it is a question of taking a risk.
Osho, The Golden Future, Ch 26, Q 1 (excerpt)
Osho: Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 1: CHAPTER 4. THE DECEPTIONS OF THE MIND Q 1 (excerpts)
We recently celebrated the 79th Independence Day of India, I am reminded that the real battle for freedom is not always fought on the borders; it is often fought within. Nations, like individuals, can win independence yet still remain captive to old fears, habits, and securities. The parrot in the golden cage from this story calling for liberty, yet afraid to fly. True freedom demands the courage to step into the unguarded sky, where there is no guarantee of safety, but infinite space to grow. May we not only celebrate the freedom won by our forebears, but also find the courage to free ourselves from the cages we build within.
निकाल लाया हूँ पिंजरे से एक परिंदा
अब इस परिंदे के दिल से पिंजरा निकलना है।
nikaal laaya hun pinjhre se ek parinda
ab ees parinde ke dil se pinjhra nikalna hai.
I have taken a bird out of its cage —
now I must take the cage out of the bird’s heart.
I am reminded of this song, urging us to break free from invisible chains and reminding us that even the smallest sapling shatters the soil to rise, beautifully mirror the journey from constraint to courage. — that bravery often begins with a single, gentle flutter toward faith in oneself, even within shadows of doubt. This song perfectly encapsulates the alchemy of confronting fear to discover one’s own soaring strength.
The music given by Amit Trivedi is excellent and the lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya are mind blowing, and on top of that the singers Amit Trivedi, Neuman Pinto, Amitabh Bhattacharya have done an excellent job for the film “Udaan” (2010).
Aazaadiyan – Udaan (2010) – Awesome Song – Must Watch – HQ