Responsibility leads to Freedom
“Freedom is not a concept, freedom will happen to you only when your compulsiveness is gone.”
Question to Sadhguru: Could you tell us all how we could help young people to understand what you’re talking about?
Sadhguru: See when we say youth, youth means humanity in the making, not yet totally conceited not yet totally lost, still in the making so it’s a great possibility. The kind of situations we have created in societies today, particularly in the Western societies and rapidly it is beginning to happen to the Eastern societies, there is too much talk about freedom. Freedom is not a concept, freedom will happen to you only when your compulsiveness is gone. Today all the things that people do compulsively that is being labeled as freedom. I’ll eat what I want, I’ll drink what I want, I do what I want is not happening out of choice, it is happening out of certain compulsiveness, when you label compulsiveness as freedom your going to get lost for sure.
Right now I think that’s happened to Western societies big time and it is beginning to happen to Eastern societies very rapidly too. This is something that we need to change in our societies that we need to understand, what a human being needs, what a child needs, what a youth needs is responsibility, that he sees that he is the maker of his life, that he has to create and craft his life the way he wants it, but right now there is too much freedom talk, because of freedom talk people think doing something absurd doing something freaky is their right. I’m not saying you must be a prude, I’m not saying you have to be a conformist but if your rebellion doesn’t have a purpose your rebelling just for the sake of rebelling because your hormones are going crazy or your doing something else, this is not it. Because this essential idea that people think freedom is an idea, freedom is not an idea, freedom is a state that you arrive at when nothing is driving you, if you sit here you can choose what to do, nothing is driving you, not your body, not your mind, not social situations, nothing drives you, you can consciously act whichever way you want then you are free.
You can only do this that’s not freedom, I can do whatever I wish that’s freedom isn’t it. So one thing that needs to happen to the youth, one thing that needs to happen to children, one thing that needs to happen to adults who bear children is they need to understand responsibility leads to freedom, but freedom leads to ruin. Freedom as a concept leads to ruin but if one becomes free it is the most fantastic thing, the most beautiful thing about any human being is he’s become free. Freedom is the highest value. In the Eastern cultures the highest goal in life is not God, you know, in the Hindu way of life for example there is no God. There is no God, you can create your own God if you want or you can discard them if you want. Mukthi or freedom or liberation is the highest goal always, so freedom is the greatest thing that a human being can attain to but when you talk about it as a concept, when you talk about it as an idea it gets totally misunderstood and it will lead to always compulsive ways of behavior.
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