Liberation - Making Sure Nothing Else Matters!

yam hi na vyathayanty ete purusam purusarsabha
sama-duhkha-sukham dhiram so 'mrtatvaya kalpate

O best among men [Arjuna], the person who is not disturbed by happiness and distress and is steady in both is certainly eligible for liberation

Liberation - One word, powerful, deep and is thought provoking. If one is trying to liberate a person, a country, a thing or an animal, then it is very simple. You free the person, country, thing, animal, bird, whatever. But how about liberating one-self? How can you liberate your own self? How can I liberate me? What do I liberate me from? How do I do that? Is it possible? One can easily liberate anything else but one’s own self. In order to do that, one needs to recognize the fact that we are not liberated. But are we really not liberated? Let us put this question the other way round. Are we bound by anything? If one says no, then they are bluffing, nothing else. Are we not bound by our own self? Yes we are. We are bound by many material things, relations, thoughts, and above all we are bound by our greed and our fears and ambitions. If we go and wish and pray, what do we wish for? Almost all the time we wish for comforts, money, relations, success, promotions, material things, what not? We also go to the extent of ‘bribing’ Him. What a joke! How can you even think of asking for material things and sundry when He has made you for a purpose? And to top it, we go to the extent of bribing Him so that he gives us what we want! Wow! How narrow can we get in our mindset?

The day we bid adieu to this material world, we do not take any money, any materialistic things no matter how big or small and also no relation. All we take with us is us, our soul. Not anything more, and not anything less. Annamacharya, a Telugu composer and musician, in one of his songs slaps it in our face when he says ‘it’s the same sleep that even a King or a pauper sleeps. It’s the same place where all of us end up – no matter what our birth and life has been’. All you need is at the most that 7x3 piece of land. That is all you need, or to put it better, that is all your body needs.

But for our soul, it’s a different story all together. It can be liberated, in its true sense. A person with a liberated soul will be totally unattached. Nothing can shake him. Nothing can affect him.  Happiness, sorrow, ups and downs, wealth, poverty, relations, all of them has the same influence on him – none of them matter. None of them can shake him to either side. He is always elated. Constantly. For him, sorrows and distress does not depress him or even shake him; and at the same time he would not fly in air, to cloud # 9. His feet are firmly set on the ground, to reality as it exists. Mind you it is reality as it exists and not as is perceived.

To quote Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on this verse ‘… remains the same in pain and pleasure, who is wise makes himself fit for eternal life. Eternal life is different from survival of death which is given to every embodied being. It is the transcendence of life and death. To be subject to grief and sorrow, to be disturbed by the material happenings, to be deflected by them from the path of duty that has to be traversed, ‘nityam karma’, shows that we are still victims of ‘avidya’ or ignorance’.

It is the simplest thing not to be influenced by things around. But, it is the toughest thing to stay immune. Take it as you like. The day everything is equal and does not affect you is the day when you have opened for yourself the doors of eternity. And eternity need not be heaven after you are gone. It also can be sheer bliss. That is the ultimate truth and ultimate knowledge. Everything else is your perception.

This is my take on Verse 15, chapter 2 of the Gita :)