SLAVERY

There is nothing more damaging than slavery. It is immaterial whether one has been enslaved physically or mentally, because finally, he is bound to become a ‘total slave’. Slavery is not a spiritual process, it is a mundane process. Our mental or intellectual existence is as material as that of our body or for that matter, of a stone or metal ore.

The slavery paralyzes consciousness. It paralyzes one’s ability to differentiate between truth and untruth. It stunts empathy and dries compassion. A slave loses his ability to identify his strengths and assess his worth. For him, the only way of survival is depending on others, whether real or imaginary. His dependence on others often assumes the form that a parasite has. His imagination is limited to, his survival and satisfaction of his sensory desires. He has no courage to go beyond a point from where an explorer commences his journey. There is hardly anything genuine about a slave, he is a fake.

The biggest tragedy in human history is that the thought of locating slaves in ones or twos has now become irrelevant when there are identifiable herds, castes, creeds or classes of human beings, so much so, even nations of them, who are essentially slaves. Interestingly, a slave may not realize that he is a slave, unless and until, the circumstances in his life force him to encounter a point of no return. Unfortunately, even at that juncture the man blames the perceivable essence of his life for his slavery, instead of his slavery itself.

The willingness to explore freedom comes from realization about the absence of freedom. We are usually so overwhelmed by the grandeur of our timidity that we fail to summon enough courage to notice the absence of freedom.

PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA

[The writer of this blog is also the author of “Mahatma A Scientist of the Intuitively Obvious” and “In Search of Our Wonderful Words”.]