Darshan with Swami Krishnananda during 1996

by Swami Krishnananda

24. Personal Freedom

(Darshan given on March 19th, 1996.)

A visitor: I want to define the difference between personal freedom on one side and the rule of the government on the other side.

Swamiji: You said 'personal freedom'. There is no such thing as that. There is no personal freedom possible. Everybody is conditioned by everybody else, and only a total freedom is possible. Every human being, every insect, everything – wind, air, everything – one is conditioning the other. An individual cannot stand isolatedly in the cosmos, just as a limb of your body cannot stand outside, so there is no such thing as personal freedom. It is total freedom only, and the more you move in the direction of that totality, the greater is the sense of your freedom. But it is not individual freedom; it is wider than individual freedom. You become one with That which conditions your freedom.

Visitor: But still there are differences between states who guarantee certain personal freedom.

Swamiji: There is no such thing. I cannot believe it because if everybody asserts personal freedom, there will be a clash of purposes. I want 100% freedom, and you also want 100% freedom, so where is the possibility? There is a mutual sacrifice involved in the asking for freedom. I can be free only to the extent I am able to give you equal freedom also. If I want everything for myself, then everybody will say that, and then there is no freedom for anybody. There is warfare. The asking for freedom also involves some sacrifice. Without sacrifice, there is no freedom. So entirely 100% freedom is not…

Visitor:  100% freedom is not possible. But there is a difference between guaranteed freedom by legal work and…

Swamiji: Legal freedom is dependent upon natural freedom. You cannot manufacture a legal freedom separately which is contradictory to the natural freedom available to you. You have got some freedom in the sense that you want to exist comfortably, and that freedom is conditioned by the fact that others also want to exist comfortably. So there is a mutual sacrifice and mutual freedom. You are free and also bound, both the same time. You are free because you have got a status of your own; therefore, you are free. But that status is conditioned by the status of other people also, so to that extent there is limitation. It is a cooperative freedom, you can say.

Visitor: But we have had, for instance, dictatorship of some political leaders or of churches, and so on, in a mental way, a mental dictatorship, and we have a free development of spiritual and mental work.

Swamiji: These things are not isolated from one another. They are mutually connected. Religious freedom, church freedom, spiritual freedom, saintly freedom, political freedom – they cannot be separated. They are all manifestations of one principle only, which conditions every kind of freedom. We do not have religious freedom. There is no such thing as that. It is a freedom of existence itself. You may call it religious or political or legal; they are all manifestations of one principle of freedom which, individually, is not 100% possible. But the more you are cooperative with other people and other things in the world, to that extent you are granted more freedom. It expands itself cooperatively. A person who is of a cooperative nature has greater freedom than one who asserts himself independently. Absolute freedom is not possible in the world. It is not possible.

Visitor: I am only saying that there are differences in development, inner and external development.

Swamiji: What I want to know is, what is the question that you are raising, basically?

Visitor: Ethical response on the continuous economic growth, whatever it is. I mean, we have to stop somewhere in between.

Swamiji: You mean to say that economic growth should go hand in hand with ethical growth?

Visitor: Yes, or the one should stop the other.

Swamiji: It is true that those should go together, but insistence on economic growth only may also breed greed, and then there will be no question of ethics at that time. A greedy man has no ethics. People become richer and richer financially, but they can do it without ethics behind it. It is necessary to combine both things. When it is accepted that economic growth is intended for the welfare of people, then the ethics comes in. Ethics is any attitude which is necessary for the welfare of everybody. That is ethics. And it can go with economics.

In our Indian tradition, there were four principles accepted: material welfare, ethical welfare, vital or ascetic welfare, and spiritual welfare. All four things are combined in four words: dharma, artha, kama and moksha. Economic welfare is absolutely necessary, but it cannot isolate itself from the law that governs the universe. That law is the ethical principle. We have emotional longings, material needs, and insistence on righteousness. All things must go together. We cannot be unrighteously happy. That is not possible. We cannot be unrighteously rich. So the righteous aspect is behind even the asking for wealth and any other thing that we need. In Sanskrit we call it dharma. Dharma is the law that determines the solidarity of everything.

There is a cohesive force in our personality which makes us feel that we are one integrated individual. There is a cohesive force in the family which makes all the isolated members feel that they are one whole. There is a cohesive force in a nation which makes it feel that it is one. Similarly, you have got an international setup like the United Nations, etc., which is a cohesive force working for the entire humanity. Finally, there is a cohesive force in the whole cosmos which keeps everything perfectly neat and clean. The whole universe is working perfectly, systematically, mathematically, without any kind of erroneous movement.

So there are layers and layers of cohesive force which prevent the disintegration of the parts. If the cohesive force in our personality were not there, we would have disintegrated into little, little bits of cellular objects. Dharma is a law that keeps everything in its particular place, in its particular context, and for a particular purpose, ultimately aiming at the total cohesiveness of the whole cosmos, of which we are integral parts.

Finally, there is only one freedom, one welfare, which is universal welfare, which includes my welfare, yours, everybody's. There is no necessity to search for individual welfare or prosperity. They will automatically follow when you are concentrated on universal righteousness. We have only duties and not rights, actually speaking. The rights will automatically follow when the duties are performed. The individual has a right to exist, but for that purpose the parts of the body should perform their duties properly – the brain, the heart, the bloodstream, etc.

The obligation that the finite has in respect of the larger whole, which is the Infinite, is what we call duty. The duty is the obligation that the lower owes to the higher, the finite owes to the infinite, the individual owes to the universal. If this duty is consciously performed, all that is necessary by way of our needs will be provided. There is no such thing as rights. You should not use that word. Everywhere people are asking for their rights, but they want no duties. That is not possible. You cannot have rights without duties. When your duty is performed, nature itself will work in such a harmonious manner that whatever you need will be given to you. Nature will not deny anything to anybody. Everything is in abundance. The whole universe is very rich, and abundance is there everywhere, but only we have to draw sustenance from it so that there is not too much insisting on individual wealth. I never believe in individual welfare. It doesn't exist at all. It is possible only to the extent you are cooperating with other people, and finally cooperating with the cosmos itself. If you are a friend of the cosmos, you have done your duty, and then you will find all the rights will follow automatically. This is exactly the meaning of that great sentence of Christ: Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things, economic, everything, will come.

We are thinking too much of effects without thinking of the causes. If you catch hold of the cause, the effect will follow automatically. But we cannot see the cause because we are blinded by sense perception. The senses tell you only what they can see as an operating medium, but why it is operating like that, nobody knows. We know the how of things, but we do not know the why of things. That is necessary. Even that must be known.

You do not merely belong to the universe, but you are integrally inseparable from the universe. Your existence is cosmic existence. Nobody exists as an individual. Individuals don't exist at all, but it appears as everyone is existing separately due to the operation of the sense organs which always externalise, spatialise and temporalise the Universal. We have to go inside us, and not outside us. The more we go outside through the sense organs, the more we move away from ourselves. The more you look at things, the more you want outside things; the more you are externalising your consciousness, you cease to be yourself to that extent. When the object takes possession of us, the subject vanishes completely. It sleeps. Whoever has greed for external things and longs for only that which is visible sensorily gradually loses one's personality; the subjectivity goes, and the objectivity reigns supreme. Machines rule; man comes afterwards. The vanishing of humanity and the rising of industrial mechanisms, etc., is the reign of objects to the destruction of the subject.