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PDF format of this bookChapter 2: The Search for Freedom
In tracing the evolution of the mind in the previous session, we came to a point where life seems to be a series of occasions when the mind feels an irreconcilability with its object. All our thoughts have corresponding objects before them. We think things, persons and various conditions. The anxieties and sufferings of life can all be boiled down to attempts on the part of the mind to reconcile itself with its object.
The mind does not always succeed with this attempt because it can never become the object, and the objects cannot become the mind; yet, there is an unsuccessful attempt at bridging this gulf, which is the story of all human history. Every attempt of one individual to overcome another, in any manner or any capacity whatsoever, is only an outer expression of the internal tendency of the mind to overcome its object.
Why should the mind try to overcome the object or reconcile with the object? Why not be independent of the object and unconcerned with it? Originally, in its evolution, the primitive state of mind thought that the objects are absolutely independent of itself, that the world has no relation to it at all. Animals react only to stimulus. There is no judgement of values, no understanding the world, no raising the question as to why there should be a stimulus from outside. The animal mind does not question because there is no purpose in questioning. Its purpose is to react to stimulus whenever it arises from the outside world. It is the human mind that feels the difficulty in a greater intensity than the animal mind.
As I tried to analyse last time, our sufferings seem to be many times more serious and complex than the sufferings of animals. The reason is that in our level of evolution, Truth reveals itself in a greater degree than in the animal mind. When Truth reveals itself in a more extensive manner, it beckons the variety to itself in a more intensified manner. Our vision of Truth is vaster than in the mind of animals. It does not mean that we have a real consciousness of truth. The vision presses itself forward in our minds merely by the fact of the evolutionary process, not because of a self-analysis that we have been practising. This is not a deliberate invention or a discovery of the evolution of the Truth consciousness in our mind. It has pressed itself forward merely on account of a level that the mind has reached above the animal level. Somehow or the other we happen to be on a higher degree, just as we appear to be in a waking condition now which is more real than the dream world. The apparently higher level of the human mind drags itself forward in the evolutionary process, and together with it also drags the degree of Truth corresponding to its level.
Now, what is this Truth to which we seem to be awakened in the human consciousness? The Truth is that the vision or the perception or the sensory reactions of the lower levels were not wholly true. It is not true that the world is absolutely unrelated to us. It is also not true that we can get on merely by reacting to stimuli. We cannot live like animals for a long time because the stimulus is also a reminder from the outer expression of Truth. “I am here. Look at me,” says Truth to the animal mind. But when there is this call from the outer expression of Truth, there is only a kicking back, as it were, which is the response which, in the animal state, the mind reveals in respect of this stimulus. There is no understanding of why this stimulus is there or ought to be there. Even on the animal level the pressure of Reality is felt, and it is this pressure of Truth that manifests itself as the urge for evolution. If there were no Truth, there would be no evolution at all.
“You are not fully ripe; you have to mature more and more,” is perhaps the inaudible voice from the cosmos. This voice from the Silence, as we may call it, urges us forward, pushes us, as it were, and never leaves us at any single given level. This is why we are never happy. Never can a single created being be happy, because evolution is not complete. We are moving, and we have to move further. Now, at the human level, a peculiar psychological difficulty arises which we call discrimination or discriminative understanding, wherein we rise above the primitive notion that the world is absolutely unrelated to us, and seem to feel, unconsciously though, that there is something hidden in the secrecy of things which is impossible to completely avoid in life. It is not possible to brush aside the realities of life totally in our self-centred existences. Selfish people have tried their best to live lives localised to their own bodies, but all these have been failures throughout history. No one who has been wholly selfish was successful in life because selfishness goes counter to the demands of the human mind, which the mind makes itself, which are necessary due to the very stage in which it finds itself by evolution.
The mind realises that it is somehow or the other dependent on the objects of the world for many purposes. If the world is absolutely unrelated to us, we should not be dependent on it, and there should be no commerce between us and the world. But the truth seems to be different; we have dependences of various kinds. From morning to evening we realise the extent of our dependence on the world. We want air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, people to talk to, and many other social relationships, without which life seems to wither away into an airy nothing.
The animal consciousness, or rather the notion that the world is not related to oneself organically, is not true. This fact comes into high relief in the human level of realisation. “I have to deal with the world,” is the conclusion of the human mind in its higher evolution. And the manner of dealing with the world is the business of existence. The whole education of the human being is the process of the training of the human mind to understand the way in which it has to deal with the world. Thus, education is a kind of training in adjustment of values, and ultimately training in the adjustment of oneself with the world in its completeness.
Even now the evolution of Truth is not complete. While it is true that in the realisation of there being some sort of a value in the objects of the world we have risen to a higher level, yet there is a pinch felt from within that we are not independent after all. We are living a slavish life, as it were, depending on the things of the world, and nobody wishes to be a slave. We may pour milk and honey on a slave; yet, he will not be happy: “Oh, I am serving this person; I am dependent.” The very consciousness of dependence gnaws into the vitals so that any amount of satisfaction otherwise given is not going to be complete.
Even the mere consciousness that the world has a relation to us in the sense that we are dependent upon it to a large extent is not going to satisfy us. We are not happy with this understanding. What is the use of knowing that we are slaves? “Can I become independent?” is the question.
So man tries to be independent. He struggles against the odds of life, and fights with nature. There are various types of struggles to overcome the dependence in which man seems to be involved. There is struggle for existence, struggle for life, which is another name for struggle for independence of the spirit. “Can I achieve independence in this life?” is the question of the human mind—a question it puts to itself, because the answer cannot come from anyone else. It is a question that is put by each one to one's own self. Dependence is a kind of death: sarvam paravasam dukham, says the scripture. Sarvam atmavasam sukham: The more we are self-dependent, the more are we happy. The more we are dependent on others, the more also is our unhappiness. Whatever be the salary that we get, it makes no difference if we are dependent. We are subservient, and this makes the mind unhappy.
So it is not merely the possession of material wealth that can make us happy, but a sort of conscious independence which tries to assert itself even in a slavish mentality. Even a slave asserts himself one day or the other. There is an assertion of independence in each atom and in every cranny of creation. The process of evolution may be described as a process of a larger and larger seeking of freedom; the more we evolve in life, the more also are we free in the expression of our consciousness. From matter to life, from life to mind, from mind to intellect is evolution, and also from freedom to freedom: from lower freedom to higher freedom, from more restricted to a more unrestricted freedom. The human mind is deliberately conscious of its situations. It can, to some extent, change its destiny with a free will—a freedom of choice. In this sense, we call it freer than the animal instinctive mind; but as we have seen just now, we are not really free. If we were, we would be happy also, because freedom is happiness.
Knowledge is power, but our knowledge has not led us to power. We have been crying for freedom for centuries and are wretched even today, in spite of our education. No one is free and happy. There is an agony in the heart silently felt as a permanently raised question, to which no answer is found. The whole life seems to be a big question mark. “What” and “why” are the questions, whatever be the object of the situation before us. What is the answer?
Nobody can give the answer. The life of the human being, the life of the cosmos, has remained an enigma, and may remain an enigma forever as long as the mind is the answerer of the question. So is this predicament of the human mind, where it is in a state of conflict between itself and the world outside: on one side, we cannot leave the world, because we will die without it; on the other side, we do not want to be dependent upon it. This is the great human psychological conflict. Conflict is of the mind with its objects, and a theoretical knowledge that its object is there and its character is such and such is not going to help the mind much, because what the mind needs is not an understanding or a knowledge of the object, or scientific knowledge, for that matter. It is not this knowledge that we are seeking. We are seeking freedom. We do not want science, we want freedom, but what the world gives us is a kind of tempting information which today we call education. We want scientific advance in our life, bereft of the freedom which we are seeking. It is like taking food without appeasing hunger. I am given food, but I am not satisfied, for some reason. It is not food that I want, I want appeasement of hunger; so the problem is not solved.
We are given tinsel which appears to be satisfying. The knowledge which we are provided today is only a kind of promise that is being made—a promise which is never fulfilled. Therefore, the mind struggles to overcome this opposition, and in this the mind has been a failure. Mostly in all kinds of struggles of the mind with nature, it has been a failure; nature has won victory. The world has managed to keep the human mind under subjection. We are slaves of the world even today. No one can be independent. We are caught up in it so inextricably that slavishness is not the word; we are worse than that. But the mind is not going to cease its effort, and there is a push behind the mind to urge it forward. “Go ahead!” says the urge of Truth.
At this present stage of our analysis, we should not worry ourselves as to what Truth is. It is enough if we know that there is an urge. It is due to this urge that we go to sleep and that we wake up. Due to fatigue after this effort of the day we fall asleep, but what is the good of going to sleep and feeling a want to go to sleep forever? For, we sleep but again wake up. The effort is not complete, and the Truth wakes us up. While it is the Truth that makes us fall asleep, it is also the Truth that wakes us up again for continuing the action that was left pending earlier. Therefore, human evolution is a continuous march of the human mind in search of freedom from dependence on the world, from the clutches of nature, from the agonising conflict of irreconcilability that it feels between itself and the world of creation.
The mind then tries to overcome this conflict by a trick. Many times we can imagine that we are free, and then we can be happy. Why strive for freedom when we can just think that we are free? This is a kind of self-deception into which the mind enters. While we cannot succeed in the battle of life, we can run away from it and proclaim victory because what is really necessary is a proclamation, and not real victory. So the mind tries to proclaim victory over the world, which it does not have. The world has defeated it. “Get away from me,” says the world. “You puny mind, you cannot understand me.”
But the mind's vanity is hurt: “I shall be called a fool for having returned from the battlefield defeated.” So it proclaims victory by certain devices that it has manufactured. In psychology and psychoanalysis these are called defence mechanisms by which the mind deceives itself into a sense of satisfaction using a so-called freedom which is really not there.
The difficulty of the human mind is a set of relations it establishes with the world outside, which we call likes and dislikes. Our relations with the world can be summed up with the likes and dislikes of the mind. But on a further investigation we will realise that dislike is actually a liking to avoid certain things, so ultimately there are only likes, no dislikes. There are various kinds of likes, or wants, or feelings of necessity. Connect the mind with the world and with the satisfaction of desires, and the mind tries to overcome the world or gain independence over it: “How am I dependent on the world? It is by my desires for the things of the world. This is what causes my dependence. If I satisfy my desires, I will become independent. Why not try this method?” And so the mind tries to satisfy desires in order to gain independence over the world.
Remember that the mind seeks independence and nothing else. So even in the mind seeking fulfilment of the desires, it is seeking only independence, because to desire is to be dependent. In the satisfaction of the fulfilment of a desire there is an apparent abolition of the conflict between the mind and the object: “The conflict seems to be resolved if I have the object of desire. How am I dependent on the object if the object is already mine? So why not have all things and thus become independent?”
These days, we regard independence as a state of mind where it is satisfied of having possessed everything on Earth. “If the whole world is mine, I am independent of the world.” This is how the mind argues. If the whole world is not mine, and yet I long for it, I am dependent on it. The longing for the world does not cease. To cease the longing, the attempt of the mind is to bring the world under its subjection. We have wars waged between nations. We have Hitlers, Ravanas, Kumbakaranas, and many others with this condition of mind where a specific form of desire called ego ran rampant—became wild, as it were, and wreaked havoc in the world in its attempt at subjugating things.
Desires are of various kinds, the most prominent of them being hunger, sex and ego, and it is these that become uncontrollable passions. While desires can be many, they can be reduced to these three instincts, hunger and thirst being biological, and ego being psychological. All the struggles of life finally will be seen to be the expressions of these three desires.
When they are in a mild form they go as preferences, likings; we like certain things, and so on. But when they become intense, they become wild passions, and then it is that they try to do harm to other people. When desires go out of bounds and cannot be controlled by even the mind from which they arise, they become like wildfire, and everything is destroyed. These are certain ways in which the mind can go off track in its evolutionary process, like railway trains can go off the track if they are run too fast or the engine goes out of order, and so on. If it moves along the track, it will reach its destination; otherwise, it will dash down, killing all people inside it.
The mind is supposed to evolve, not to run amuck. Horses pulling carriages are supposed to move along the trail, but if the horse goes amuck, it can throw the vehicle down into a ditch. The human body, which is like the vehicle pulled by the horse which is the mind, moves onward towards Eternity. A very beautiful image is given in the Kathopanishad: The chariot of this body is being driven by the horses of the senses, and so on. This chariot is supposed to have been driven to Eternity along the prescribed path. But if the horses go uncontrolled, they may run hither and thither and break the carriage to pieces. The destination will not be reached. The desires of the human mind are basically reconcilable with the urge for evolution, but they get entangled with an unnatural relationship of the mind with objects and then become passions.
It is very difficult to understand the good and bad points of human desire. It is not that all desires are devilish, but they can become devils if they are out of control. Fire—is it good or bad? Water—it is good or bad? We cannot say. Water is good; without it we cannot live, but it can drown us also. Likewise is human desire. It has a basic rationality behind it which is explicable by the immanence of the Truth-consciousness which is the urge behind all human desires. So there is a divinity behind all human desires, but there is also a Satan together with it, walking parallel with the divine urge within. The Satanic element is the diversification of the desire—the horse going amuck, we may say. Instead of the horse moving along the path, the horse is running wild into the forest. So is the condition of the human mind in its attempt at fulfilment, not knowing what really happens.
The mind foolishly imagines that freedom can be had if all others are destroyed: “My freedom is challenged by the existence of other people. Then I shall see that they do not exist.” Hitler was such a person: “If anybody opposes me, I shall see that they do not exist, or I shall make them all into satellites.” The human desires try to convert the objects of the world either into satellites, subservient elements, slaves, subordinates, or it sees that they do not exist at all. These are the positive and the negative sides of human desires. In the cruder forms of desires, there is a feeling of restlessness without one's knowing what is happening inside. But in the finer forms, there is a deliberate attempt to do something with the objects.
We know the longing of the human mind to see that it is predominant in the field in which it works. Whatever be our field of activity, our instinct is to be the predominating person. Leave alone our being subordinate to others, but we would not even like to be treated like others. To feel that we are just like others is very painful, so the mind says: “Why should I be one amongst the many? I shall be superior.”
This desire for superiority is again an assertion of independence. The superior consciousness is larger in freedom than the consciousness which is treated equally with others. If it is subservient, then it is like death; it cannot bear it any more. In all the struggles of the human mind with the objects of the world, including with persons, it tries to bring other things around itself. This is what is called enjoyment. We possess the objects under our grip, physically or psychologically. We may physically hold the objects in our hand, which is one kind of control, or we may be paid honour and tributes by people, which is also a kind of grip because now they are subservient.
Now, under all these psychological conditions, the mind feels a superiority. The mind wants to rule in order to gain independence over others—to exert authority is to make satellites of others—because the primary urge is for the highest of freedoms, which cannot be achieved as long as there is a second. The moment there is another, there is a difficulty in adjusting oneself to it.
Dvitīyād vai bhayaṁ bhavati (Brihad. 1.4.2): Where there is a second, there is a fear. If there is another person nearby, we have fear of him and cannot have peace. It may be a person or anything else, but we cannot reconcile with it. “How can the consciousness reconcile itself with the object?” is the great universal, philosophical, spiritual question. Is it possible to reconcile them? Nobody has achieved this reconcilability. Always the object has remained outside consciousness, and even today it is outside; but as long as this reconcilability is not reached, the mind cannot rest in peace. We are defeated.
A defeated person cannot be happy; and so people in the world are miserable, their struggles are in vain, and the world is what it is, even after centuries. We are showing our teeth to the world in utter defeat, and only patting ourselves on our backs in our homes. But victory must be achieved because the victory of the mind is the victory of consciousness; and the victory of consciousness is the victory over all things which cannot be attained so long as the consciousness has an opponent before it, or external to it. The reason for human evolution is this.
Why should there be evolution? The reason is that there is an object before consciousness, so there is evolution. The mind struggles somehow or the other to make peace with the objects. “Don't fight with me, please. Let us be in peace,” is the argument of the objects of the world. We have been struggling and fighting with the world and have not been able to gain victory. We have tried many ways of controlling the world, by making it subservient, by ruling over it, by enjoying it, and even by destroying it; all these methods have been tried throughout history, and all have failed. People who have trod this Earth with the aim of destroying things for the purpose of controlling them have not succeeded. The Caesars, Napoleons, and Alexanders have tried to control the world, but in turn they were controlled and have been wiped out of existence.
The mind is defeated. It is not this person or that person that is defeated, but the human mind. The specimen of individuality is defeated by the structure of the Universal Cosmos. Therefore, the mind tries to make peace when the opponent is too strong. We have tried in vain all the while to fight with this enemy. So what is the alternative? We must somehow say, “Let us be in peace, let us not fight anymore.” We have striven to put him down. We have fought tooth and nail and found that it is not so easy, so the alternative has come: “Let us make peace; you exist, and I also shall exist.”
The recognition of the equality of human beings is a higher state of recognition of the human mind. The age of the law of the jungle, as it is called, is over: “If I am strong, I shall tear you.” Man tried that law, and even today many are trying it, and they will not succeed. Then they come to the reconcilability with other principles of egoism: “Let us both exist, and let freedom be imparted to all.” Today we call this the height of civilisation. If all people are treated equally in society and everyone is the same in the eyes of the law, and if justice in the legal sense is meted out to people properly, then we say we are in the zenith of civilisation. Today we are likely to consider ourselves so. At least the majority of people feel that it is good to treat all equally. Well yes, there is no other alternative; we cannot go on fighting, as the mind has tried this method and failed. We shall all be treated equally.
Originally in the instinctive level, the mind did not like to be treated equally. It wanted to assert its independence, so it tried to wage war and subjugate the objects. When it did not succeed, it came back to its original level of thinking and thought that it is better to be in peace with these difficult elements. Today when we have no control over people, we try to be at peace with them. What control have you over me, or I over another? No one has control over another; each one is an independent ego, but there is a mutual agreement. This is what we call the law of human society. It may be family law, communal law, political national law, international law, etc. It is an agreement of people that they shall live in a certain way, and shall not do certain things. Then they set up governments to enforce this agreement. We have made law. We have made governments for the sake of our own good; otherwise, we will fly at each other's throats.
So this is the state we have reached today, in 1970: “Let there be a kind of agreement.” We agreed with others in many respects. We respect in a large measure the sacredness of human life. We agree that others also are human beings like ourselves. We accept that they too have desires and aspirations, as we have. This is one kind of peace and culture that the mind has achieved—peace in the sense that we shall not physically wage war.
With all this, are we free? Again is a question. There is no war, we shall not fight amongst ourselves, we shall accede to the requests of others, we shall regard others as our own selves, etc.; well and good. Are we happy now, or do we want something else? Is everything all right? No, there is still something else we want. Everything is not all right. Political peace is not the ultimate satisfaction of the human mind. There seems to be an urge for further growth, further integration. The mind has to reconcile itself with the objects in a higher sense than it had been visualising things earlier.
If all people keep quiet, it does not mean that they are in peace. Peace is not merely keeping quiet. It is a conscious agreement of the principle of ego with the other principles of egos in the world. Even if we do not fight among ourselves, we still are egos. The egoism has not gone. So in a state of the so-called international social or political peace, happiness is not really assured because of the permanent multitude of egos, among which there has not been a basic agreement.
“What is my relationship to you?” is the question of one ego to another. Do you just exist staring at me without doing anything, or do we have to interact? Now we are in a very advanced state of thinking. We are not thinking like animals, or even like ordinary human beings; we are thinking at a level of mind where it is accepted for all times that there should be no fighting because of the recognition of an equal value in human beings. It is at this level that further difficulties crop up—difficulties of a philosophical nature, we may say.
If all people have to keep quiet without talking to one another, there is no war, of course, but yet there is no peace. We will not like that condition, and will like a further growth of a more positive nature. Perfect silence of the egos is a negative peace, but we are not satisfied with negative peace, or negativity. If we shall be provided with all our needs—plenty to eat, plenty of clothes, a good bungalow to live in, and nobody will do any harm to us—yet, we will not find peace, because this is not what we want; there is something else that is urging us to go further.
Psychoanalysis as a science of the study of the human mind realised that peace can be had only if the mind can adjust itself with the reality of other egos. Even in a peaceful society, there are erratic minds. They are not always happy. The minds become erratic on account of difficulty in fulfilment of desires. They want certain things, but they cannot get those things because others also want them. Therefore, even if there is social peace, there can be certain psychological difficulties. So what to do? We have already agreed that there should be no fighting, and yet we both want it; there is conflict of desire, again.
From conflict to conflict we seem to be rising, without being able to reconcile them. Even in a perfectly peaceful society, there are minds going crazy due to the incapacity to fulfil desires. If two persons desire the same thing and if one is to decide for some reason not to assert his desire, that desire is suppressed. There is a suppression or a repression of desires, as we call it: We bury the desire within because we have not fulfilled it. We have conceded the desire to another person, and the other is enjoying that which we would have liked to enjoy. So we have repressed the desire, pushed it down.
But this is not a solution, and it is not only one or two desires. We have a series of desires every day. We live for so many years pushing down these desires inside, creating a thick layer of cloud over our mind. It makes us moody; we want to talk, though we do not want to say what the problem is. People are very dejected because their desires have been frustrated, so psychoanalysts thought, “Why not bring these desires out and make the person happy?” They have many techniques such as free association and dream analysis by which they try to pull the desires out of the patient's mind. When the person is psychologically sick, the desires are pulled out, as a thorn is pulled from the sole of the foot, to make the mind normal.
It is the suppressed desire that is making us moody, melancholy and depressed. Pull the desires out. But how? By expression. How are these desires to be expressed without fulfilling them? We do not want to fulfil them, and yet we want to express them. Psychoanalysts have failed due to the difficulty of this technique. Theoretically, we try to find ways to extract the desires, but they are not like small bugs that can be pulled out. They are forces. Desires are forces, energies which seek satisfaction and which we have pushed inside on account of not being able to fulfil them. Now by a process of psychoanalysis we may pull them out. But what happens to them?
When we pull the snake out of the basket of the snake charmer, we will have to be very cautious. The snake was there inside the basket, and now we have brought it out, but what are we going to do with it? While psychoanalysis is a very good as a medical science, it has not paved the way to human peace. With all we have learned and with all that we have, we are the same miserable fellows.
I previously explained the development of the human mind—not only in the process of evolution, but also in its definite advancements in the fields of education, science and psychology, and how all this has led us nowhere. Finally we seek asylum in the corner of an ashram. Nothing is all right. Everything has been tried, and it is all useless. We realise this too late, when our teeth begin to shake, hair becomes white and there is very little time to do anything. But the day comes in the life of every person when this realisation supervenes, and we cannot escape it. We open a gate to a new vision of things.
Here it is that we study a new science altogether. It is a thoroughly novel approach which has escaped the notice of the sciences and the arts studied in schools and colleges, which have all tried their best to satisfy the human mind but failed. We know our educated persons today. Are they happy? Never. Whatever be the qualifications that we have, we are never happy because happiness and freedom are distinctly quite different from the fields of education that we are given. We are asking for something and are given something else. All the while we have been sidetracked, and have been taught that this is the way to what we are seeking. We have been searching and have found nothing, and are now retracing our steps.
For fifty or sixty years we have been walking along this path of traditional arts and sciences, and then we realise that we have missed the way. Freedom and happiness it is that we want, not art and science, food and clothing, power and authority. It is not these things that we are seeking. We want to go down to the crux of the matter, as good physicians in analysis of disease. We are mistaken in thinking we are asking for things of the world. We may be deluded under the notion that we want to be rulers, kings, emperors, etc., because we are under the grip of a phantasm.
What we really want is freedom of expression of the spirit, which is being denied to us every day, even with all the possessions that we have. The spirit is seeking freedom. The maharajas are not happy, and have failed. Their freedom is checked by the various difficulties in their lives. All the glorious potentates that have trod this Earth have found that their spirit could not be expressed as they wanted. Yudhisthira, Vikramaditya, and tens and thousands of emperors much greater than these trod this Earth, but we know their fate. Time is inexorable, and it shall not spare any person. He may be a potentate, a ruler, the Trimurtis; even they shall be dissolved, says the scriptures.
The external methods which the mind has been employing in trying to grab things for gaining independence have failed; and if we are going to use the same methods today, we are going to suffer the same defeat as others have suffered throughout history. We have to open our eyes to things and be educated in a new fashion altogether, because education is the process of the expression of the perfection within us. The education we have had is not education at all. No perfection has been revealed to us. We know very well how imperfect we are. Where has been the perfection which education has been manifesting in our life? It has all gone as a will o' the wisp. The new version of things into which we have to open ourselves is what is generally known as the way of yoga—the practice of the knowledge of Truth.
The satisfactions of desires, the attempts of the ego, and the hope that our education will satisfy us have all failed. From all corners of the world we have tried to escape through different doors, and they are all closed, so we look up to the heavens for redress of our woes. When everything fails, man looks to the heavens.
Spiritual consciousness arises too late in life. It does not arise easily in a child because the child tries other methods of escape. It must try other methods and get defeated, and then it shall come. Even a mouse will try all ways to escape. If it cannot escape, finally it will jump on us, but it will not do that in the beginning; first it will try other means—the doors, the windows, etc. The human mind tries escapes of various types, escapes from difficulties for the sake of freedom and happiness, but it cannot escape like that and has failed in its attempts. Then, like Draupadi looking up for Lord Krishna, the human mind opens. Everything has failed, everything is hopeless, and the world is not going to help us. The mind, of course, realises this very late, but once it looks up, it shall see the light of the heavens. This is the mind evolving not merely from the animal to the intellectual or rational mind, but even above the intellectual and rational level to the moral and the spiritual fields of existence.