Question: I have learned that “To surrender unto the Lord through the transparent medium of the spiritual master is to attain complete freedom of life”.
What exactly is freedom of life? Why do we all seek freedom of life? It is true that we all have to face a stark reality in the form of DEATH! But, what about duties while we are alive and towards those who are alive around *us*? Is performing our duties, in any role not good enough?
Answer by Romapada Swami: Real freedom is to regain our natural, constitutional position. A fish out of water seeks water. A sick person seeks to regain his health so he can resume his normal functions. The jiva similarly hankers to regain his lost relationship with God.
Our nature is to be free in service to God. We are not meant to be constrained by pain, loss, scarcity, ignorance, anxiety, hunger, old age or repeated death and change of bodies. No, it is not true that everyone has to face death. A fully self-realized pure devotee does NOT experience “death”, or any other material condition, as everyone else does. Such jivan-muktas quit their material bodily covering, but in full awareness, and continue their eternal life in service to the Lord. That is our natural condition also.
The fact is we all seek freedom, compulsively, whether we are consciously aware of our efforts to do so or not. Why else is the entire human civilization busy researching and inventing remedies to endless problems? Why invent so many new gadgets? Why nuclear families, or vacations? Why not simply resign to the inevitable? Search for freedom is an inescapable fact, but most people search in the wrong direction.
It appears you have mistaken freedom as escaping from one’s responsibilities & duties. A prisoner wants freedom: simply resigning to his fate and doing his duties nicely within the prison will not satisfy. But misfire escape attempts will only earn him further severe punishment! His real escape lies in agreeing to co-operate and abide by the State and the Ruler/King. In other words, everyone must do their respective duties while within this prison of material world; freedom, however, is not doing so for one’s personal or extended satisfaction within the prison, but for the satisfaction of Vishnu. (BG 3.3-9)
A housewife cannot whimsically give up her duty to her husband or children on the pretext of serving God. Not only immediate bodily relatives, but one is duty-bound to serve the community, the forefathers, the sages and philosophers, the scientists and administrators, the deities of universal administration, the birds and beasts around us, to serve mother earth, the rivers and oceans… No one can escape this staggering list of duties; neither can one possibly fulfill all these various duties perfectly, except by understanding that ultimately all of one’s duty is towards God, through the medium of instructions received from bonafide spiritual master. Such persons alone can go on executing their duties without hankering for a break or sense-gratification, and without being affected by the heat & cold, hunger & thirst, disease or old age etc. They actually experience freedom even while working in this world.
