Be a lion, be a lion, break the cage and be free! Take a big
jump and the work is done! (Swami Turiyananda, a direct-disciple of Sri
Ramakrishna).
Indeed, down the ages, men of God have always given the call
for love, compassion, and spiritual courage. But somehow, we, the people on the
street, have chosen to be deaf and we continue to live in our multi-layered
cages: the cage we are born with – body, mind, ego, and samskaras; the cage we
have constructed for ourselves – identities born of relationships with people,
ideas, things, and places; and the cage forged for us by the world –
situations, and circumstances.
The consequence of
living in these cages are violence, debased sense gratifications, and false
sense of happiness and goodness.
The irony is that most of us do not even recognise the cage
as an imprisonment. We accept our condition as a natural state of life and are
happy to enjoy the ‘freedom’ of pacing around in the cage! We spend our
energies in polishing the cage, defending it, and glorifying it with
euphemistic names. Our individual cages, then together shape new cages for our whole
society.
It really requires a lion’s courage to break free from all
these cages. We have to take ‘a big jump’, a leap of faith – faith in our
innate divinity, faith in the divinity of others, and faith in God – to awaken
ourselves and others to a life of true freedom.
Source – Vedanta Kesari January 2020 Editorial