Shackles of an elephant
Elephants are majestic animals. And this is not the first time I have something to talk about them. I will give some links to all the elephant articles at the end. But first let's talk about their training.
It is hard to train an elephant. Especially wild ones freshly captured. But as you can understand training a seven-foot young one is harder than training four-foot calf. So often it would be a calf. I know what they have to undergo in this domestication process is not pleasant at all. Maybe it is shackles on all four legs, keep them from kicking and running away. Ankus to inflict the pain, and food and water as a reward. And at the end of this tiring painful period, they will learn to obey the command of mahout. And most likely they will remain calm for the rest of their lives.
I am sure you have seen a couple of elephants walking on the road. Sometimes they have no shackles. Sometimes tiny one on one leg. Sometimes they carry their own shackles. Why do they not run away?
Answer is its their memory. Although they are not shackled now. They were in the past. And all the elephants can remember is what it had gone through when it tried to escape for freedom. They have strong memory which last decades. If you think about this, it is exactly like the horse who did not run away when tied to a plastic chair. It is a no knot!
This phenomenon brings us to the main point of our discussion. Freedom.
Shackles of freedom
Freedom can be physical and mental. In physical freedom you are allowed to walk free. Do anything you like and feel anything you like. This is fundamentally a principle in democracy and not in dictatorship. So, we are lucky most of the time to be born with this freedom as a right, more than we appreciate it. We can compare physical freedom like the wild elephant, and the one who is trained. Except when the elephant is in training it is physically free most of the day.
But the elephant as you can see is not mentally free. Maybe it is taken care of, yet it doesn't want to run away meaning, its shackles are in the mind now.
Someone can argue it is like the fish in the tank and fish in the wild. Fish in the tank is free from disease and sudden death from predators but with compromised freedom to swim. But swim in the wild is freer physically yet not free from dangers. As we can see this is going to be never ending argument, unless fish could talk and tell exactly it prefer. Mind you still this can wary according to individual 🐟 🐠.
To understand mental freedom better we need to go back to how it is restricted. What is mental freedom? What are we trying to free ourselves from? What are the shackles of mental freedom are made of. I think at this point you might need to look at previous articles on prisoners of mind and who build mental prisons.
Sometimes you may think it is freedom of thinking and expressing yourself in writing painting and speech of what you think. But I think this is also a Suttle form of physical freedom as these all are actions.
Then what is true freedom? And what are the shackles which prevents us from achieving that.
To understand this, we need to find out how mind works. But there is a problem. No matter how many pages would write here about workings of the mind, your mind would understand it in a different way. But that is basically the problem. There is no objective truth which we all we see similar. We all would see according to our knowledge and capacity.
When we look at our own minds long enough, we will understand how mental objects are formed. Basically, these are reflections of our own environment but within us. It includes everything you ever heard of and going to see in the future. Mathematics language, living, non-living, good and evil, truth and false. These mental objects are our own shackles which keeps us trapped. And more importantly we are also a creation of same process, hence a mental object. This is the wisdom you can gain while looking at a lump of clay.
Here I can give you another example. Imagine a prank where a group of people fight on the street. They will mimic a gunfight and play havoc on the road. For them and the camera crew this is a joke. Yet for the people who are on the street this is a first-hand experience of a gunfight. I am sure they will start to run away and even injure themselves. They would not enjoy it like the camera crew or even the actors. So, we can say, not knowing the truth is the suffering for the people on the street. They are with their own mental shackles. And only way to break them and become free is to empower them with knowledge, and each one of them have to understand it.
Yet this is hard to do in real life as of the previous problem of subjectiveness of the world. I am not claiming I am free. Rather there is a way, and you have to see it yourself with mindfulness.
Comentarios