A Bird In search of a Cage

The title first caught my attention, and then when I read what he’d said in just those three lines, it hit deep. This is from Seth Gordin’s blog.

'So much freedom, so much choice, so many opportunities to matter.

And yet, our cultural instinct is to find a place to hold us, a spot where we are safe from the responsibility/obligation/opportunity to choose. Because if we choose, then we are responsible, aren't we?'

Think about it; how many of us are either in search of that cage or are stuck in cages we’ve already found, and choose to stay in because we think we don’t have in us the ability to choose? How much of that is conditioning?

In fact this is exactly what Jiddu Krishnamurthy talks about. How the human mind has been conditioned, shaped, moulded since millions of years and how we still allow our basic instinct of fear to create the framework from which we operate, and that's what causes all forms of conflict. It is conflict when we force ourselves to fit into a particular pattern established by society, by religion, when we discipline ourselves to conform to a pattern.

And what would it take to break through? Not in some distant time but immediately? It is mindfulness, meditation, not in terms of sitting down to meditate per a system, but as in..... to ponder over, to observe, to pay attention, to learn. To make the mind extraordinarily sensitive, alive, not burdened by the past and therefore free.....in essence, to be aware !