Never, never, for a single moment lose your freedom. And never destroy anybody else’s freedom. That’s what religion means to me. A really religious person remains free and helps the people who come in contact with him to be free. He never possesses anybody and he never allows anybody to possess him.
It needs constant vigilance because our minds always want to cling, and in clinging we lose. In clinging we start to commit suicide. Then a very strange situation arises: we hate the person we love, we want to destroy the person we cling to.
A very strange situation, but if you understand it, it is perfectly dear and logical. You hate the person because he has destroyed your freedom. You hate the situation because you are imprisoned in it, you are a prisoner. And you are a clinger because the known, the familiar, gives you a certain comfort and you are afraid of the unknown, the beyond.
So you go on doing something which is self-contradictory: on the one hand you cling, on the other hand you want freedom, and that is what all the people of the world are struggling with. They cling to the very cage of which they want to be free and their whole life remains just a futile exercise. They cannot be free because they cling, and they cannot destroy the cage because then there is nothing left to cling to. And they also cannot drop the idea of being free because that is their intrinsic nature. It is impossible to drop it, there is no way to do it.
Not a single human being has been able to do it up to now, and nobody is ever going to succeed in doing it because it is not that we love freedom: in fact we are freedom and only in freedom can we grow.
