Bondage

1 5 Swami Dayanand Saraswati (Arsha Vidya Gurukulam) "Whatever I don’t want to have, but I can’t get rid of is bondage. In Sanskrit, it is called बन्ध / bandha or बन्धन / bandhana. It is derived from the Sanskrit root word, bandh, to bind. The bondage itself is bandha. It means you are bound. One cannot extricate oneself from certain things, which he or she wants to get rid of.What is it that one does not want? Pain and sorrow, limitation, fear, old age and being subject to disease and mortality are just a few things that most of us do not want. When one doesn’t love certain things or doesn’t like certain things, but cannot get rid of them, they become bondage for the person. It is that wanting to get out of something and not being able to. I want to get out of this struggle to become happy but I cannot rid myself of the struggle. I want to be free from insecurity, but I find myself helplessly insecure. That’s bondage. Being insecure is bondage. Being bound by time is bondage. Being bound by various limitations is bondage. Who is it that feels this bondage? Vedanta discusses it this way. The physical body does not feel the bondage. Neither does the mind. The mind is a karana / करण; it is simply a means or instrument. The person or the ego feels the bondage. No matter who the person is, wherever there is “I” sense, there is a sense of bondage also. That I want to be different from being what I am is bondage. In Vedanta, we say that a life of becoming is a life of bondage. In one word, we call it संसार / samsara . “I am a संसारी / samsari” means I am not acceptable to myself as I am now. That is संसार / samsara. A संसारिन् / samsarin is the one who has संसार / samsara. This is the one who appears to become a संसारिन् / samsarin because—he or she wants to become. I cannot but struggle to become because I am not acceptable to myself as I am. I struggle to become that person in whom I can be free, meaning in whom I find total acceptance, complete acceptability. Suppose I become that person in terms of wealth, in terms of health or in terms of any accomplishment that I gain. Then afterwards, once again, I want to become. Thus, I am always in the process of becoming. That is संसार / samsara. This ongoing act of becoming itself reveals that there is no way of becoming free. You don’t become free, because the very fact that you want to become reveals that you are not free. The attempt to become free is a denial of freedom, according to Vedanta, because it betrays a self non-acceptance. We can say that this is the original sin or the original problem. That constant wanting to become or needing to become somebody else is the original problem. And in that somebody else, I expect to see myself as a free person, free from want, who won’t need to become any more." Timeline Photos · Sep 10 · View Full Size · Send as Message · Report Photo LikeCommentShareGet Notifications Brandon Fulbrook and 108 others like this. Parveen Nair Jayakumaran Annasamy Vasugi Thirumalaisamy Dawn Marie Jacqueline Cho Bavani Dayananthan Skantha Pushpanathan Louis Cj Ai TingTing Gandhi Krishnappan Like · 2 · Sep 10 Mahesh Sowani Dialogues with Swami Dayananda - book review http://maheshsowani.blogspot.in/2014/09/dialogues-with-swami-dayananda-book.html Heart of the matter: Dialogues with Swami Dayananda - book review maheshsowani.blogspot.com Like · 2 · Sep 10 Swami Dayanand Saraswati (Arsha Vidya Gurukulam) Good post, Mahesh ji, I agree with your review and it represents Pūjya Swāmiji's position well. There is one sentence that I wanted to touch upon though, mainly for clarification of readers : "In consonance with the controversial guru Osho, this Swami of Shankaracharya order says that institutionalized religion is a problem" It is true that organized "religion" is a problem, then again, listening to other talks of pūjya swāmiji, he does not accept religion as a sensible construct to define dharma. So while on the surface level his conclusions may appear similar, what he is arriving at may elaborate the nuanced ideas. A friend once wrote the following: Due to western education becoming the norm in India since the times of the British, it has become a norm for even Indians to see their own tradition in terms of western categories like culture and religion, instead of rightly viewing not just our society but also others in terms of our paradigm of dharma. Now that we are independent of foreign rule for the past 65 years, we should also take the next rightful step of reclaiming our own categories and using them to view the world. So what is dharma? Dharma literally means that which supports or upholds or maintains the order of the Universe (called Rta). This is a much more far reaching categorization than religion or culture. While religion in the western sense typically refers to an institutionalized framework where a church maintains a list of commendments to follow, dharma is a more deeper principle and is not applicable to humans alone, but pertains to everything in existence. So for instance, what upholds an atom or maintains its existence? It is that the sub-atomic particles in the atom are adhering to their dharma (of doing what they ought to be doing). When we come to the human realm, we all humans have our own social identities. Not one, but several. We carry these as various kinds of labels, depending on where and to what parents we were born, what we studied, what professions we chose, what organizations we choose to belong to, what kind of relationships we enter into with other human beings etc. For instance, we all would be, in relation to other people, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, friends, co-workers, fellow citizens, and so on, at the same time. We could belong to birth based groups (jAtis) or membership based groups (sanghas). What “upholds” all these labels then is the dharma of human beings. My brotherhood to my sibilings is upheld by my properly adhering to brotherly dharma. My sonhood to my parents is upheld by my properly adhering to filial dharma. My citizenship to my country is upheld by my adhering to the dharmas of the citizenry and so on and so forth. Thus, the separation between religion and culture would be a meaningless thing in our viewpoint, because dharma encompasses both these western categories. So, a westerner might consider his eating etiquette at a dinner table as belonging to the realm of culture and a secular act, while going to church on sunday with his family as a religious act. But from our viewpoint, both are acts of dharma – the former a dharma to be followed at the dinner table as by adhering to it, he/she is upholding good relations with those who are eating with him (as it is expected behaviour at the table) and the latter upholds the institution called the church, which is a membership based group he/she belongs to. Edited · Like · 4 · Sep 10 Mahesh Sowani Thank you very much! http://maheshsowani.blogspot.in/2014/09/dialogues-with-swami-dayananda-book.html Like · Sep 11 Swami Dayanand Saraswati (Arsha Vidya Gurukulam) Mahesh ji, again, thanks for sharing, but its the fifth time you are posting this here. Edited · Like · Sep 11 Write a comment... Post