Be free in this moment.
Not free to do anything you want,
But free from anything that you want to do,
Free from anything you want to be,
Free from anything that you want to think,
Essentially free from all compulsive habits.
Our life is a bundle of habits,
Conscious,
Unconscious habits that is running the show of our life while we masquerade living free.
So I invite you to be truly free in this moment,
Unbothered and uninterested,
Unworried.
Imagine you're standing at a bus stop or a train stop and you are sitting there because the stop is pretty,
It has nice Wi-Fi,
Cool ambience.
You're not really interested in boarding any bus or train,
So when you see a bus or train come by every 15 minutes,
20 minutes,
Because the bus or train will come since you are at the stop,
But if you are uninterested,
If you don't want to board it,
The coming and going of the bus or the train doesn't matter to you,
That's how it is with everything that is unfolding.
You're not interested in the sounds or the thoughts or the feelings or the images that are flashing in your mind.
Before I go further,
Let me share a story with you.
After I graduated my undergrad in 2007 and I came to the US in 2008,
For those few months I worked in Mumbai,
One of the most crowded cities in the world,
And I had to take the train every day,
Actually I had to take the train,
A bus and a rickshaw each way every day and it was chaos.
A non-local like me trying to fit into the system was extremely hard,
I never figured it out,
But I survived.
On one particular day,
I was going out with my friends on a weekend where it's not so crowded,
I'm not on a clock to get to work either.
But every day of the week I was on a clock,
So when I entered the train station,
The panic button was on,
You had to board this train,
You had to jump into the sea of people.
But on that weekend,
I found the same habit kicking in and I remember it so clearly.
I asked myself,
Why am I rushing?
I'm not on a clock,
But I realized that the habit was so strong,
The momentum of that habit was so strong that even if I don't want to do something,
It is quote-unquote making me do it.
And this might be the case with you as well,
As you sit on this bus stop or train stop uninterested in boarding your bus or train,
You might feel compelled out of habit.
The momentum of our habits.
Most of the times we think we are free,
We are the master of our life until we come face to face with some of our habits that expose this myth.
Almost every part of our day is a habit outsourced to our mind,
Where you don't have to pay attention.
How somebody should speak in front of you,
The tone they should use,
The verbiage they should use and should not use,
The clothes they should wear,
The food they should use or not use,
All these things are laid down for us and for others in our mind.
And we believe these guidelines,
These train tracks to be true and completely applicable until someone questions us.
And instead of that questioning being a moment to reflect,
It becomes a moment to react and become angry.
Most of these train tracks that are laid down are laid down with unconscious claims,
Uninvestigated claims about religion,
About society,
About fairness,
Unfairness,
About family.
I'm not saying everything is wrong.
As a matter of fact,
I'm not saying anything is wrong.
All I'm saying is we are not in charge.
Whatever has been laid down is in charge.
We are just acting like monkeys in our own life,
Following the rules and regulations laid down by someone else inside our mind on how to live our life.
And this someone else is a faceless person,
Could be society,
Could be our parents,
Could be everyone,
Could be ourselves.
What you eat is a habit.
How much you eat,
How often you eat,
What you drink,
How you drink.
How you interact with your kids,
Your spouse,
Your parents.
What ticks you off,
What disappoints you,
What frustrates you is like a computer program most of the times.
I'm aware that someone might argue that habits are a good thing,
They bring efficiency in the work we do so that we can outsource it to our mind to run it behind the scenes,
So to speak,
While we are doing bigger,
Better things,
Solving harder problems.
I'm not talking about practical habits here,
I'm talking about psychological,
Emotional habits that dictate our actions,
That dictate our internal peace and happiness and that dictates our connection with other people.
I remember when I started learning about these things almost a decade ago,
My mind was blown away to realize that hardly a few seconds of my life are quote-unquote conscious,
Intentional.
Most of it was reactive,
Automated.
That was my identity and that was my identity for others as well.
I was angry,
I was strict,
I was fat,
I was weak,
I was mediocre at work.
None of these things were intentional.
It's a humbling experience to reflect,
To take stock of how much freedom we exercise on a daily basis and freedom has been convoluted to,
Or restricted rather,
To doing things.
Freedom to do.
But what about the freedom to be free of?
Freedom from compulsion,
Obsession.
What would happen if you didn't eat your lunch or drink your coffee or didn't react,
Didn't roll your eyes,
Didn't get frustrated,
Didn't complain?
What I'm proposing is a revolutionary internal freedom.
No matter how the society has shaped us based on where we were born,
To whom we were born,
What was projected onto us,
We can't go back and change any of that.
But what we can do in the moment,
In every moment,
Is to reflect,
Is to ask ourselves,
Do I want to continue this habit?
Firstly,
We'll have to recognize it as a habit.
That would require a next level of self-awareness.
Internal freedom is what paves the path to peace and happiness.
Peace and happiness are not accidental.
If they were,
We would have been programmed already by society to be peaceful.
Chaos is the default state.
Entropy is the default state.
Where you have the freedom to reverse this entropy,
To reverse the chaos,
To bring order.
A good question can,
Must,
Make you stop in your tracks.
A simple question,
Like,
Are you free,
Internally,
Can be journaled for hours,
If not days,
If not decades.
The first level of freedom is always freedom from habits.
That doesn't mean habits are bad.
Maybe I need to be a little more precise.
Freedom from unconscious,
Unintentional habits.
Drifting away in thoughts,
Reacting emotionally,
Escaping from our feelings,
Lashing out at others,
Practicing,
Complaining,
Disappointment.
These are not true trophies of a free life,
Or an intentional life.
Unfortunately,
This is not someone else's responsibility.
As I mentioned,
Chaos is the default state,
The default substratum of habits for everyone,
Until someone takes responsibility for themselves.
And you and I both know where chaos is taking us,
Has taken us,
Individually and collectively.
We can continue to test,
We can continue to test the poison,
Or start working on an antidote.
And I'm not asking you to change your habits,
I'm asking you to be free of them.
Changing your habits is a very self-helpish way of moving forward,
Which only pertains to manipulation at surface level.
What I am suggesting and asking is a revolutionary exercise of freedom,
Where you can be free,
Completely free,
As in a session like today,
If you wanted to.
Unbothered,
Unworried,
A complete pause.
When we are busy changing habits,
We are replacing one with the other.
It's very mental,
Psychological,
What I am asking is very spiritual.
See your patterns,
See your habits,
See the suffering that your habits are causing for you.
Maybe not always,
Because some of them seem harmless to begin with.
And how your habits are creating problems and suffering in others.
We cannot stumble into happiness,
We cannot stumble into peace with accidental,
Unintentional habits.
The only place it will take us to is chaos and suffering.
Thank you.
