If our subconscious is not dissolved, real progress is not possible.
No end of bubbles continually rise from the depths of the
subconscious and make us do things we should not do, think
thoughts that should not be thought, keep us in a state of perfect
slavery.
We have not yet become responsible beings at all.
We live on impulses and think impulse-driven and impulse-rooted thoughts, and, guided as we are by impulses and animal reactions, we still believe that such a state is freedom!
Vedanta always puts great stress on consciousness, purified consciousness, consciousness that has really become conscious in ourselves.
There must be a thorough, merciless, dispassionate, overhauling of all our conceptions of freedom.
Licence has nothing to do with freedom.
Sex-indulgence has nothing to do with freedom or true manhood.
A person is a slave to his senses and thinks that he is free, that he is a man.
That is the fun! When a helpless slave believes he is free and behaves in a slavish manner, there is no hope for him.
Freedom is very different from all this.
No one is free who has not developed his higher faculties and become master of his subconscious.
We cannot just act as if the subconscious did not exist!
The way to freedom lies not in becoming helpless and being guided by desires and passions, by all sorts of animal cravings,
by likes and dislikes, but by consciously controlling all desires and
passions, all feelings of attraction and aversion, and remaining
wide-awake at all times.
If we do not do this, no amount of reading will be of any avail.
Most people are scared away if you speak to them of continence, of the idea of control, but real freedom can only be had through control. Our life is very often not a life of control, but a subconscious life.
We resent anything that forces us to rise above this subconscious sort of mentality.
To think that it is freedom to lead a subconscious life is absurd.
Can anything be more awful than this?
If you dispassionately look around you, you see the effects everywhere.
Yet people feel proud of all the progress that is being made.
When we do not know how to make use of our freedom, our freedom
lapses into licence, and licence always is the sign of a slave.
Ordinarily we are creatures of the impulses and tendencies that rise from the subconscious to the conscious plane, and the
task of spiritual life is to rise above all nature’s laws, to rise to the
transcendental plane, where alone we can enjoy freedom.
As we rise from the lower laws to the higher laws of nature, we get more and more glimpses of true freedom.
Swami Yatiswarananda -
READINGS ON THE GOSPEL OF SRI RAMAKRISHNA -
Chapter: - Transformation and true freedom -
Wiesbaden, Germany, June 22, 1934 -- (Vol.I 290-295)
