The Greatest Gift That You Can Give to Your Self Is To Come to This Recognition

Now, if you buy into this idea, ‘Okay, I see this now. What does it mean for me?’ it’s just inviting suffering. The one that wants freedom will never be free. The one that is free is always free. So, if you keep believing you are that one that wants freedom, you will never be free. Maybe that’s what Papaji [Sri H.W.L Poonja] meant. He used to look at someone and say ‘You want freedom? No. Go.’ [Chuckles] So also grace (acts) in a way because that whole system ‘the seeker identity’ that we have nourished for so long sometimes could be just chopped off in this way. The one that wants freedom will never be free. Because it doesn’t exist. It’s a made-up idea. Suppose you woke up with a condition tomorrow. You start imagining you are a cow. Now, you want to make the cow free. And you say, ‘But I insist that I have to make the cow free.’ Then will you suffer or will you be happy? You will suffer. [Smiles] So the idea of you getting freedom in that personal way, in a special way, is just made up, is nonsense. It’s like the cow getting freedom. But the you that is, is free, is beyond free and bound, actually, is beyond all opposites. Now, you want to pick up the cow pose again?

Ah, but even that conclusion, now leave. We don’t know even that. It can seem like a nice, humble, worthy conclusion, ‘Okay, I identify (with) my problem.’ But who are you in that picture? Drop it. Stop diagnosing the cow, because it does not exist. The cow’s heart is beating in nineties, ninety beats a minute. [Smiles] What does this mean? Will the cow become free soon? There is no cow. Even if you say, ‘I am the body,’ is the body wanting freedom? So, the one who is the claimant, the owner of the body, the owner of the relationship, the owner of the bank account, the owner of all of these, also says, ‘I want to be the owner of freedom.’ If the body became a little more [smiles] alive or intelligent or something, then if you give the body the choice between ice cream and freedom, what would it say? ‘Freedom? I am free. My hand is moving, my head is moving.’ What special freedom can you give it? So, this one — the imagined one, which is just a product of all our beliefs, all that we think is true, all that we think we are right about — that is the one who had made itself seem like a seeker. But that seeker will never be free. That seeker will just be dissolved.