“For most of us freedom is an idea but not an actuality. When we talk about freedom or think about it, we want to be free outwardly, to do what we like, to travel, free to express ourselves in different ways, free to think what we like. The outward expression of freedom seems to be extraordinarily important, specially in countries where there is tyranny, dictatorship; and in those countries where outward freedom is possible one seeks more and more pleasure, more and more enjoyment, freedom to possess. And in the search for freedom, if one is at all serious, there is not only the outward expression of that freedom, which must, it seems to me, come from psychological freedom, inward freedom.

And if we were to enquire deeply what that freedom implies, freedom to be inwardly, completely and totally free – which then expresses itself outwardly in society, in relationship – then we must ask, it seems to me, whether human mind, heavily conditioned as it is, can ever be free at all. Or must it always live and function within the frontiers of its own conditioning, and therefore there is no freedom at all? Or verbally understanding that there is no freedom here on this earth, inwardly or outwardly, one then begins to invent freedom in another world, liberation, moksha, heaven and so on.

So if we could put aside all theoretical, ideological, concepts of freedom and actually enquire whether our minds, yours and mine, can ever be free, freedom from dependence, psychologically, inwardly, freedom from fear, anxiety, the innumerable problems, both conscious as well as deeper layers of consciousness. Whether there can be complete psychological freedom, so that the human mind, being free from all problems can come upon something which is not of time, which is not put together by thought, or as an escape from the actual realities of daily existence.”