The World at Your Feet: Notes from an Itinerant
PIO on Freedom

chillibreeze writer — Anjoli Bandhyopadhyay

“What is freedom?”

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Freedom is power, says Halle Berry at the end of the Hollywood film Cat Woman. Twelve years ago in Montreal, my friend Karine, whose father is Indian like mine, was intuitively looking into Indian philosophy to resolve problems in quantum mechanics that western theories of perception failed to address. I, on the other hand, was eagerly discovering connections between the ancient Marian cults and Indian goddess traditions. And ironically, living in India today, as a person of dual Canadian and French nationality who is also a PIO (Person of Indian origin), I find myself experiencing and, consequently, investigating differences rather than similarities between eastern and western philosophical concepts, aesthetics and styles.

These notes from an itinerant PIO may be helpful to those of us who are constantly traveling from one chaotic continent to another in search of love or livelihood. For example, I find myself impatient to describe certain subtle but nonetheless consequential differences between Indian and western notions of freedom. In Hindu philosophy, the term moksha is the closest translation for the English terms liberation and freedom. But the Hindu belief in reincarnation implies fundamental differences in the Indian and prevailing western liberal understanding of what is actually meant by freedom and how one might go about being really free.

Western concepts of freedom emphasize one’s freedom as an individual to choose between options. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal describes man as “a thinking reed" whose “dignity consists in thought.” Pascal clearly says, “If the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which had killed him.” One is therefore encouraged to challenge social laws in an effort to progress from a “baser” state of existence to a “higher” level, which is, in theory, revolutionary and self determined.

The self competes with other selves for sovereignty and power by rejecting authority and tradition; individual autonomy and independence are the measures of freedom, not self-knowledge. The individual is believed to know what’s best for himself or herself and chooses whether to buy apples or oranges, whether to live alone in a studio or to live with others in a collective, whether to have children or not, whether to look after aging parents or not. The individual ought to choose between right and wrong. And the onus is on the individual to determine through personal experience, if not by education, how to exercise his or her free will. Consequently, the individual alone is held responsible for the consequences of his or her actions.

In the Hindu worldview, the individual is linked with the universe and seeks an end to the cycle of rebirth; moksha is self-realization. It is about revealing one’s true nature by following the laws of righteousness or dharma. The Self is an absolute and is there to be revealed and realized through knowledge (jnana), action (karma) and love (bhakti). Only by seeing one’s self for what one is, free from illusions is one free to fulfill oneself. It is illusory, for example, to believe that one is not subject to the laws of karma. How else does one explain a three year old dying of cancer?

Overcoming one’s individual desires, and steadfastly performing one’s social and spiritual duties, one experiences the ego as part of a much larger whole, as a pearl in the necklace so to speak, subordinated to an ultimate Self. The Upanishads are clear: Tat tvam asi. Moksha is essentially, understanding one’s true relationship with the world. And this freedom from maya, or illusion, is not attained by making “informed” individual choices, but rather by learning and observing the laws of society and nature.

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—About our writer: Anjoli says, Russel Hoban's often hallicinatory and dream travel novels always entertain and inspire me. Here is one of his quotes:"An idea is an eye given by God for the seeing of God. Some of these eyes we cannot bear to look out of; we blind them as quickly as possible."

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