Message of Buddha – Freedom

The message of Buddha can be condensed into one word – Freedom. It is absolute and unconditional. Buddha does not mean freedom only from outer bondage but from inner too; Freedom not only from others but from oneself too. Other religions also talk about freedom, but not in that penetrating sense in which Buddha talks about it. Other religions talk about freedom in the sense that the self has to be free. Buddha talks in a diametrically opposite sense, with a new dimension to it. He says: One has to be free from the self itself.

The self is bondage. You are not in bondage because of others; you are in bondage because of yourself. Unless you disappear, bondage will continue. It may change forms, it may become modified here and there, it may become more convenient, comfortable, but it will remain. The moment you disappear, the moment you see yourself as an absolute emptiness, at that time freedom is total. Freedom from self is real freedom.

These sutras are of immense value. Remember, when Buddha talks about freedom he does not mean the ordinary freedom talked about by the politicians, by the priests, and others. The social and the political freedom are: you are completely free as long as you think, act, dress, earn, speak and buy like everybody else.

You can’t be free unless absolutely whatsoever happens spontaneously in you is allowed and accepted. Man has been programmed, you have been given blueprints – what to be, how to be, what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. And those programs have been put so deep down in your being that you have become unconscious of them. It appears as if you are acting out of freedom; you have been tremendously deceived.

Even when you think you are acting out of freedom, even when you think you are acting out of your own conscience, you are not. The society is controlling you in a very subtle way. The moment the child is born, the society starts programming the child. The society treats you like a computer; it goes on feeding and programming you. By the time you become a little alert, you are already programmed – you are already a Christian or a Hindu or a Jain. You are already fixed; you are no more liquid, you are no more flowing. And you will function out of this fixity, out of this obsession, that the society has put inside you.

Freedom is the dignity Buddha brings to humanity; this is the grandeur that he introduces you to again. This is your inheritance, natural inheritance. So live with it forever.

- Osho