Release

What do we have to give up to be free, to be truly ourselves? 

Recently, my office mate and I were discussing the Hindu concepts of samsara and moksha, and I realized something that I hadn't thought of before.

In Hinduism, samsara is the cycle of death and rebirth that we are trapped in, potentially forever. Moksha is the release from samsara, which is the ultimate goal of all life. When one attains moksha, he is reunited forever with the eternal.

It's easy to think of moksha in terms of escaping, but I think it is better to think about it in terms of letting go.

Escaping the cycle of death and rebirth would be like trying to swim out of a whirlpool. The vortex is nothing of your own making, and all you can do is try your best to overcome the forces dragging you down.

In the Bhagavad Gita, however, Lord Krishna counsels that a person attains moksha after realizing his true self, which can only be done by letting go of all desire, ego, vanity, insecurity, doubt, ambition, and fear.

In my mind, this path to achieving moksha could be animated as an image of a hand opening and dropping the heavy weight it is carrying.

Not restricted to Hinduism, a similar idea is offered in the Tao Te Ching:

In pursuit of knowledge,

every day something is added.

In the practice of the Tao,

every day something is dropped.

In Islam, the Prophet Muhammad is quoted in the Hadith as encouraging believers to reject whatever binds them to the world just as a seasoned traveler would avoid packing a heavy suitcase:

“Be in the world like a traveler, or like a passer on, and reckon yourself as of the dead.”

Rather than being morbid, the injunction to be as the dead means to have no cares or burdens, which is a very zen way to travel through life...be it this one or the next!