(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 16 January 2015, United Kingdom, Lecture at Matchless Gifts)
I remember a song from when I was young. I didn’t like that song. It was describing different problems in the world, and the chorus was, “But fortunately we have the key to escape reality.”
I was thinking, “But wait a minute! You didn’t escape reality – you just clouded it over! It’s still the same. You didn’t solve it.” So I didn’t like that song. I wanted something real – real solutions, real freedom. That was the first song I played on my first guitar. I didn’t know any chords, but I was banging it and calling out “Freedom!” at the top of my lungs.
I was serious about it and looked for freedom in so many ways. I remember the poet Leonard Cohen who sang, “Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”
I was thinking, “Where is your freedom when you are caught in a world you didn’t make? Another child born in a world it didn’t ask for?” So I encountered these things, and I was searching and thinking, “Where is it?”
