Since, in truth, bondage and freedom are relative, these words are only for those terrified with the universe. This universe is a reflection of minds. As you see many suns in water from one sun, so see bondage and liberation.
- One of the deepest techniques — only very rare minds have tried it; hard to comprehend, not hard to experience (comprehension must come first). The radical claim: bondage (SANSARA) and liberation (MOKSHA) are not opposites but relative — degrees of one phenomenon, like hot and cold on a single temperature scale. Therefore tantra requires you to be liberated from MOKSHA itself, not only from bondage; unless freed from both, you are not free.
- The pitfall this technique cures: fleeing to the opposite pole. The sannyasin who cannot look at a woman’s face is still obsessed with women — running from rather than after, but the obsession is identical. The saint who recoils from money as from a scorpion is still greed’s prisoner, reversed. You cannot escape what you are against; going against it binds you negatively. ‘You cannot become liberated by reaction.’
- The technique proper: seek to FEEL — not theorize — that both poles are the same. Not hot/cold as a position, but existentially, through your own realization. When this deepens from idea to lived fact, the question ‘where shall I move?’ collapses. With no valid direction, movement ceases; without movement the future disappears; without future, desire ceases. In that stillness, liberation happens of itself — not a result you achieve, but what was always there once the running stopped.
- ‘This universe is a reflection of minds’: what you perceive as bondage or liberation out there is your own state mirrored back. One sun, many reflections in many ponds — dirty and clean, big and small. A thief sees the whole world thieving; a sexual mind sees it all as sexual; a Buddha finds the whole world in NIRVANA. The world does not change; the reflection does. Truth is seen only when all seeing disappears — only the mirror remains, with nothing reflected in it. That is the real.
- Naropa’s double answer on enlightenment: ‘Yes and no both. Yes — there is no bondage. No — because that very desire for liberation was a reflection of bondage; it arose because of bondage, just as longing for health can only arise in the ill. A truly healthy person cannot feel health — it is simply there, unfelt. Now I am beyond both: neither in bondage nor in liberation.’
- Q&A (Q1) — the desire for liberation is desire: all desire is worldly; there is no ‘spiritual desire.’ Whether you desire money or NIRVANA, desire means you are not in the present moment — the only real door into existence. Calling your desire for God an ‘aspiration’ or ‘intrinsic thirst’ is the mind’s subtlest deception — a change of object, not of desiring; the running, dreaming, and future-projection remain identical. You cannot practice no-desire (only desires can be practiced). The actual path: move into each desire with full alertness and walk it all the way to its misery. Do not borrow Buddha’s realization; suffer your own desires until YOU see, in your own experience, that every desire is hell. When that seeing becomes an existential fact — not an opinion — desiring falls away on its own. That fall is NIRVANA: not a reward for effort, but the consequence of understanding.