Editorial
Break the Cage
January 2020
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The Vedanta Kesari
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ityananda and Haridas as directed by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu were once going around the streets of Navadwip, spreading the name of the Lord. Jagai and Madhai, two drunkards who were the terror of the town, opposed these messengers of love. Once, Madhai attacked Nityananda and wounded him grievously. The saint only replied, “Shall I stop giving you love, because you have hit me?” This merciful love transformed the ruffians and they became the disciples of Sri Chaitanya.
One day while walking in Cairo, Swami Vivekananda and his companions, engrossed in some discussion, lost their way. They found themselves in a squalid, ill-smelling street where half-clad women sat at doorsteps and peeped out from windows. Swamiji initially did not notice them until a group of noisy women began laughing and called out to him. Though his companions tried to quickly usher Swamiji away from there, he gently disengaged from them and approached the women on the bench. Standing in front them he said, “Poor children! Poor creatures! They have put their divinity in their beauty. Look at them now!” and began to weep. The women were silenced and abashed. Swamiji’s compassion awakened them to their pitiable condition and turned their thoughts towards God. One of them leaned forward and kissed the hem of his robe, murmuring brokenly in Spanish, “Man of God! Man of God!” Another lady covered her face with her arm in modesty and fear. Slowly, Swamiji and his companions walked away from there. Swami Turiyananda, a direct-disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, was once explaining Vedanta to a Western disciple as they walked along a fashionable avenue in New York. As he went deeper into the subject, the faster he began to
walk and the louder his voice became. Then suddenly, he halted in the street and with one arm raised in air told the disciple almost shouting, “Be a lion, be a lion, break the cage and be free! Take a big jump and the work is done!” It was a call that the surprised fashionable New York people heard in wonder. Indeed, down the ages, men of God have always given the call for love, compassion, and spiritual courage. But somehow, we, the people on the street, have chosen to be deaf and we continue to live in our multi-layered cages: the cage we are born with – body, mind, ego, and samskaras; the cage we have constructed for ourselves – identities born of relationships with people, ideas, things, and places; and the cage forged for us by the world – situations, and circumstances. The consequence of living in these cages are violence, debased sense gratifications, and false sense of happiness and goodness. The irony is that most of us do not even recognise the cage as an imprisonment. We accept our condition as a natural state of life and are happy to enjoy the ‘freedom’ of pacing around in the cage! We spend our energies in polishing the cage, defending it, and glorifying it with euphemistic names. Our individual cages, then together shape new cages for our whole society. It really requires a lion’s courage to break free from all these cages. We have to take ‘a big jump’, a leap of faith – faith in our innate divinity, faith in the divinity of others, and faith in God – to awaken ourselves and others to a life of true freedom. Let us begin this new English calendar year with a prayer and a vow to recognise and break these cages.
