| Questions and Answers: What Is Freedom? |
by Paramhansa Yogananda
Inner Culture, April 1941
Question: "When are we really 'free'?"
Answer: There can be no free expression of soul without freedom of thought. You must never forget that you are a free agent. Your will power is always free. If you use your will power, it will create new karma for you, but most people don't want to make a change. They don't want to make the effort, so they give up.
We Are Slaves to Customs
To do everything that you want to do does not mean that you are free. Man is usually bound by his desires, which is not freedom at all. To do all things, guided by wisdom, is freedom. You can only change your karma if you are guided by wisdom and use will power. If you guide your actions by will power and wisdom, the power of your past wrong actions will grow weaker and your habits of good actions will grow stronger.
Established customs enslave us more or less. We never live in real freedom. We are always wanting something we do not already possess. We become attached to non-essentials. As soon as we become a slave to something, we have lost our will power and freedom, for the time being at least. Just as the Orientals are slaves to old customs, so the American people are slaves to new customs. We chalk out our destiny in the past and to that destiny we make ourselves slaves.
Why is it that one person is born into an evil family and another person is born into a good family? Each one used his freedom to live in a certain way in past lives and thus attracted to himself those conditions in this life.
There is no real life without God. There is no real freedom without God. You must put your mind on the God-Center within you. Whatever you do or think, God must always be uppermost in your mind. When you are in tune with God, you can accomplish anything at any time. You must always remember this. You must not cease activity; instead, you must increase the power of your activity, so that in spite of bad influences your will power will speed up things for you.
God's methods are not those of an Almighty Being always punishing us. He has created us. He has given us freedom. We must work out our own destiny with His help.
