Liberation of the Individual

“Until an individual comes to a fundamental questioning of who he is, he is simply lost in the collectivity.”

Spirituality is not an ideology, it is not a concept, and it is not a manmade dream. Spirituality is an existential longing to know who you are. That is why there is no other force more powerful than an individual’s longing. It is more powerful than all of the atomic bombs that man has ever created, because this force, once it takes over an individual, can remove everything out of their path and simply allow them to focus: Who am I? What am I? Why am I? Why am I eating? Why am I breathing? Why am I walking? Why am I dreaming? Until an individual comes to a fundamental questioning of who he is, he is simply lost in the collectivity.

A further example of this collectivity is religion. In religion, you cannot recognize an individual because it is just another collective ideology. If you are a Hindu, a Muslim, or a Christian, does it say anything at all about you? No. It can only say something about where you grew up. In fact, everything about you, from the way you look to the language that you use, has been acquired from the outside. And all the accumulation has submerged and hidden the real you.

Now, more than ever, the world is moving towards the liberation of the individual. There was a time for kings, there was a time for priests, and there was a time for governments, but now the force is the individual. If you look at what is happening, our innovations and developments are constantly giving the individual the power to express himself. Not too long ago, even to share this simple existential process would have required me to get permission from my religious community. They would have decided whether it made sense or not. Then I would have needed the permission from my country. They would have decided whether what I said was helpful to people or not. Under those circumstances, individuality was completely drowned.

Throughout human history, if an individual saw something that sparked his curiosity he would want to express himself, no matter the circumstances. For example, when Galileo figured out that we live on a round planet and that the Earth rotates around the sun, the church considered this to be an absolute heresy. During the time of Galileo, if you were not following the orders of the church you were a heretic, which literally means “one who goes their own way”.

Galileo was also considered to be a danger to the church because the church always believed that the earth was flat and that it was created in six days. So the church branded Galileo as a heretic and his papers were not allowed to be published. They went back and forth and finally the church forced Galileo to write at the end of his papers that his findings were only a speculation, not the truth. Only by adding that condition could Galileo publish his papers.

In a way, we have come very far. Now an individual is free, theoretically. Psychologically he is still bound by a suppression that has kept him in bondage for so many centuries. Since man comes from this collective consciousness, whether he knows it or not, there is a part of him that knows that his ideas were subjugated at one point in time. At that point in time, man had the fear of expressing himself freely. So in a subtle form, that suppression has continued to this day in the form of the family, the community, the religion, and the ideologies of the country

Therefore, an individual is still bound, but he is more bound psychologically than in any other way. He is more bound by his own mental process than by anything else. If an individual can step away from his psychological burden, if he can explore life from the pristine purity of his own consciousness, then the answers he will get will simply astound him. It will completely put him in a different realm of reality, because an individual is only one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is divinity.

What is an individual searching for? He is searching for absolute freedom, happiness, goodness, and love. He is searching for a way to go beyond his pain and suffering. He simply wants to be out of pain. As a result, the combination of all of these qualities is what we call divinity. Divinity is not a person. Rather it is the best of all of these qualities, and the search to reach that divinity can only start from the individual.