Question: How can we attain lasting freedom?

Sri Chinmoy: If we try to achieve freedom through our vital power, by hook or by crook, then we will not get real freedom. But if we get freedom from the soul, it is spontaneous and everlasting. This is the freedom that is based on our feeling of inseparable oneness with the entire world. So if we want to achieve real and everlasting freedom, it has to come from the soul. If we use our human determination to attain freedom, we see that this determination usually comes from our vital — not the emotional vital, but the vital that wants to exploit its position of supremacy. When we attain freedom through the exercise of our determination, it does not last. On the contrary, just when we think we have attained freedom, we discover that we are badly bound in a hundred subtle ways. Real freedom is the feeling of love, truth and oneness; it is not through determination but through inner realisation that we can build up this feeling. It comes from our inner realisation that we are of infinite Light and for infinite Light.

There is another word we can use: will power. Will power and determination are two different things. Will power comes directly from the soul, while determination usually comes from the vital, which is often unillumined, obscure, impure. Will power, which is the very breath of the soul, immediately brings Light with it. It endows us with the ultimate Vision, and with that ultimate Vision we can attain the soulful and permanent experience of real inner freedom.