Untying Our Wings

This excerpt from Eknath Easwaran appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of our quar­terly Blue Moun­tain journal.

“All of us have wings, though we do not sus­pect it because they are so tightly tied. We are not meant to stay on the ground and peck at crumbs of per­sonal plea­sure and profit. We are meant to soar – to give our time and love freely to every­one around us. That is the essence of spir­i­tual growth, and the whole pur­pose of med­i­ta­tion and the other skills of spir­i­tual liv­ing is to free our wings and allow us to fly high.

“In India’s mys­ti­cal lit­er­a­ture, the ties that keep us earth­bound are called “knots that stran­gle the heart” because they con­strict our capac­ity to love. There are mil­lions of these ties, but per­haps the eas­i­est to see are what I call per­sonal attach­ments: pos­ses­sions and activ­i­ties we cling to that claim our time and atten­tion at the expense of those around us.

“Many of these attach­ments are mate­r­ial. Most of us have accu­mu­lated things that tie us down one way or another, often because we think they add to our sta­tus or pres­tige. Other attach­ments might be activ­i­ties we enjoy that ben­e­fit no one, includ­ing our­selves. What­ever it is, we can’t imag­ine doing with­out it. That is the hall­mark of an attachment.

“These ties might seem gos­samer, but they add up. They can bind us so tightly that we can scarcely move beyond the lim­ited cir­cle of our per­sonal likes and dis­likes. Imag­ine if your favorite pos­ses­sions were actu­ally attached to you. How dif­fi­cult it would be to drag them around even for a day! Yet the men­tal load we carry is no less bur­den­some. Shed­ding even a lit­tle of that load leaves us feel­ing as light and free as if we really did have wings.”

Read the rest of this arti­cle from the Blue Moun­tain journal.

Untying Our Wings