Freedom from’ is an abstraction, but freedom in observing ‘what is’ and going beyond it is actual freedom. We are going to go into this. Don’t look puzzled. But first, if I may suggest, just listen, not accepting or denying, just have the sensitivity to listen, and not draw any conclusion or assume any defensive reaction or resist, or translate what we are saying into your own particular language which is already loaded. The word ‘freedom’ probably in your own language, in Sanskrit, is already heavy with meaning.
And if you translate what is being said into your own particular language, then you are really not listening but translating into your language, through which you hope to understand, and you won’t. But if you will listen, listen to the English, of which perhaps you know, and if you listen as you listen to those crows, noisy, flying about, trying to find a tree for the night where they will be unmolested and be quiet, you listen to them, you can’t do anything about it, you can’t ask them to stop calling to each other.
You just listen and if you resist the noises they make, that very resistance denies the freedom from listening - the freedom to listen to the crows. And if you resist because you say ‘I want to listen to what is being said and they are making an awful lot of noise’, that very resistance is an act that prevents you from listening and therefore denies the freedom to listen.
Time being the past, time being thought, time is sorrow and therefore unless we really see the truth of this, we shall always live in conflict, in sorrow, in the prison of thought. I don’t know what you think, how you regard this question, not what your religious teachers have said, not the Gita, the Upanishads, your gurus, your social structure, your economic condition, but what you think, what you say, which is far more important than all the books put together, which means that you yourself have to find the truth of this.
And never repeat what others have said but find out for yourself, test it out for yourself. Not test what others have said - the Gita, the Upanishads, the Bible, your particular guru, the saviour, and so on - not what they say and test what they say, but test what you think, what you see. Therefore you are free from authority. We have to rely on scientific knowledge, other people’s experiments, other people’s accumulation of mathematical, geographical, scientific, biological knowledge. That is inevitable. If you would become an engineer, you have to have the accumulated knowledge of those who have accumulated mathematics, structure, strain, and so on - if you would be an engineer. But if you would find out for yourself what truth is, if there is such a thing, you cannot possibly accept the accumulated knowledge of what others have said, which is what you have done. – Jiddu Krishnamurti