Everyone desires freedom.
Throughout a person’s life, there are three stages of freedom a person can achive.
- Freedom from your parents:
This is the first stage. As a child living under the care and protection of your parents, there are certain restrictions that you have to follow.
You have not yet the financial and physical ability to take care of yourself and have to rely on their support as well as their rules, restriction and mood.
To be free from your parents, you should learn to take care of your self as early as possible. Learn all the life skills necessary to strike out on your own. Skills like: how to prepare meal, how to drive, how to do laundry, how to get a job, how to find a room or apartment for rent.
Moving out of your parent’s place and be on your own is the sure sign that you have achieve the first stage.
- Freedom from your boss:
Although having a job frees yourself from your parents, it leads you to another restriction: your boss.
You are now under control and restriction of your boss eight hours a day.
To free yourself from this, you’ll need financial freedom. That is to have enough money to live that you don’t have to rely on a job anymore.
There are several ways to achieve this:
One way is to keep working but keep saving money and put them into investment until you can live off your saving and investment income.
Another way is create your own job and be your own boss.
- Freedom from yourself:
Once you have achieve freedom and many other goals that you set out in life, sooner or later you’ll experience that existential crisis.
You soon realize that the excitement of having goal and working toward it will be gone once you achieve such goal.
Wanting something and finding way to acquire them is fun and exciting but once you possess them you become dissatisfied and want something else. The cycle keeps on repeating and you realize that no matter what you do, you’ll be dissatisfied.
The thing is you’re not alone in such experience. Many people who seemingly have everything a human being would want stay in that dissatisfaction state.
For some, the solution is getting more exotic things and experience more experience the sensual, hedonistic world has to offer.
Some alter their mind which unhealthy and illicit substance to find temporary escape from never ending dissatisfaction.
The sad reality is that life is designed in that way.
It designs in such way so that life can perpetuate.
Fortunately, a great ancient spiritual teaching can help liberate yourself from this.
Buddhism have found a sound and logical way to help you liberate yourself from yourself.
And that is the ultimate freedom.
Its basic teaching is to free yourself from suffering/dissatisfaction .
Buddha and several others have achieve that freedom follow Buddha’s teaching and with diligent practice and adhering to that teaching, maybe someday we can achieve that also.