The Power of Choice

Imagine being free to express yourself honestly every second of every living moment. Freedom of expression is not so much a right as it is a choice. Nobody can give it to anybody else. All are free to choose how they live so long as their choices do not infringe on the harmonious, loving and happy lifestyles of any other.

The modern world has seen an increase in integrated social spaces where men and women of varying ethnic and socio-political dynamics meet and co-exist harmoniously. On the surface level, everything seems to be as it should be. However when we begin digging deeper, we start finding that there are far deeper forces looking to further segregate our world. These are the archaic patriarchal systems of the world, which are owned by Them.

We all come across Them at some point or another. Them own pretty much everything you can think of that money can buy: education, politics, banks. It is Them who say how the world should be, Them who purport to tell us how our worlds should be.

However, we have moved into an age where more and more people are beginning to realize that there is no need for these patriarchal systems. We are all in this Universe together, bound by fate and expected by God to be everything that we already are that is pure and beautiful. Understanding that there is no one way of worship, and understanding that God goes by many names (Allah, Krishna, Jehova, Love, Buddha) is the first step to fully emancipating oneself from our enslaver’s ‘system’ (which is very reminiscent of what oppression feels like).

To clarify, it is oppression when someone is forced to live up to the expectations of being the ideal son or the ideal daughter; to be exact, it is Ideological Oppression at its most fundamental. These are the first roles that we learn to play. We are all actors from the instant we are born, and behind every man and woman lies a world of imposed expectations from birth. These roles have been preconceived generically for everyone from the second they are birthed, and everyone is expected to play along.

What these roles fail to take into consideration, though, is that ach living soul has a story, and all of our stories are linked in some way or another to millions of other narratives.

We, as a species, generally follow the same storyline. We are born, we go to school (crèche, primary, secondary, tertiary) where we interact with other bodies and minds, we fall in love, we suffer heartache, we learn to love, we die. Beyond this general storyline lies a plethora of side narratives: the time when you and that person did that thing that made you feel that way. All of our experiences share one other common factor: we chose to be wherever we were that time when that thing happened.

Life is a choice. To live a free life, a life where you can choose to be as you are without imposition from some or other institution which purports to know you better than yourself, is what we should all strive towards.

Them are not a bad lot at all. They have simply forgotten that we are all humans, and that no other is in any way, form or shape any better from any other living being. So, for the progression of the Human Revolution, we remind them of our wild, natural, intuitive power the best way that there is to revolt: art. After all, we do have Freedom of Expression. Accessing it, on the other hand, is a subjective choice.

Hare Krsna.