It is Slavery to live in the mind…

'It's a Slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body'

This quote from Khalil Gibran might be the most profound, far reaching and sane sixteen words we are lucky enough to have been given. 

Such a simple sentence and yet it conveys everything we need to know about human suffering and how it ends.

It is Slavery to live in the mind…

In one powerful word ‘Slavery’ Gibran describes the torture, restriction and compulsion of a life lived from an identified, believing mind. 

The mind’s premise is unquestioned and unchallenged. 

Its needs, insecurities, fears, shames, rules and limitations must be respected. 

The lived experience of self and other that it creates is taken at face value as actual reality. 

And the avoidance of anything that confronts this blindly accepted perspective is a given. 

The search for freedom takes place within these unquestioned prison walls. The mind and the experience of being that it creates is shackled to the conditioning that gave rise to it.

A no choice, no option compulsion.  Forced to live out over and over again whatever the mind creates simply because it looks like reality. 

Slavery indeed. 

…unless…

In one innocuous word ‘unless’ Gibran indicates that this existence of limitation and restriction is not the only way. There is a way that it changes. There is the possibility of freedom being realised. There is something else available, a different understanding, a different way of seeing this imprisonment.

…it has become part of the body. 

And in the final five words, again so simple and basic, ‘become part of the body’, he describes how this freedom happens. The only five words necessary for the mind to be understood and for its torment to be healed. 

This is the end of slavery. This is the end of the dictate of the mind. 

Freedom is here in the body.

The body with its real time sensations, its intelligent flow of information, its immediate responsiveness to real-time stimuli is the closest the mind can get to actual reality. 

The body contains the layers of emotional conditioning that create the lived experience of separation. It is in the body that these layers can be experienced, understood, healed and integrated. 

The mind, becoming part of the body, becomes part of reality. No longer isolated and exhausted fighting itself on its own created battlefield. 

And the perfection of the design is that it is the experience of mental slavery that shows the mind its own innocent confusion. 

It is Slavery to live in the mind and the mind, underneath the exhaustion, the believed separation, the defence and protection, knows this.

And, knowing this, the mind does what it was always designed to do.