What is freedom? What is the ideal free state? What state of environment is 'heaven'? These are eternal questions which have been, through ages, drawing out human endeavours for satisfactory answers.
Tagore has defined freedom, and the state of 'heaven' stemming from this freedom, excellently in this poem:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
I find that very appropriate. That is true freedom - freedom culminating in a truly progressive society, a society celebrating, and living by, the human magnificience and excellence in its highest aspects.
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