Vertical Living

Did you know that some of the greatest literary classics were authored in prison? Don Quixote was written by Miguel de Cervantes when he was serving a sentence. Pilgrim's Progress was penned by John Bunyan when he was imprisoned. The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi and The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru were written when the authors were incarcerated for political crimes. While the depth of their suffering provided the raw emotion, their solitude provided an outlet for them to express vivid ideas. Their dreams allowed them to look toward a grand horizon beyond the confines of the four walls of their prison cells.What is a prison? It is an enclosure that inhibits an individual’s freedom. It is sometimes made of bricks and mortar and sometimes by a few limiting ideas. Bricks and mortar can confine the body, but they cannot imprison the human will, imagination, or creativity. However, the prison of the mind—the prison of limiting ideas—is a stronger cage and can imprison a person even in a free world!Alcatraz was one of the most notorious prisons in history and several spine-chilling tales have been told about the life of its prisoners. Robert Franklin Stroud, known as the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” was one of the most violent convicts who served time there. As he transformed gradually and broke free of his mental prisons inside a physical prison, he began to develop an interest in raising birds. Over time, with persistent efforts he immersed himself in extensive research about the birds and became a of the most revered ornithologist who authored a book titled “Diseases of Canaries.” Great freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru who spent many years in prison were quite unperturbed by the hardships they had to face. They saw their time in prison as the cost of attaining freedom for their country. They were revolutionaries at the forefront of India’s freedom struggle and they were extremely driven by their inner calling. They endured years of harsh treatment in a government prison at the hands of the colonial forces. While they were physically bound by the walls of a prison, they were free from the prison of their ego and mind. They found the purpose of their lives by becoming freedom fighters, and used their free minds to author timeless epics in prison. These books are of eternal value to our society. We tend to live in mental prisons, where superiority and inferiority complexes can lead us to question ourselves and compare ourselves to others. We live with many limiting ideas that prevent us from connecting with our surroundings, and being a part of the bigger universe—the summation of infinite possibilities—or what I call as the whole. It is the universal whole to which we belong.