“Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.
Freedom is the goal of the universe.”
The trinity of bondage is a chain: ignorance, desire and inequality are three of its links—each leading to the next—in a loop that binds us indefinitely unless and until it is snapped.
Vedanta’s vision of reality is of one, infinite, perfect Being, beyond time (kāla), space (deśa) and causality (nimitta). Something inexplicable seems to have happened to this nondual reality. Since no one knows how, why and when it happened (or whether it even happened at all), the first link in the chain is ignorance (avidyā). It feels as if the infinite Being may have somehow been overcome by some kind of sleep. In the resulting dream, the infinitude disappeared and the infinite Being was reduced to a finite being. This seems to be the only way something so impossible may come within the range of possibility.
The original state of fulfillment lost, the dreamer began to desire (kāma) things which were believed to bring fulfillment. Desire coupled with will (icchā) produced intention (saṁkalpa) which led to action (karma). The world of action is also the world of inequality: inequality in the kinds of work and the kinds of results, and inequality among the people who reaped those results in different ways. Not for nothing did Swami Vivekananda say that inequality “is the source of all bondage” (CW 4. 329).
Trapped and bound in the vortex of karma, the inexorable chain of cause and effect, the dreamer is dragged from one day to the next, one year to the next, one life to the next. Death is no respite, as the power of unrequited karma leads to another birth and more karma which, in turn, leads to yet another birth. Every life is a new dream. Quite possibly, every day (not merely every night) may be a new dream. The wheel of karma is relentless in its movement.
At face value, karma produces both joy and sorrow. Good karma produces happy results and bad karma produces painful results. While this may seem to be a fair deal, it actually is not. It is atrocious. There is no way to keep the joy and avoid the sorrow. There is no way to have only one and not the other. Worse, the dream seems endless: the dreamer continues to experience mortality, imperfection and ignorance.
The trinity of bondage—ignorance (avidyā), desire (vāsanā), inequality (vaiṣamya)—remains firmly in place. The basic ingredients of human experience—namely, disease, aging and death at the physical level and stress, anxiety and alienation at the psychological level—are anything but fun. Even the fleeting and sporadic “happiness” experienced in life is severely compromised by the painful memories of the past and the anxiety-ridden uncertainty about the future. Which, in practical terms, means that life is basically suffering. This is the stark truth which formed the centerpiece of Buddha’s message. In the Gita, Sri Krishna referred to the world as “joyless” (asukham, 9. 33) and as an “abode of suffering” (duḥkhālayam, 8.15).
The good news is that none of this is real. All of this happens in a dream. The bad news is that the dream is continuing, even as I write this; worse, most don’t even know that they are dreaming. We are in the dream even as we read this. Unless the dreamer wakes up, the dream will continue to feel real.
The dream becomes unbearably painful for those who are sensitive to the defective nature of human existence. This is the truth of our present life, our present experience. Thankfully, it is a “lower” truth which can be overcome by a “higher” truth. As Swamiji pointed out, we are not traveling “from error to truth, but from truth to truth, … from lower truth to higher truth” (CW, 4. 147).
The higher truth comes to us through the trinity of freedom, which will be the focus of the next post.