This is a wonderful, mythological story. If you become enchanted by yourself then you lose consciousness; then you don’t remain a human being, you become a plant. Then the humanity in you disappears, your inner soul is negated, you fall back. A plant has no freedom. Man is free, he can walk – a plant cannot do so, it doesn’t have feet, it has roots. Narcissus became a plant – it means that any person who gets caught in the reflections of the ego, his feet become roots, he stops; his pace stops and he loses his freedom of movement.

This happens to almost all people. The Upanishads say that when a man loves his wife, actually it is not the wife whom he loves but through the wife he loves himself. A man doesn’t actually love his children, but in the children, through the children, he loves himself. Children are a mirror, the wife is also a mirror. And every man is Narcissus.

The doors of the ultimate freedom cannot open with this kind of mental condition of man, in fact it finishes whatever

little freedom he has. You should have had wings so that you could fly towards the divine – but you lost even your feet!

Do you understand the bondage of the tree? It cannot move, it has to stand wherever it is, it cannot move even an inch from where it is standing. It is helpless, it has no freedom to move.

Man can move, he can walk. A bird can fly. But there is a limit to the movement of the body; at a certain point it gets tired, and that tiredness will become the bondage. And even if a bird is able to fly for miles, you cannot measure the sky in miles. It will get tired – there is a limit to the body. And freedom can be freedom only when it is unlimited. The freedom of soul is needed. When the soul has wings and it can fly without any limit, without any obstacle, without any chains, then that is moksha, liberation.

The search is for moksha. Your search for happiness is actually the search for this moksha. That is why every happiness of yours becomes a misery, because when you find that instead of salvation you have got bondage, then the happiness doesn’t appear like happiness. When you are in search of money, even that is for moksha. You think that with money you will get a little freedom, you will be able to move about a little. The poor man’s sky is small; a rich man’s sky is a little bigger, more convenient. But when you have money you find that your space, your sky,

has become even smaller than the poor man’s sky. The money did not give you any freedom, it has become a bondage. Now you cannot even give it up.