We're not free because our minds aren't free; they're hampered by limitations we may barely be aware of. In a certain sense, we have to get out of our minds to find the energy to see what our limitations are.

The first limitation has to do with the idea that we even "have" a mind. There is a level of the universe that is the level of mind that we, each of us, experience, but we have no claim on it. You can't say it's yours. It happens that you have been given the gift of participating in a level of the universe that is very subtle, very fine, the place where things come into being first. Call it the creative hotbed—that's what we're connected to. We're given a free pass to go into this realm, but we can't have it.

So we have this capacity to move in the fields of the mind as long as we don't insist that it's ours and make no claim to how marvelous it is or how sluggish it is or whatever other negative thing you may want to say about it. So the first limitation is this idea of possession, which, if you eliminate it, removes all our other ideas about "how smart I am" or "how stupid I am" and everything in between. So you can have free access to mind, but you can't have mind.

But what is this "mind" we're talking about it? The mind is clear. It's precise, unlimited. You get a sense of its nature with a baby—the kind of expansiveness you see there, how everything is cause for wonder and nothing is dismissed or categorized out of existence. And as children grow, you can see how that world gets narrower, more confined. Who hasn't mourned the loss of a child's innocence with the passing of time? What we're seeing and acknowledging is the imposition of limits, the draping of chains across a child's future.

It starts with parents, of course. They love us but they give us limitations. The child, acting in the brilliance of the mind, drops the spoon of oatmeal from the highchair to the kitchen floor. It's only looking to see how things work. That's what children do—experiment with reality to see how things work, to understand how the laws of the universe work. And the parents look at the glob of cereal on the floor and scold the child.  It makes a mess, it's not nice, and so on. They have all the good intentions in the world, but they're hauling out the chains and—however reluctantly, however unknowingly—putting limitations on their child.

Then it's on to school. Need I go on? The child gets there and what do they do? In the face of the immense world of the mind, we give them "one and one is two, two and two is four..." You know the rest of the story. You're the product of it. And you know it doesn't stop with graduation. We leave school, walking through our days like Marley's ghost, finding new chains to wrap around ourselves. We're haunted by the memory of all the limitations that were ascribed to us—whether by loving parents or benighted teachers. We come to believe in them, make them our personal creed. We know, we just know, that we can't sing or hit a ball out of the park or live without fear. We've been told, been warned, even threatened, and we've become believers.

In this way, we build up a picture of ourselves that may as well be set in stone. We see ourselves as people who can only do a small set of things, people who believe the very worst about ourselves. Draped in the chains of limitation from childhood, we wear our rusted, useless outfit voluntarily, even proudly, like a new suit. Our limitations become badges of honor, something we honor with our belief and behavior.

This built-up self-image would pose an impossible situation if it weren't for the ability we're granted to observe this sorry predicament. The ability to observe is one of the great gifts of being human. With observation, we can disentangle the knots that have formed in our chain suits. We can disentangle and eventually throw off the chains if we're willing to make the effort.

This isn't an easy task. Most of us don't even want to throw off our chains. Having accommodated ourselves to them, we begin to wonder if life is even possible without their alleged "protection." Draped in chains of fear, nothing gets in, and nothing gets out. It's like the story of the storming of the Bastille—when the French revolutionaries broke into the worst parts of the prison and declared the prisoners free, there were some who had been so worn down by their imprisonment that even a notoriously foul prison cell looked better to them than the risk of living life as a free man. It's critical that we don't become so inured to our lack of freedom that we begin to mistake it for its opposite.

When a child comes to his mother and puts his sneaker in her lap and says, "Mommy, untie this for me, I can't do it," she becomes the mistress of unknotting knots. It's observation that allows her to do that; she can see what needs doing and take the proper action. That's exactly the same process we can use to free ourselves.

However, instead of acting like adults, we often assume the role of the child with the knotted sneaker. We look to others to do the work we need to do. We look to shrinks or gurus or the latest New Age fad to do our work for us. That's a trap. Every person has to do this work for themselves. Everyone is able. It's fine to ask for help, but ultimately no one can do the work of self-observation that needs doing but the person trying to escape her chains. If you think you can't, you're already putting limitations on yourself, repeating the old pattern. This untangling is what we're put on earth to do—to recognize the limits we're faced with, observe the exact nature of the chains we've lived in, and break through to freedom.