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Good morning. It was an audacious but short-lived prison break for Daniel Khalife. Now, he’s back behind bars. But what motivates such a risky breakout? Was it the poor conditions in prison? The lack of staff supervision? Or just, that human beings universally yearn for freedom. Perhaps this story resonated with me as I and thousands of Hindus celebrated the festival of Janmashtami last Thursday and over the weekend. One episode crucial to the history of this ancient festival involves the imprisonment of Vasudev and his wife, Devaki, by the King of Mathura, who feared that their child to be born would be his downfall. When Devaki delivered a son, her husband managed to smuggle him out of the prison and hide him with friends in a nearby village. He then crept back into the prison-house to hide the fact of his son’s birth from the King. Vasudev understood that walls and shackles aren’t the only things that suppress our freedom. The Vedic texts tell us that the constraints we impose on ourselves are much more restricting. On Monday I attended an online webinar hosted by the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation. This international charity funds scientific research into promising techniques that may help us expand what they call our Perception Box: a metaphor for how a person’s perception is skewed by their beliefs, biases and internal narratives. The Foundation supports initiatives both new and traditional, secular and spiritual – whatever can be shown to be effective. The Vedas agree with this concept of the Perception Box. There’s an old Sanskrit saying: As I see the world – so I expect everyone else to view it the same way. This is how we develop attitudes, judgements and prejudices that damage both our relationships with others and our personal peace of mind. We can misinterpret diversity of opinion as dissension; differing priorities as challenges; or regard varying allegiances as disloyalty. The Bhagavad-gita repeatedly encourages us to free ourselves from those mind-sets that imprison our thinking. It asks us to purify our intelligence, release ourselves from envy and ill-will towards others – and to cast off any sense of prestige and privilege that comes at the expense of others. Breaking out of prison might be against the law, but the Gita proposes that any attempt at liberating ourselves from the confines of our own engrained thinking is commendable. If we can, even for a moment, see the world without the filter of our own prejudices, our stories and convictions – it might free us to become more open, more curious and inwardly more peaceful.