There was once a seeker who climbed a mountain to ask the old masters about freedom. At the summit, he found not one teacher but many, sitting in a circle around a small fire.
“I want liberation,” the seeker announced. “Tell me how to become free from my attachments.”
The Buddha smiled gently, stirring the embers. “You have already found the first treasure,” he said. “Most people never realize they are bound. They mistake their chains for ornaments, their cage for a home. You have seen the attachments—to family, to creatures you love, to the very patterns of your thinking. This seeing is not small.”
“But knowing is only the first gate,” added Laozi, his voice like wind through bamboo. “The Tao Te Ching speaks of this: ‘He who knows he has enough is rich.’ Yet you have discovered something deeper—that knowing about attachment is different from accepting that you are attached. One is a map; the other is the actual ground beneath your feet.”
Zhuangzi laughed, causing the fire to dance. “The butterfly dreams it is a man, the man dreams he is a butterfly! You say ‘there is no liberation without acceptance’—but friend, this very statement shows you already understand the secret. The mind that rejects its own framework is trapped by that rejection. The mind that accepts its framework can finally move through it like water flowing around stone.”
From the shadows, Rumi leaned forward, his eyes bright with wine that was not wine. “Listen,” he said. “In the Masnavi, I wrote of a man who searched everywhere for his lost camel, until he realized he was riding it. Your attachments—to family, to your cats, to the structures of your own thinking—these are not obstacles to your freedom. They are the very ground where freedom must flower. The Beloved does not ask you to love nothing. The Beloved asks you to love everything so fully that you no longer clutch at it.”
Epictetus, the former slave who became free in chains, nodded. “In my Discourses, I taught: some things are within our control, others are not. But you have found something subtler—that even our framework of mind is not quite ‘ours’ in the way we imagine. It is a gift we inherit, a pattern we discover ourselves already wearing. The Stoic path says: accept what you cannot change. But true acceptance goes deeper—accepting that acceptance itself is the door, not the destination.”
Krishna, radiant even in the mountain cold, spoke as if from the Bhagavad Gita: “Arjuna stood on the battlefield, attached to his kinsmen, paralyzed by love and duty. I did not tell him to stop loving. I told him to act with love while releasing the fruits of action. Your realization, my dear, mirrors his: attachment itself is not the prison. The prison is the mind that wars with its own nature, that denies what it feels while feeling it, that seeks liberation from the very capacity to love and care.”
Al-Ghazali, who once questioned everything until his own tongue fell silent, spoke last. “In The Alchemy of Happiness, I wrote that the heart is like a mirror. When covered with rust—the rust of denial, of pretending we are other than we are—it cannot reflect the Divine. But when we accept the rust, when we see it clearly and name it truly, the very act of acceptance begins to polish the mirror. You say you have attachments. Good. Now you can begin.”
The fire had burned low. The seeker looked around at these ancient faces, and something shifted in his chest—not a release, but a settling, like a bird folding its wings.
“So,” he said slowly, “the most important finding is not that I should become free of attachments, but that I have learned to see them without looking away? That acceptance of my own mind’s framework—with all its loves, its patterns, its very way of holding the world—is itself the beginning of liberation?”
All the masters nodded as one.
“The path to freedom,” Buddha concluded, “is paved with acceptance of what is, not dreams of what should be. You are already walking it.”
And so it is written in all the wisdom traditions, though the words differ: the truth that sets you free is not the truth about some distant shore, but the truth about the ground beneath your feet right now—the truth that you are already standing on sacred earth, attached and awake, bound and free, exactly as you are.
p.s: writing this in my way of grieving of our lost.
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
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