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In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. Peace and blessings be upon the Prophet Muhammad and his family. And upon his family and his companions. Madhu, I’ve run the sisters. In my view, if there is one single differentiating factor which separates people who are free, not enslaved in their minds, from people who are enslaved, is to look at and see how they take care of their surroundings. Now, as you can see here, this is a development on a golf course, villas on a golf course. I challenge you to find one piece of plastic, one scrap of paper, one empty bottle, one anything that would qualify as trash, anywhere, near a house, away from a house, anywhere, on the golf course. You won’t find a single thing. Even if this was to be said about one particular place, it would be remarkable enough, but this is the default. This is the default. Except in places where, and this is America, also in America where you have the poor, the homeless, refugees and so on. And the first thing that hits you is the filth, the garbage, all the trash around everywhere. Now, I’m not being critical of poor people. I’ve been poor myself. But I want to differentiate between having resources and taking care of yourself and your environment. The two do not go hand in hand because I know situations, in India, for example, where you go into a house of a person who is a, may not be a billionaire, but certainly a millionaire. And in India, millionaires have billionaire lifestyles. So you have this fantastic house. You have people who are all over, you know, doing wonderful things, living in beautiful lifestyles, fantastic houses, furnishings and whatnot. But clothes strewn everywhere, shoes everywhere, expensive stickers. You know, each one would be worth more than somebody’s salary for a month or a year maybe, but just throttle. You get into one of their cars and it looks like a trash can on a wheel. In India, you go into somebody I’ve been in, somebody’s people’s houses, people who are not billionaires, but definitely millionaires. And in India, alhamdulillah, millionaires live the lifestyle of billionaires. You know, servants and this and that. But you go inside the house, it has, it’s a beautiful mansion. Inside it has fancy furniture, expensive stuff. Some of them even have a kitchen to show and a kitchen in which actual cooking is done. So, as we say, in Urdu, we say, yes, it’s okay, the teeth of the show are different, the teeth of the food are different. Which is not strictly true, but you know, so we have this Dikhanika Kitchen Egg or Khanika Kitchen Egg. Or the one in which food is cooked, the Dikhanika Kitchen, the one in which food is not cooked, it’s only for show. We have the most fancy kitchen appliances and stoves and god knows what. Never touched. Absolutely pristine condition, but to show people. Allah have mercy on us. We’ve gotten used to this very, you know, lifestyles which are very destructive. So, anyway, to come back to my point. So we have people with all these resources, fancy places. We’re talking about change in the mind, mental enslavement versus mental freedom, true freedom. So we have these people who are really mentally enslaved. So they are, they have the resources, but they don’t take care of them. And to me, as I said, the biggest and best sign that somebody is free is that they take ownership of their lives. They don’t live their lives as if it belongs to somebody else. Not my job. I don’t need to take care of it. As I showed you, as you can see, as I’m walking here, place is taken care of. And obviously, some of it is taken care of because the development, the golf course does it. But the maintenance fee here is, it is roughly $500 per quarter, which means you’re paying $2,000 per year. For your surroundings of your house to be maintained. So you may be doing some things yourself, as in by your own hand and some things you might be paying for, but people are paying for that. When you go for a walk, you see people walking their dogs. You see people walking their dogs. You will find people with those people with either carrying a plastic bag with something in it or they have plastic bags in their pockets. And in parks and so on, there are boxes, dispenser boxes, which are free. And there’s a trash can under that dispenser box. All of these are meant to pick up the dog’s, what they call dog eggs. So you know what it means, right? So when the dog does what a dog does, they just don’t walk away. They pick it up and they don’t just pick it up and throw it there. They pick it up. They take it with them and carry it to this bag. And they take it to a place where there is a disposal for it. And they dispose of it in that particular place. Signs that these are people who are free in the mind. They’re not enslaved. They own. They feel that they own the place that they’re in. And what’s the best, most reliable sign of ownership is you take care of that place. Who are your children, children you own, your own children are children whose bills you pay. Any other child, you may love the child. The child may love you and it might be a student, might be a child which is, which is demented enough to have you as a mentor. But it is a child who is not yours. And so you hand the child back to the parents. When the time of the child is done with you, you give the child back to the parents. When it comes for bills to be paid, you don’t pay the bills of that child. The child’s parents pay the bills of that child. I’m just going around this little thing here because there are sand hill cranes on the other side. You can see them now. Magnificent birds. Many of them sometimes a meter tall, sometimes more. Fantastic birds. This is a resident flock. They’re all over America, North and South America. They winter down here in Florida and further south in the Mississippi. And they, they go to their nesting grounds in Canada in the summer. But there are two resident flocks. One is resident in Florida, doesn’t go anywhere. And this is one of them. It’s a part of that flock. I’m told that the resident flocks are not doing so well. You wish them well, such beautiful birds. So I’ll look at that. Big deficient one standing there. So take care of the environment. Biggest lesson to teach your children. Take care of the environment because it is your environment. It’s not somebody else’s. And if you don’t take care of it, guess who suffers? If your house is like a garbage can, if your car is like a garbage can with wheels, and it doesn’t matter how expensive that car is, it doesn’t matter how, what kind of brand it is. It can be a Rolls Royce, but it’s still a garbage can on wheels. And if that’s what you want to live your life, that’s how you want to live your life, then remember that that is the life of a slave. A person who is mentally enslaved. And true freedom is always in the mind. Freedom is always in the mind. As Nelson Mandela said in his prison in Robben Island, he said they can imprison my body, but they can never imprison my mind. And that is the truth. That is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. May Allah the Almighty grant us the ability to do that. Now when you do that, when you have, when you live as if you own the place, then you create some beautiful surroundings. And as I said, guess who benefits? Right? Guess who benefits? So, teach your children this, to take care of their surroundings. Because that is a sign of true freedom.
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