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How Renunciation Can Happen?
In the Hindu system, in the yogic tradition, renunciation is a vital
necessity. Giving up! And the tradition is full of stories of people
who left their wives and children and went away into the jungle to parasite
meditation. My Master's teaching was totally different. He said, "We
do not renounce. As our level of being changes, unwanted things fall
off by themselves." Very much like when a plane lifts off the ground,
the earth falls below it. And he used to make a joke about that. He
said, "Imagine if a plane had to take off by pushing the earth
out into space beneath it." Impossible to the point of absurdity.
When it takes off, the earth remains behind.
So that is how, in our system, renunciation happens without our having
to renounce anything. Perhaps the greatest renunciation is this idea
of attachment to life, which is what we experience as the fear of death.
I do not think anybody is free from that fear, I mean, at any time.
The older we get, the more afraid we are of death. But with this fantastic
system of my Master, when the inner existence becomes something finer
and subtler, more or less in tune with that infinite existence of the
Divinity, this fear of death goes. Not because we think of death and
negate death, but because, in a very natural way, we have achieved oneness
with that eternal life, which we call divine life. And this body becomes
merely a vehicle for that achievement. It is as easy to leave it as
it is to get out of your car when you have come home. And that is how
my Master defines the ultimate state of human existence as, "Going
back home to that original home from which we have unfortunately descended
here."
In true renunciation we do not renounce anything. The objects which
have been enslaving us, they renounce us. It is not we who are attending,
it is the whole grasp of our attention which is making us slaves and
when our attention goes to something higher, automatically this attraction
falls of. Then there is no power in external objects of the world to
attract us, to enslave us, to hold us in bondage. When we start meditation,
this memory of our original home is strengthened in us little by little.
And as it grows, we find what Master very beautifully calls a state
of non-attached attachment.
True renunciation is impossible. We may give up our wealth, but when
you have it in the thought, it is almost as bad as having the wealth.
And it has the complication that we have the feeling of having renounced,
and then ego develops, "I have renounced." So egoism develops.
Therefore, renunciation has no benefit when it is an imposed renunciation.
But when the tendencies of the mind are slowly turned inwards, and the
mind is itself attracted by what it finds inside, the outside world
loses any charm that it has had upto now. And by the very loss of that,
there is renunciation. That is, instead of our giving up the world,
the world gives us up! Because now the mind is no longer externalized,
it does not go out.
In another way, we can say we are now looking outwards through the senses.
In spirituality, we try to go inwards with the senses, and here is the
great secret: because the senses cannot help us, we abandon the senses
without a second thought. It is not a conscious thing. It is like a
carpenter who takes different tools for different work. You cannot say
he is renouncing this tool in favour of another tool. I find this idea
of renunciation is a very troublesome idea for almost all people. It
is like a telephone. We use it because it helps us to speak to somebody
who is very far away. It does not mean that I renounce my voice or I
renounce personal communication.
Therefore, when we are able to accept the need to turn inwards, this
wonderful thing happens, which my Master has spoken about again and
again, that the senses lose their control over us, which they have now,
in a very very wrong way. This truth my Master put in a very short form.
He said, "Turn from here to here and there is every thing that
you have to realize."
Thus, Vairagya can be attained only when one is wholly diverted
towards the Divine. When it is so, one naturally becomes disinterested
in his own self, including everything connected with it. Thus he loses
not only the body-consciousness but subsequently the soul-consciousness
as well. What remains then is nothing but the "being in dead form
or a living dead."
It is not an accident that great saints, when they leave this world,
have to throw everything off. That is the final renunciation.
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