Renunciation

TRUE RENUNCIATION


There is a famous story which describes a devotee who asked a spiritual master, “Will you please help me? I’m disturbed. I want peace.” The Master smiled, “You said ‘I want peace’. First drop the ‘I’ and then drop the ‘want’ and see what are you left with.”

Renunciation is understood to mean the giving up of physical and material wants, the renunciation of attachments, and simultaneously the adoption of an austere life to gain peace. The conclusion then will be that the common man can never hope to attain peace so long as he retains the material life. Thus, even a mother cannot expect to gain peace if she continues to be concerned about the child’s needs. Either they must both abandon their attachments or they must reconcile themselves to an existence without peace. However the sage Ramana Maharshi denied that such a choice was necessary and that man had no need to head for the hills to be tranquil. By merely dropping the ego, the false self, with its accompanying obsessions, one gets into the zone of serenity.

It is man, among all creatures, that is capable of amazing creation and horrific destruction; can his restless, inventive brain be harnessed and directed towards peace? The sages say that renunciation founded on ‘vivek buddhi’( discriminating and enlightened understanding) leads to peace. If one separates the essential (the grain) from the non-essential (the chaff) one is left with a rich, meaningful existence. By merely giving up a car or a house or a family while dwelling on them in mind at all times, no peace is ever possible.

A man renounced his family and wealth so he could be at peace as a sanyasi. He joined a band of roaming sadhus, slept in the fields, ate the food he received as alms and meditated. One day he was gifted a very ancient, original shastra. He was delighted. He spent months studying the tattered pages of the valuable, rare book. One morning when he awoke he discovered that the sadhus had disappeared and taken his book with them. Desolate and bereft, he mourned the loss and wept copious tears. In effect, the good man had unconsciously transferred his attachment from his family to the book, he had not been able to remove the attachment. By replacing one love-object with another he was right where he had started from.

Sometimes devotees dependent on their guru find it difficult to even make routine decisions without gaining sanction from him. Anthony de Mello described a similar situation where the sage tells his slavish devotees, “Light is reflected on a wall. Why venerate the wall? Be attentive to the light.” Ramana Maharshi explained, “If you can feel the presence of the Master where you are, your doubts are readily overcome, for the Master’s part consists in removing the doubts of the seeker.” The blind attachment to the “physical guru” rather than the “spiritual guru” prevents the devotees from moving away from the wall and towards the light, away from the physical form of the guru and towards the spiritual message.

True renunciation begins when we attempt to root our defects; if we begin to eliminate and erode the power of our flaws in our lives we get freer and nearer to peace. Whe we renounce defects rather than responsibilities we are nearer to the goal. This results in a better life not merely for us but also for the family and society at large. It is essential to see that we are making no paradigm shift if we are giving up one set of objects and replacing them with another; the paradigm shift is in doing away with the rough edges, the negative habits, obsessions, our emotional immaturity and so on. Whether one is attached to the family, a pet, a book or a guru there is still no real change. It is still the same old lady in a new saree. It is our negative traits and habits that stand in the way of our own freedom; when we begin weeding them out, we will be left with a peaceful garden of colorful flowers.
A friend’s grandmother summed it up well with these words: “ I don’t mind if you can’t do anything good, but make sure you don’t do anything bad.”