More on Renunciation

A friend and I were talking by phone last week. He had read my last post. He asked me if I was getting ready to renounce and abandon my family, move to Tibet, and live in a cave, all in pursuit of greater Truth. (I capitalized it in my mind when he said it.)

I laughed. I restated the point by Maharajji: if we are attached to anything more than to truth, then we compromise truth in favor of our attachment. He remained unpersuaded.

Renunciation has a remarkably bad reputation in 21st century America.

Two or three further thoughts along these lines, the first: I read this, this past weekend, by Lama Surya Das:

Last night across the globe, millions of new parents were awakened by the sound of a crying baby. Around the world, these parents responded by groaning as theystood up and made their way to the baby's crib in order to do what had to be done. All of these parents were renouncing, giving up, or letting go of their much needed sleep because they cared more about the well-being of a little child. The child's needs were more important than their own. Their parental love was stronger than their attachment to their own sleep.

Renunciation, an important and recurring spiritual theme, is not that complicated to understand. Renunciation means sacrificing or giving up something that seems important at that moment in favor of something that we know ultimately has more meaning. Each time we do this, we are making a spiritual choice -- a decision to go withthe bigger picture. ...

A spiritual journey almost inevitably begins with a decision to renounce a certain way of life. But that decision is less about changing your environment or letting go of people and things than it is about transforming your inner being -- learning the inner meaning of letting go and letting be in order to find wise naturalness and authentic simplicity.

I think it's important that we don't make the mistake of thinking that Buddhism or other genuine spiritual paths encourage us to walk away from responsibilities, friends, or families. Spiritual renunciation goes much deeper than any such external symbolic gesture. Kabir, the fifteenth century Indian poet-saint, said that he didn't wish to simply dye his clothes the saffron color of a holy order; he said he wished to dye his heart with divine love.

From Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Personal Spiritual Life, Broadway Books, NY: 1999, pp. 31-34, passim

Then, along the same lines, Ram Dass, from Be Here Now:

You may think of renunciation in terms of some external act like a New Year's resolution, or leaving family and friends to go off to a cave. But renunciationis much more subtle than that -- and much harder -- and much more continuing. On the spiritual journey, renunciation means nonattachment. To become free of attachment means to break the link identifying you with your desires. The desires continue: They are part of the dance of nature. But a renunciate no longer thinks that he is his desires.

Be Here Now, The Lama Foundation, 1971

Finally, (also) from Ram Dass, and the point I want to explore more deeply:

When I was in India, Maharajji said to me one day, "Nobody does hatha yoga anymore." I was surprised; I said, "No? But it's very big in America, Mahrajji." He said, "No, nobody does it anymore, because hatha yoga assumes that you've already finishsed with the first two practices of yama and niyama, and nobody does any of that now.'"

So there are eight sequential steps in the practice of ashtanga yoga, and we can see that it's the first step, yama, that has to do with the practice of renunciation. Think about it: We imagine we're so spiritually advanced because we're considering becoming renunciates, and we discovery that it's the very first rung on the ladder. We're just beginners!

Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita, Harmony Books, NYC: 2004, p. 137.

From this statement, Dass remarks on the different kinds of renunciation associated with the path of yoga as it is articulated by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. I chuckled as I read Maharjji's view of yoga. Perhaps because he was hanging out with the likes of Ram Dass in the 1960s, but Maharajji was mistaken. There are those, even in America, even today, who practice in some degree or another the yama-ic renunciations Maharajji looked for in vain: ahimsa (non-harming), satya (truth), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacharya (chastity), and aparigraha (letting go).

Devout Mormons do. So, too, do devout Baptists, and devout Adventists, devout Muslims and devout Catholics. At least, they do to with respect to some of them, and to some degree. Those traditions (and others, I'm sure) ask a lot of their followers. Mormonism is the tradition I know best, so I focus on it here.

Within Mormonism, this observation is often repeated: "A religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation." Of course, although the idea of renunciation and self-sacrifice is preached in Mormonism, it is seldom followed to the farthest extremes of its internal logic. Still, the teachings are more than just gilded ideals carved into architecture that never penetrate human minds and flesh.

For participation in the Mormon temple rituals, which the LDS Church teaches are essential for living with God after mortality, searching worthiness interviews by an ecclesiastical leader are required. Among the standard questions:

• Do you abstain from alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea?
• Do you live the law of chastity (for unmarried persons, this is complete chastity, for married people, it's sex only with one's spouse)?
• Are you honest in your dealings with others?
• Do you pay a full tithe?
• Do you fulfill any child support obligations?

The standard questions also include belief elements. Curiously, Mormons are sometimes best known for the strictness of their lifestyles, which, at 45 years of age, I find pretty easy to live by.

It is the belief criteria that disqualify me -- ultimately because of renunciation.

During my life, one of the things that I have held to most tightly, despite the pain that clutching has caused, have been orthodox beliefs.

I held to them when my experience suggested the beliefs were not correct. I held to them when my heart told me they were harming some whom I loved. I held to them when my mind told me that they were improbable. I held to them when every part of my mind and body told me of a world that did not conform to those beliefs. So why do I no longer hold them?

Maybe I'd have arrived at this level of renunciation eventually, anyway, but I got here because as I practiced hatha yoga (including the moral principles, that Mormonism so nicely instilled in me, and even though Maharajji said no one did those things), I began to have the experiences of hatha yoga -- the perception of complete Union with others, the perception of prana (energy), flowing through my body, the discovery of an "inside" to my mind, the discovery of meditation, finding other planes of consciousness.

My orthodox Mormon beliefs taught me (blessedly and paradoxically), that after all the mediation of scripture and leaders and authority, the fundamental way to discover truth is to experience it, and to prefer those experiences to any authoritarian statement to the contrary. My experiences in yoga and meditation were inconsistent with those tightly held orthodox beliefs. So, in the end, I let go of those beliefs.

Was that renunciation? Sure. But it was renunciation of the sort Surya Das describes with parents tending to a crying baby, rather than the, "I need to find a way to suffer, so that cave in Tibet is the right path for me." I hold no illusions about the pain that my renunciation has caused my loved ones. If I could find a way to truth that didn't entail that pain, I like to think I'd have taken it.

From the perspective of having let go, I'm beginning to think that intellectually defending a position that my heart disbelieved required me to look less to my heart for guidance, and that, in turn, made me more emotionally ignorant, less intuitively intelligent, than I have found I can be since I abandoned that effort.

Still, I don't want to suggest that I don't feel the pain of loss from what I have given up.

This past weekend, a confluence of events split open the wounds that I thought had begun to heal. I found myself wanting, desiring, wishing to believe. But when I looked, I found that I still didn't. I was frustrated. Unhappy. It wasn't fair.

Then, in meditation on Tuesday morning, I had a brief perception of the energy of the universe, and that it composed me, and flows through me and is me. And I was fundamentally contingent and a precious and ordinary conscious stage of the energy's flow, and -- therefore -- empty, all without denying my ability to choose and exist and be, for a time. And though I can't articulate a rationale reason why, that perception alleviated all the strife. It didn't make the pain go away, but it stopped the suffering.

And I realized that my desire to return to the belief context that I've stepped away from was the desire of a person who's just awakened and climbed out of a warm bed, looking back and wondering whether being awake is really better than slumber.

Renunciation

Monica's post about renunciation over on Buddhist in Nebraska got me thinking about the different ways that notions and the experience of renunciation work in my life. This evening, I ran across the following, about how commitment to truth requires a profound degree of renunciation, from Ram Dass' marvelous book, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

Ours is not a culture that has much appreciation for any path of renunication. Ours is a culture built on the idea that more gratification, sooner, is better. Gandhi said, "The essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation." That's certainly a hard sell here in the West, where everything keeps fanning the flames of our desires. ...

By Gandhi's yardstick, my own country with all its affluence, is not yet very civilized. If we look at what people do with their great wealth in America, we find that they mostly use it to try and create more and more sensual gratification for thmselves. And then when they're totally jaded with it all, and they begin to feel the inevitable falling away of their desires, they don't know where to turn. It's a dead-end street, because it all passes, it's all transient.

Once we see that, we're motivated to turn the process around. But as we start to do that, our minds sometimes get ahead of the rest of us, and we start giving things up in order to be "good," and not because we see that they're a hindrance and we're finished with them. We try to jump the gun on the process.

I've had my own experience of the difference between those two motivations in connection with the practice of fasting, which is a form of renunciation (we renounce satisfying our desire for food). Fasting was an interesting one for me, because I have always had an intense relationship with food. I learned from my mother to equate food with love, so by the time I was ten I was wearing pants in size double Z, with balloon seats. I was definitely deep into the oral trip.

Then it was 1967, and I was at the temple in India. I noticed that everybody there fasted a lot, so one day I said to my teacher, "Hari Dass, can I fast?" (Actually, I didn't say it -- I wrote it on the slate I carried, because were were maun, silent, at that time.) Hari Dass answered, "If you'd like." I asked, "How long should I
fast?" He said, "Four days would be good." So I asked him, "How long do you fast?" He wrote, "Nine days, on every new moon." I thought, "Well, if he can do it, I can do it." So I wrote, "I will fast for nine days." And I looked very holy.

The time came, and I started the fast. And then I proceeded to spend the entire nine days thinking about nothing but food. I thought of the Thanksgiving dinners I'd had as a child; I visualized the roast turkey....

I did complete the fast. I made it through all nine days. But the interesting question was, while I was so busy fasting, what was it I was feeding?

Three months later, when I did my next nine-day fast, I was getting much better. ("Better" -- a new ego trip!) Now I spent the whole time thinking only about foods I could eat as a yogi. So I thought about spinach with lemon on it, and steaming bowls of rice ....

Time passed, and then a few years afterward, I was back in India again. Some friends and I were staying at a little village, and it seemed like a good opportunity to do another long fast. But this time, except for the fact that at noon, lemon and water or ginger tea was brought instead of food, I never even noticed I was fasting. I was just busy doing other things instead of eating. About halfway through, I thought, Oh, this is what fasting is about. Far out!" It's not about renouncing food -- it's about renouncing hunger! I hadn't even known what it was all about before, because I was so busy thinking that the ego-tripping I was doing was tapasya, that it was an austerity of some sort.

I've come to recognize that the real tapasya happens when we are so ripe to do it that we just do it. We do it joyfully, with a feeling of "Yeah -- of course. That's what happens now." We do it with a feeling of "Whew! Now I can be rid of that one." It's a
release, not self-denial. Ramana Maharshi said, "I didn't eat, and they said I was fasting." Right there in that statement is the essence of tapasya. As long as we think we're doing the austerity -- "Look at me! I'm giving this up!" -- it's just another ego trip. Whatever we may think we're renouncing, we're just stuffing our egos with both hands.

pp. 134-136

A few pages later, he describes a personal crisis point he reached as he tried to implement Maharajji's two instructions to him: "Ram Dass, tell the truth," and "Ram Dass, give up anger." In trying to live consistent with those instructions, Dass insults and rejects the people around him, throwing a plate of food into the face of a man who serves it to him. He writes:

Across the way, Maharajji was watching. "Ram Dass!"

I went over and sat down in front of him. He said to me, "Something troubling you?"

I said, "Yeah. I can't stand adharma. I can't stand that in all of us which takes us deeper into the illusion. I can't stand it in them -- they're all so impure! I can't stand it in myself. In fact I hate everybody in the world -- except you." And with that I started to cry -- not just to cry, but to really weep and wail. Maharajji tried to comfort me; he patted me on the head, he sent for milk and fed it to me. He was crying, and I was wailing and wailing. And when I got all finished with my wailing, he said to me, "I thought I told you not to get angry."

I said, "Yeah -- but you also told me to tell the truth, and the truth is that I'm angry."

Then he leaned toward me, until he was nose to nose and eye to eye, and he said, "Give up anger, and tell the truth."

I started to say, "But..." -- and then, right at that moment, I saw my predicament. See, what I was going to say to him was "But that isn't who I am." And in that instant, I saw in front of me the image of a coffin, and in the coffin was an image of who I thought myself to be. And what Maharajji was saying to me was "I'm telling you who you're going to be, after you're finished being who you think you are."

Then I looked at all those people, all of whom I detested, and I saw that one layer down, one tiny flick of the lens, I loved them all incredibly. I suddenly saw that the only reason I was angry with them was because I had a model of how I thought it ought to be, which was other than the way it was. How can you get angry at somebody for being what they are? You're trying to outguess God. ... The next time you get angry, look closely at what you're angry about. You'll see that you're angry because God didn't make the world the way you think it should have been made. ...

So the practice of satya requires that in all our doings -- in our dealings with other people, in steering our spiritual course, whatever -- we stay as close to the truth as we possibly can. Maharajji said to me, "Truth is the most difficult tapasya." It's the hardest austerity, the toughest one to do. He said, "People will hate you for telling the truth." And sometimes they do. "People will laugh at you and taunt you, they may even kill you," he said, "but you've got to tell the truth."

The trouble is, we can only tell the truth when we cease to identify with the part of ourselves we think we have to protect. If we're afraid of being laughed at or taunted or killed, we can't tell the truth; we can't tell the truth if we're busy guarding some
position. It's only when we realize that we're not as vulnerable as we fear we are that we can afford to tell the truth. ... I can never be straight with you if I need something from you. So in order to tell the truth to you, I have to give up whatever that need is inside myself. That's why satya is a practice of renunciation; what we're required to renounce are the attachments that keep us from speaking the truth.

pp. 146-47

I have lived my life trying to get people to like me. Oh, I've been reasonably successful at approaching and approximating truth at times, but I've often resisted telling it straight, rather than slant, for fear of harming others.

Or so I told myself.

But in the past few weeks, in particular, I've begun to notice how much of my fear of harming others might be a cloak for my fear of de-friending myself -- a fear of losing what I so strongly want -- connection, love, validation.

Am I ready to give up that desire? Not completely. Not yet. But I am, with the ideas of Monica and Ram Dass, beginning to see that my attachment to such relationships is not entirely benign, and that it may, curiously, be harmful.

More than worth a click

Click this for an hour's worth of Ram Dass at his best -- warm, funny, wise, perceptive, open, and the curious amalgam of Eastern and Western that feels most natural to me. The link is to the first half of remarks he made recently in Santa Barbara. More to come.