Divine Life
Society Publication: The Doctrine of the
Bhagavad Gita – To Thine Own Self Be True by Swami Krishnananda
Even if you have renounced the
world, the taste for the world will not leave you easily. The world has been
abandoned but the taste for the world has not gone. Though you have not eaten halva
and drunk kheer for three months, you know its taste. Can you say the
taste also has gone? It will not go. The beauty of life, the fragrance of
things, the velvet-like comforts of life may not be there when you are living
like a sanyasin, but does the sanyasin know that such things
exist in the world? Even the knowledge that such palatable things exist is a
negative deficit entry in the balance sheet of the spirit of renunciation.
There is no use saying that we
have nothing. In some places, teachers of Yoga tell us that withdrawal of the
sense organs from the objects does not mean closing the sense organs and
plugging the holes of the apertures of perception. Really speaking, withdrawal
of the sense organs means 'not being even aware that the objects exist at all
as outside things'. That is real withdrawal. Being aware of something, and then
shutting the eyes to it, is quite different from not being conscious of the
externality of existences.
The earlier type of
renunciation is immature. It is of a type of working knowledge that you have,
not a qualified knowledge. The real renunciation is spiritual and not social,
material or physical. You are not socially segregating yourself from anything
materially or physically, which is actually what everyone does when one says he
has renounced family circumstances, and the like.
Now, the instructions in the
fifth chapter tell us that we are required to have another type of the spirit
of renunciation which is purely spiritual in the sense that we have not even a
taste for anything. "The pinnacle of Vairagya, or renunciation, is
reached," says a great master, "when you consider that even the joy
of Brahmaloka is like the taste of a dry straw." And what to speak
of the joys of this world? These truths are all beyond our heads at present,
but by intense practice and a hammering of these ideas again and again into the
mind we will find that it is not only possible, it is an essential.
When this detachment of a
wholly spiritual character takes possession of us, we become fit for direct
confrontation of the reality of life. This is the preparation of the
personality for the Yoga of meditation, as it is portrayed beautifully in the
sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.
Excerpts from:
On Renunciation: The Doctrine of the
Bhagavad Gita – To Thine Own Self Be True by Swami Krishnananda
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