When someone says renunciation, people have all kinds of ideas. They think it is about leaving your family or getting away from it all and going to some cave to meditate. That cannot be further from the truth. So let’s demystify renunciation today.
Renunciation means a spontaneous wish to attain liberation (Mukti, Mox) from Samsara. This requires a careful look at the definition of Samsara. For a lot of people who are of Indian origin, Samsara typically means day-to-day life. That is not Samsara at all. Samsara is this endless cycle of birth and death. If you think about it, we have been going through this cyclical process of birth, death, birth for eons. Idea is to get out of that wheel.
Why would we want to get out of this circle you may ask? If you look at it, Samsara is full of suffering. We go through the suffering of birth, aging, sickness, delusions, death, and then rinse and repeat! Let’s look at each of these individually.
Any woman who has given birth will tell you it is no joke. If the full-grown adult is having so much pain, can you imagine what a baby goes through during the birthing process? Even before the birth, in the mother’s womb, the baby goes through suffering. When a mom drinks something cold, the baby feels like she is taking a cold shower, and exactly the opposite when mom drinks something hot.
Once we are born, for initial weeks and months, we don’t know how to convey our wants and needs. The only thing we know is to cry and to move our limbs around to get attention. That has to be a frustrating experience. Not being able to communicate you are hungry or you are in pain.
As we grow, the suffering of sickness is one of those things that can sneak up on you at any time. When sickness strikes even the most healthy amongst us can get knocked out. It can take away our daily joys and make us feel unpleasant. When we feel ill, it is like a soaring bird that gets shot and comes straight down to the earth. We have no strength. We get frustrated and sometimes are dependent on others for our day-to-day activities. Our medical team may or may not be able to help us. If our sickness is incurable and if we are not exposed to spirituality, we may feel anxious, fear and regret.
No one can escape from this next suffering called aging. All of us age and with age comes age-related issues. The simple task of getting up and down becomes a chore and is painful. When we are young, we can travel around the world, however in old age, just getting out of the house is very difficult sometimes. We lose our eyesight and ability to hear as we age. Our memory fades and we tend to repeat ourselves – I feel like I am already experiencing this one😊Things we used to enjoy when we were young, no longer appeals to us and we are not able to enjoy those same things anymore.
At the time of our death, we don’t want to let go of the possessions we have accumulated throughout this lifetime We feel sorry about leaving our loved ones behind. We have to leave everything and everyone we are attached to and that creates sadness for many people.
There are other sufferings beyond the four basic sufferings of birth, sickness, aging, and death that we discussed here. We all suffer from our delusions. These delusions bring us anger, attachment, hatred, confusion, jealousy, and so on. When we get angry for example, sometimes, we can feel physical pain. It also creates tremendous mental suffering. It affects our health. These sufferings prevent us from enjoying life. We suffer from environmental factors such as recent weather extremities in Texas. That causes people to lose their shelter, temporary displacements, and so on. We suffer from not having our desires fulfilled. Even when our desires are fulfilled, they may not get fulfilled in the way we want them to be fulfilled. With wealth comes its issues and that could be temporary as well.
So as you can see the cycle of birth and death tends to bring suffering. The only way out of this is to strive for liberation. We should make a spontaneous wish to get out of this endless cycle and make a determination to attain supreme inner peace of liberation.