Ultimate renunciation

There are two ways in which the sense of oneself, as `I', arises. And both have to be constantly, incessantly, without stop, discarded, if one really wants to reach where one has set out, spiritually. This is the highest renunciation. Which explains why, not so intriguingly, all ancient texts say that the person (Jnani) can do what he/she wants once self-realised. Which explains Dattatreya or Janaka....But that is  some other subject altogether. Here, what is being discussed is that simply, even as the sense of what one is experiencing -- in the two ways that one normally feels oneself -- is discarded, then something is won in that spiritual battleground where the unreal (felt so very real) and the Real (not felt at all, but there all the time) are pitted against one another.

Below, the two ways in which the sense of I, what is referred to as Ahamkara (or the ego self, in yoga) arises:

One, it comes from within, incidental to who you are and therefore what you feel. For example, you feel, I am a woman. I wish to marry a man. I wish to bear a child. I wish my child to be the best in the world.I am envious of her. Etc. Etc.Etc. I am a yoga teacher. I like this asana. I hate that practice. Anything or everything everything that arises from what oneself feels... This is created by so many details (samskaras) of who one is -- gender, nationality, factors even like genetics, profession, period in which you are born, so many things to create the soup of what you are as a person.
The core thrust of such an event, is, thus: I am feeling irritated. I am feeling happy etc.I am feeling this, I like that, I do not like that (raga/dvesha). 



Two, it also comes from external triggers. He has irritated me. She is making me happy etc. The movie is lousy (meaning, I do not like the movie).

Both types of experiencing life, and oneself, constantly recreates the illusion of an `I', which even neuroscientists are finding out, is quite an illusion. But since this sense of the I is a steadily flowing, creating hte illusion of one solid image, we are attached to it. We have no choice. It obsesses us. So we need sensations (vrittis), feelings (even negative, and often negative ones) to help us constantly recreate the illusion of the self.

But for a serious meditator, there is only one goal -- this continuous discarding of both experiences.


Clearly, this is not everybody. Because it means a disintegration of a reference point. Without that, you could simply go mad. Or become realised:)

As Osho says, the lunatic and the saint, both are mad. But the lunatic does not know he is mad. The saint does.
So, an extreme sensitisation to this swirling twigs and flotsam of I, as they arise, and to constantly discard them even as they flow past ... That is where the you can discover That, of which they speak in glowing terms. Only after the constant debris of the I has been cleared.