RENUNCIATION— WHO NEEDS IT?

     We have all heard celebrated Advaitic teachers such as Ramana, Robert Adams, and Nisargadatta saying we must renounce the world, pay it no heed, ignore even your own problems, because they have no reality due to their ever-changing, transient nature. Zen masters say ignore emotions, ignore the internal energies that you feel, ignore inner visions, they are all Makyo--illusion.

But many hearing this say that this style of spiritual life is not for me. Why would I want to give up sex? Why do I want to give up love? Why do I want it all to leave this material world? Of course for these people, their deepest “spirituality” might be the heat yoga of some yoga center, which has almost nothing to do with real spirituality.

Many people feel in a quandary of “how do I quit this mundane lifestyle because I have so many responsibilities and relationships, children to care for, parents to care for?”

Naturally, formulating the problem in this fashion is to leave yourself trapped. So instead, we will take a Tantric approach.

Rather than saying we will drop all attachments to the world, seek and destroy all habits and attachments within the external world, and all relationships that keep us from going within, let us say instead, “We are going to seek the greatest pleasures within, because we know the pleasures of the world and how fleeting they are, and where suffering far outweighs the pleasures.”

Instead, the Tantra teacher or guru who knows that people do not readily take to renunciation, but are easily tempted by new and better pleasures, would say, the pleasures you feel now are so slight, so hollow, and so temporary, but if you turn within, you open to a whole new universe of pleasure that you could not even dream of before. You open yourself to the ability to open your heart fully, feeling completely relaxed in your own beingness, without any problems, obligations, or suffering.

When your heart opens, your entire body and mind relax, and you fall into an oceanic bliss. The more you can relax your heart, the more your whole being begins to relax, and with that relaxation all the energy centers within the physical and subtle bodies open up, communicate with each other, and coordinate consciousness and activities. You become totally in touch with what Robert Adams called the power that knows the way.

Now, you find instead of turning within providing experience of only nothingness, or quietness, or peace, that you are becoming immersed in something entirely beyond the physical body and its needs and pleasures. Instead you are immersing in your own sense of beingness, your sense of being alive, your sense of being something separate from your body, and which is witnessing your physical body. You have found what Aurobindo called the psychic body, or psychic self. And in due time you will find that this psychic self has infinite levels which you can explore for the rest of your life, in ever deepening and awe inspiring ways. This new world provides endless pastimes of self discovery and deepnening happiness.

Just a hair’s breath deeper than the opening of the heart experience, is feeling the energies circulating within your subtle body, whether it be of the Kundalini sort, the Chi sort, prana-experiences, or by any number of ways of categorizing the internal energies one begins to feel when one’s attention is on one’s own experiences of self, the experiences of existing as a living, sentient being immersed just in that sensation of being alive and feeling, of being sentient, aware.

Both women and men, but especially women can go deeper easily, and have the bliss of those energies transition from the heart to their womb and vagina, where they will begin to be able to experience spontaneous orgasms without even the thought of sexual intercourse, but in close-conjunction with the general openness of their entire being to ever deeper sensations than those provided by the external world.

These orgasms can become relatively continuous and can become deeper and more profound, and no longer centered in the sexual center, but will be felt throughout the entire body, and even as Stuart Sovatsky called some of them, pineal orgasms, with the ecstatic center of bliss being in the pineal gland under the brain.

What extraordinary motivation to go deeper than to have endless and deepening full body orgasms, or constant ecstatic blissful states of energies circulating in and around the body.

What wonders begin to unfold in one’s life, such as experiences of telepathy, or becoming sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field like birds feel, or being able to watch grass blades trope to follow the sun through the sky morning to afternoon. Some people will be able to see in the dark, while others will swoon with ecstasy under the light of the full moon.

But mostly the feeling you feel most intensely, an ever increasingly, is love, love for your own personal beloved, love for your family, love for your friends and for your nation. Love for animals, love for plants, love for all of existence. In fact, developing an ability to love just by practicing love itself quickens the deepening into deeper “spiritual” bodies within oneself, such as the energy body, the bliss body, the deepening awareness of the various energy centers within the multiple bodies a.k.a. Chakras, which penetrate all the experiential bodies.

One watches the Chakras each open up, each begins to radiate and to speak to the other energy centers within one’s various levels of subtle body, and all of your spirit becomes unified instead of scattered, dispersed, confused, and feeling hopeless.

With an integrated spirit, you gain supreme confidence in yourself, even knowing that the body and even the subtle bodies are transient because for some reason, the fear of death no longer bothers you, and no longer touches you, because you are realizing you are something beyond even all of the subtle bodies as well as your physical body, because you are aware of them in an ever deepening way, and ever more ecstatic way, but the witness is separate from all of these existential and experiential states. Thus the label is given of being Unborn, the absolute, or the noumenal Self.

In this path there is no renunciation of the external world; there is no conscious decision to become a monk or a nun; there is no conscious decision to give up the pleasures of the flesh, but there is a realization that the mundane world has nothing to offer in comparison to the excitement, the pleasure, the bliss, and the quickening of life found once you discover your inner life has vast riches to offer.

Eventually, the life force within you, the divinity within you, becomes pleased as Nisargadatta stated, by your efforts and love, and reveals itself to you in the most explosive revelation you have ever experienced that shakes your being and fills you with all, wonder, surrender, and worship of that life force, which later you discover is really you, you at the deepest level of being an incarnation of sentience, awareness, within the material universe.

This path requires no renunciation, only a turning within to find the wonders, bliss, and pleasure residing within your own being.

Also you find an increasingly intense, ecstatic, orgasmic love for other beings, and other beings walk with you hand-in-hand on this journey of unfoldment and enlightenment without renunciation at any point. And you also find that carrying out your duties in the world regarding your children or parents, your lover or spouse, your boss or employees, is still possible, and is done in a much more fulfilling fashion because you are not really attached to the situation, your real attachment is to consciousness, to awareness, to bliss and to love, but you can function in the world, and also go ever deeper spiritually.