renunciation

Renunciation is the art of removing the barriers between one__ self and others.

When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly __n the world_ in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.

I wanted to be a sadhu. But what good would it do for me to be a sadhu in India? A real test of faith would be to go back to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping countries on earth [America] and be a sadhu there.

Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.

I never use the word renunciation at all. I say: "Rejoice in life,in love,in meditation,in the beauties of the world, in the ecstasy of existence--rejoice in everything!" Transform the mundane into the sacred. Transform this shore ino the other shore, transform the earth into paradise.And then indirectly a certain renunciation starts happening. But that happens,you don't do it. It is not a doing, it is a happening.

I once renounced my home in Calcutta, and roamed around the villages of Bengal as a monk. But after I attained the Absolute Divine state of Unification with the Universe, I realized that the purpose of life is not renunciation of anything, but the realization of the purpose itself.