Response by Learner NJ
Renunciation we aspire for is here and now. It is renunciation of I-ness, my-ness, the petty interests, desires, and ego, not just the show of renunciation by a dress or colour or gestures. Isha Upanishad says: everything is pervaded by God, so renounce it and enjoy. To be in world and not be affected by it like a lotus leaf dry in the water is the ideal. For even if one goes to a mountain or forest carrying his impure mind and impressions, he will think of the same things there also.
There is a mention in LS’ reply about purity. Purity is to clear mind of lower faculties. Mind must be a pure channel: each part carries its own role and doesn't interfere with others. This can be visualised as a pattern or design: intricate but each part correctly connected and related with other, and together it shows symmetry, beauty, order: One is reminded of Sri Aurobindo's “Place of art in the national education” where he advocates teaching art for Chittashuddhi: purifying the mind stuff. For pattern, order, beauty outside creates it inside. That is why perhaps before a religious ritual involving concentration often there used to be a contact with art -- through a rangoli or flower decoration etc.
Comment by Course Facilitator LS to NJ
NJ, your explanation of renunciation (of I-ness, my-ness, interest and desire) is good. Sri Aurobindo says that desire and ego are the two main knots that keep us bound to our false vision of things, desire primarily centered in the vital, and ego primarily centered in the mind. It is thus renunciation of these that must be done.
“…our renunciation must obviously be an inward renunciation; especially and above all, a renunciation of attachment and the craving of desire in the senses and the heart, of self-will in the thought and action and of egoism in the centre of the consciousness. For these things are the three knots by which we are bound to our lower nature and if we can renounce these utterly, there is nothing else that can bind us. Therefore attachment and desire must be utterly cast out; there is nothing in the world to which we must be attached, not wealth nor poverty, nor joy nor suffering, nor life nor death, nor greatness nor littleness, nor vice nor virtue, nor friend, nor wife, nor children, nor country, nor our work and mission, nor heaven nor earth, nor all that is within them or beyond them. And this does not mean that there is nothing at all that we shall love, nothing in which we shall take delight; for attachment is egoism in love and not love itself, desire is limitation and insecurity in a hunger for pleasure and satisfaction and not the seeking after the divine delight in things. A universal love we must have, calm and yet eternally intense beyond the brief vehemence of the most violent passion; a delight in things rooted in a delight in God that does not adhere to their forms but to that which they conceal in themselves and that embraces the universe without being caught in its meshes.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga
CWSA, vol 23-24, pp. 329-330
