As you get older, you’ve learned to become more like a stone. That’s what growing up includes. Now you’ve got to grow down, back to that pliability, back to that innocence, back to that availability, where you’re not holding anything. Because when death comes, everything you’re holding will instantly be gone.
You can grasp as hard as you want, and it’ll fly out of your hands nevertheless, as if your hands were greased. You will not be holding on to anything. So why hold on to it now? Why continue daily reinforcing the habit you’ve been taught of holding and grasping—and having what amounts to a closed mind and a closed heart? If you ask yourself sincerely, candidly, “could my heart be more open?”—how could the answer be anything but “yes”? And if you ask yourself sincerely and candidly and without guile, “could I actually have a more open mind,” how could the answer be anything but absolutely “yes”?
All your biases, all your judgments, all your hatreds, all your preferences—things that are very serious and things that are just ‘that’s the way it is for me’—all these things run the gamut, all of them can be shifted, and all of them can be on the way to diminishment. And that’s how you prepare for death, which is making a better life.
You will have a better life the more open you are, the more your grasping has left you. The more these habits have been eradicated, tamed, reduced, the more you will be available for what’s actually the very nature of life. And with all life’s sorrows, and all life’s pains, the very nature of life, nevertheless, is joy itself and love itself. So why would you want to hold on to these other structures and these other implants?—when what it actually does is hold back J & L (joy and love).
You will find no peace if you continue to grasp, even a little bit. The tiniest bit of grasping, a wisp of grasping, makes inner peace impossible. You can have a degree of it. But like a buoy in the ocean—it will bob up and down, and it won’t be the real inner peace.
Real inner peace is a steady state—and very, very active in you. And that grasping alone is enough to make it unattainable for real. You can have a lot of it; but that’s not the same as permanent, anchored, and continuous—without any change in the nature of it, so that nothing can move you. Nothing can cause you to have an over-reaction, nothing can cause upset, even in your system. You are so at peace. This is the peace of a Jesus, this is the peace of a Buddha, this is the peace of an Osho. And it’s attainable by you. You don’t have to be a high being.
Absolutely attainable—but only if you’re willing to give up the worldly focus. The worldly is not going away till you die. So you don’t have to give it up. What you give up is the focus, the concern in relation to it. And that’s the definition of renunciation.
So all those who are disciples, and all those who seek the spiritual way, have to understand: your understanding is not correct until and unless you understand fully that you are the activity of more and more renunciation, till you get to actual and true renunciation.
Which doesn’t mean you give up anything, lose anything, or let go of anything other than your identifications and attachments to the outside, to the world. And even to a degree on the inside, because we take it in… the more we’re identified, the more we’re attached, it becomes an inner thing too. It mirrors how we’re attached to what we experience as outside. So both have to be renounced.
“Renounce” doesn’t mean you’re against anything. Remember, you have associations with words that come from the culture, and the word “renunciation” has strong negative associations for most Western societies. And you’ve got to change that. You’ve got to make “renunciation” one of the sweetest words in your vocabulary. So it really is sweet in your ears when you think it and hear it. The same way the word “flower” or “honey” or “sugar” sounds to your ears, or “cake” sounds to your ears, that’s how the word “renunciation” or “renounce” should sound to your ears. I’m not saying I’m more advanced than you or somehow ahead of you if I tell you the truth that the word “renunciation” does have that quality for me; it sounds like the word “sugar.” So if I can do that, absolutely you can do that.
So the Guru is the presence of the encouragement to renounce, to change your attitude about what that means. To understand and to explain to you that it doesn’t mean giving anything up. It means opening yourself to all that is. It’s a huge gain, not any form of loss whatsoever.
🌿 Excerpt from Darshan with Swami Premodaya, JewelTree Center