Renounce Our Ideas About It (Ashtavakra Gita 1.2) - 20th October 2016

Ashtavakra Gita, in verse two, says: 'To be free, shun the experiences of the senses like poisons; turn your attention to forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity, and truth.' To be free, shun the experiences of the senses like poison; turn your attention to forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity, and truth. This is like a preparatory verse. Yesterday I was saying that maybe I should not have glossed over this verse so flippantly the last couple of times when I read it, and there's a feeling to share a bit more about this this time.

So now what happens is that we find very often that as the urge to discover the Self starts to appear here, it can feel like even the worldly realm, aided by the mind, the amount of temptation, the amount of desire to engage with these four aspects of our life seems to also increase. So the distractions, they start to appear. Many times we have seen this in Satsang also, that we could come to Satsang and just when some clarity is starting to emerge, it can feel like, 'I found the perfect love of my life. The perfect man is here, the perfect woman.' You're like, 'When is that going to happen for me?' So it can feel like, 'Oh, and maybe this is my Master's blessing for me.' Mostly it is not. It is this action which is starting to come and say, 'Yes, this is what I must do with my life. I found my life partner who will complete me, my soulmate.' It can feel like that. And then many, many, many times it can feel like it just turned out to be another regular relationship with all the ups and downs and just the personalities playing up, and all of these aspects can seem to show up again, even in relationships within the Sangha.

The sage has advised us—and this is the only really, the only phenomenally speaking words in this chapter—the sage is saying, 'To be free, shun the experiences of the senses like poison.' What does that mean? I'm not saying that you have to become celibate. I'm not saying that you have to renounce the world. But can we at least drop the meaning that has been given to all of this? This dropping, for me, is more important than trying to hide in a cave or getting away from day-to-day life. So the sage is saying, 'Shun the experiences.' I'm just making it even simpler for all of you and saying: let go of your interpretations and ideas about all of this. You will find that life becomes so spontaneous and moment to moment.

Turn your attention to forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity, and truth. So like I was saying, this is the only phenomenal, personal-seeming instruction given by the sage, where he is saying if you have to have—if you have a sense of what attitude I should have in this world—forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity, and truth are beautiful attitudes to take as long as you have the sense that you have some choice about these matters. Many times I've also said that when true spirituality comes in contact with the seeming phenomenal world, then kindness and love must be there. Forgiveness—all these are beautiful attributes: forgiveness, sincerity, kindness, simplicity, and truth.

So there's a sense that there's a question of how to be in the world also. In the past, there was this sense that if you're writing a spiritual document, there must always be some—it must be complete. What makes it complete? It must talk about the truth, but it should also give you a sense of what is moralistically right or wrong. No spiritual text was really complete—you take any type of religion, any scripture—without having a section of morality, all of these things: how empathy and kindness and truth, all of this. Now, maybe also this is there for the sake of completion; at least one chapter or one verse on how to be in this world to be included so that it's considered a complete text.