7

Renunciation and Purification

Throughout the Gita, we come upon references to the role in a spiritual life of practices that would be called renunciation. They are related in a certain way to sacrifice; they are acts of purification, designed to cut us loose from the bonds that tie us to the worldly realms. The Gita doesn’t go into those practices in as much detail as we might expect, because the underlying assumption is that everybody already knows about all them. The Gita wasn’t written with our present Kali Yuga mentality in mind—the mentality of the dark age in which we live, an age when we’ve gotten totally lost in worldly things.The Gita assumes that Arjuna would already know and practice all the acts of purification that most of us are just beginning to consider.

Practices of purification are essentially techniques for putting ourselves in a position where we are prepared to experience direct, firsthand knowledge of the Brahman. They do that by creating a structure through which we can draw back from the things that keep trapping us, the things that keep creating karma for us all the time. That is, all of the purification rituals in Hinduism (and there are rituals in Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most other religions as well, by the way, and the practices all overlap), all of the renunciations, are done in order to cool us out, so we’re not generating so much heavy karma for ourselves. Until that happens, we’re constantly preoccupied just with the stuff we’re creating every day. The minute that preoccupation lightens up a bit, we have a space where we can start to refocus, and deepen our meditation. And then, with the deepening of meditation, will come the higher wisdom.That’s the principle behind the practices.

Now, in a way, purification is a hype.You take your body, just as it is, and your mind, just as it is, and your feelings, just as they are— and right here, in this very place, lies the Brahman, the enlightened state. It’s right here! It’s right now! It’s not there or then, it’s not in India or Tibet, it’s not being kept secret by “him” or “her,” it’s not in this book or in that book. It’s right here, and you are it—right now.

Okay, so then what’s the point of purification? What, in fact, is the point of any of these practices, if we already are the Brahman? They’re to get rid of whatever in us prevents us from really knowing who we are at this moment. See, from a practical point of view, we’re faced with an interesting paradox. At one level of our intellectual understanding, we know that we already have all the riches—we know that we are the atman, that we are the Buddha, that we are free. We know all that. But if we look inside, we’ll notice that although we know it, we somehow don’t believe it. And that’s what all the purification methods are about: getting us from where we seem to think we still are, to where we don’t think we’re anywhere anymore. Hence we have all these practices, like karma yoga and jnana yoga, like sacrifice and mantra, like renunciation and purification. All of them, by one route or another, are designed to get around that roadblock between our knowing and our believing.

Just to frame our discussion, here are a few slokas from the Gita:

“For the man who forsakes all desires, and abandons all pride of possession and of self, reaches the goal of peace supreme.”

“Know that a man of true renunciation is he who craves not, nor hates; for he who is above the two contraries soon finds his freedom.”

“When in recollection he withdraws all his senses from the attractions of the pleasures of sense, even as a tortoise withdraws all its limbs, then his is a serene wisdom.”

The attraction of our senses is what keeps us stuck, and the purification process that the Gita seems to be recommending here is to renounce the senses—to detach the senses from their usual objects, for hither and thither the senses rove. Remember that the buddhi, which is the soul, can be pulled downward by the lower mind, the manas, which in turn can be captured by the indrias, the senses, which are fixed on the sense objects. Those are the levels of it: There is sense object, there is sense, there is mind-that-knows-sense, and there is higher mind, which can be caught in the worldly pull outward, can be drawn into the thinking mind and the senses. If it resists the pull of the senses, if it withdraws and turns inward, it becomes instead a recognizer of the atman. That process is promoted by our acts of purification.

We’re gradually extricating the buddhi from being snared by sense objects, and we’re using different approaches to get there. We’ve talked about some of them before—that we can draw the mind back from the senses, saying, “I am not my eyes. . . . I am not my ears. . . .” Or that we can work on the mind directly, as we do with meditation, quieting it down so it doesn’t respond any longer to the pull of the senses. Or that we can fill our minds with the wisdom of that-which-is-beyond-all-this, because that wisdom in turn loosens the pull of the senses.

When we adopt any of these techniques—when we sit down to meditate, for example, and to withdraw our senses—we suddenly discover how agitated our minds really are, how full they are of this and that. Monkey-mind, they call it in India. The same thing happens as we enter into any practice—mantra, japa, prayer, whatever.We see how distracted we are by all the wordly desires that keep pulling on our consciousness. So we start to look for ways to quiet the agitation, and that’s when practices of purification and renunciation start to attract us and to become part of our lives. Maybe we start to pay more attention to our diets, to the way we take care of our bodies.We start paying attention to who we hang out with, what we fill our minds with, what we think about when we’re not meditating—because we see that all that stuff is feeding into the agitation that is keeping us from meditating.

The amount of toxin that builds up in us is amazing. Let’s say you’re driving down the street, and somebody cuts you off.You think, “Why you so and so!” and that—just that!—the vibration, the energy, that’s fed into the system by that one thought, resonates and resonates, stirring up anger and putting all the passions to work. That’s not the kind of mental setting that’s optimal for meditation. So maybe we start renouncing that rush of righteous rage; instead, we take a situation like that and turn it into a moment of purification practice. There’s a kind of fire, an inner fire, that comes with letting go of our anger at a moment like that, and that’s the fire into which we make our offering. We offer our anger to our awakening. Swaha!

We find that we have to keep living in the marketplace until we learn how to transmute its energies—all its energies. We start to watch for the things that capture our consciousness so we can get free of them. For example, when we look at what captivates our minds, we’re likely to find amid the collection our attachments to our various cherished possessions. They pull on our minds because “where your treasures are, there will your heart be also.” So says Jesus. If your “treasures” are your possessions, that’s where your heart will be.

Let’s say, for example, that you own a very beautiful, priceless something-or-other. You sit down to meditate, but before the meditation can take you beyond yourself, here come these powerful thoughts about the need to protect that something-or-other: “Is it really safe? Did I lock it up securely enough? Can vandals get it?” Whatever. We are chained by the chains of our possessions.

Possessions don’t have to be physical things, of course; possessions can be emotional possessions, or intellectual possessions.You start to meditate, and you have this really great idea.You think, “Gee, I mustn’t forget that idea, because I’ll bet I can make a million on that one.” Or how about, “I have to remember that idea, because it’ll help all humanity!” That’s a nice one, right? Then you try to meditate. Every time your mind starts to get quiet, to get beyond thought, you grab back at the idea for fear you’ll forget it. Not yet is our faith strong enough to trust that if it was a good idea, it’ll come back; trusting takes deep faith.

In time, we begin to see the way the bonds of our attachments, be they physical or intellectual or emotional ones, are keeping us from something we want much more than we want the stuff we’re attached to. That’s when we start to see the appeal of reducing both our physical and our psychological possessions, to bring a kind of clean simplicity into our lives. I used to fill every corner of every place I lived with things. First I needed a record player and a good hi-fi system. Then there were my books—shelves and shelves of them.There were beautiful tapestries, soft things, warm things, bath salts, incense, wines, foods—I surrounded myself with a luxurious cave of stuff.

But then, as my practices deepened, I noticed it all starting to get simpler and simpler. I didn’t need all that stuff around me anymore. And now, when somebody gives me an empty room with white walls, and I put my mat on the floor and sit down, I’m really just about as content as I ever was with all of that stuff. My life has gotten simpler and lighter, simpler and lighter, because I’ve found that the rush of experience isn’t nearly as interesting as what happens when my mind gets still.

Now, just to complete the cycle about our relationship to possessions : There is a time for enjoying the romanticism of life, and for reveling in all the possessions we gather around us. There is a time when all of that is renounced and falls away. And then there is a time when we are so totally free of it all that we can have it all again—but without the attachment. I used to visit Swami Muktananda at his ashram in Ganeshpuri. I’d go into his suite, and there he’d be, sitting on a sterling silver chair, in front of a sterling silver table, eating off of eighteen-karat gold plates. It would take two strong men just to lift his huge, silver chair. I’d think, “What kind of a yogi is this?” Then I read the story of his sadhana and saw where his consciousness had gone, and I realized how muchnothing all that extravagance is to him. And in that world of nothing, when people give him gold plates, he eats off of them. To him, it’s the same as eating off a leaf! What does he care?

So I’m not suggesting that in order to get to God we have to give up all our possessions (although Christ did say, “Take all that you have and give it to the poor”). It depends on where we are in that whole cycle. I’m just saying that we may want to examine our relationship to all the stuff in our lives, to see if there are places where we want to let go of some of our clingings.The Ashtavakra Gita says, “The sage, who has no attachment, does not suffer, even in the world.” It’s fine to enjoy our possessions, our ideas, our feelings—as long as we can completely let go of them at any moment. Gold plates? That’s fine. Leaf plates? That’s fine, too.

Possessions are only one example. Our monkey-minds are like these agitated monsters that are wanting this and collecting that, always grabbing, grabbing, grabbing. The process of cooling out that agitation takes time, and that’s hard for the agitated mind to accept. But the spiritual journey will teach us patience if it teaches us nothing else.

There are all these layers to work through—layers and layers of attachment. In the nature package that comes with our incarnation are all of the gunas, all the forces of our desires, passions, emotions, thoughts.They’re all part of our package—they’re all just there—and until we’re completely finished with all our desires, they can recapture us at any moment. One of the Egyptian holy books says: “Let your desire be at the same level as your goal. If you aspire to superhuman joy, accept the superhuman structure in a very human body, and know that the abyss is always a near neighbor to the summit.” Or as my teacher, Hari Dass, used to say to me, “Even a ninety-three-year-old saint is not safe”—meaning that there’s always the possibility of the worldly stuff coming and grabbing us back again.

Right to the very end of our sadhana, as long as there is anybody at all in there, all the stuff that comes with that somebody-ness is lurking around, available and ready to exert its pull. Our battle, the battle of Kurukshetra that we’re waging within us, is with the power of all those pulls of nature.The desires operate by using the ego, with all its deep attachments to survival and to reproduction, to capture our attention. If we’re doing practices of renunciation, we have to expect to deal with the powerful pulls of those desires.That’s the point of the practice, in fact—to recognize the power of those forces, so we can begin to cool them out.

A lot of people hear the word “renunciation” as somehow meaning that the world is bad, and that’s why we must renounce it. But that’s not it at all. The problem isn’t that the world is evil—the problem is that we’re too caught in the world. We’re starting from a place where we are trapped, bound hand and foot, by our attachments, and through a series of maneuvers we are trying to extricate ourselves from our shackles. Renunciations and purification exercises are one set of techniques for escaping from those bonds. They’re a Houdini act.

So it’s not that the world is evil, it’s just that we’re trying to get some purchase on our desire systems so they won’t be dominating our consciousness all the time, and therefore renunciation doesn’t have anything to do with being a “good guy.” It isn’t better to give up sex, or better to fast; we don’t do renunciation practices to be good—that’s falling into the satvig trap, the trap of being attached to being somebody nice. We renounce things because we want to give them up. We do it because we see how they’re holding us, and we’ve identified ourselves with something that’s much more interesting than the immediate gratification, the next chocolate bar. We renounce things when our desire to get on with the journey is stronger than our desire for the next ice cream soda.

We used to do experiments in psychology about “delay of gratification.” The question was, would people give up a little candy bar now for a big one later?—And how big would the later one have to be for them to give up the little one now, and how much later, and all that experimental-variables stuff. What we took for granted in those experiments was that society is essentially a training ground for the deliberate renunciation of immediate gratification—but always in order to get more of the same gratification later on.

Practices of renunciation, on the other hand, reflect a kind of “enlightened self-interest.” We don’t do a practice to get a bigger candy bar later on; we do it when we see that our attachment to our desires will in itself inevitably lead to more suffering. At the point where we see that, we decide that we want to get free of the whole bag. That kind of renunciation doesn’t come out of guilt or fear, out of shoulds or shouldn’ts; it comes out of wisdom.

Ours is not a culture that has much appreciation for any path of renunciation. Ours is a culture built on the idea that more gratification, sooner, is better. Gandhi said, “The essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation.” That’s certainly a hard sell here in the West, where everything keeps fanning the flames of our desires. Look at the way advertising is designed—it’s based on the exact opposite of what we’re talking about. It’s built on making us feel more and more dissatisfied, making us think we want more and more things. I mean, every three or four minutes on television there is another statement designed to create in you yet another desire: “If you don’t own this, you can’t possibly be happy.You mustwant it! You’ve gotta have it!”

By Gandhi’s yardstick, my own country, with all its affluence, is not yet very civilized. If we look at what people do with their great wealth in America, we find that they mostly use it to try and create more and more sensual gratification for themselves. And then when they’re totally jaded with it all, and they begin to feel the inevitable falling away of their desires, they don’t know where to turn. It’s a dead-end street, because it all passes, it’s all transient.

Once we see that, we’re motivated to turn the process around. But as we start to do that, our minds sometimes get ahead of the rest of us, and we start giving things up in order to be “good,” and not because we see that they’re a hindrance and we’re finished with them. We try to jump the gun on the process.

I’ve had my own experience of the difference between those two motivations in connection with the practice of fasting, which is a form of renunciation (we renounce satisfying our desire for food). Fasting was an interesting one for me, because I have always had an intense relationship with food. I learned from my mother to equate food with love, so by the time I was ten I was wearing pants in size double Z, with balloon seats. I was definitely deep into the oral trip.

Then it was 1967, and I was at the temple in India. I noticed that everybody there fasted a lot, so one day I said to my teacher, “Hari Dass, can I fast?” (Actually, I didn’t say it—I wrote it on the slate I carried, because we were maun, silent, at that time.) Hari Dass answered, “If you’d like.” I asked, “How long should I fast?” He said, “Four days would be good.” So I asked him, “How long do you fast?” He wrote, “Nine days, on every new moon.” I thought, “Well, if he can do it, I can do it.” So I wrote, “I will fast for nine days.” And I looked very holy.

The time came, and I started the fast. And I then proceeded to spend the entire nine days thinking about nothing but food. I thought about the Thanksgiving dinners I’d had as a child; I visualized the roast turkey, and the sweet potatoes with the little marshmallows on top, and the different kinds of stuffing, and how the gravy would smell, and what the first bite would taste like—I lived that out again and again and again. I thought about all the different restaurants I’d been to around the United States, about the cracked crab in the Northwest, and the steak at Original Joe’s, in San Francisco, and the bouillabaisse in New Orleans, and the Lobster Savannah in Boston and—oh, boy! I’d been a cross between a gourmet and a gourmand for years, so I had a rich stock of memories to draw on.

I did complete the fast. I made it through all nine days. But the interesting question was, while I was so busy fasting, what was it I was feeding?

Three months later, when I did my next nine-day fast, I was getting much better. (“Better”—a new ego trip!) Now I spent the whole time thinking only about foods I could eat as a yogi. So I thought about spinach with lemon on it, and steaming bowls of rice, and fresh hot chapatis, and milk. I was doing all these fasts, thinking, “Aren’t I good? I’m doing nine-day fasts, just like the book says. I’m becoming a great hatha yogi.” And yet there were very few waking hours when I was not obsessing about food.

Time passed, and then a few years afterward, I was back in India again. Some friends and I were staying in a little village, and it seemed like a good opportunity to do another long fast. But this time, except for the fact that at noon, lemon and water or ginger tea was brought instead of food, I never even noticed I was fasting. I was just busy doing other things instead of eating. About halfway through, I thought, “Oh, this is what fasting is about. Far out!” It’s not about renouncing food— it’s about renouncing hunger! I hadn’t even known what it was all about before, because I was so busy thinking that the ego-tripping I was doing was tapasya, that it was an austerity of some sort.

I’ve come to recognize that the real tapasya happens when we are so ripe to do it that we just do it. We do it joyfully, with a feeling of “Yeah—of course. That’s what happens now.” We do it with a feeling of “Whew! Now I can be rid of that one.” It’s release, not self-denial. Ramana Maharshi said, “I didn’t eat, and they said I was fasting.” Right there in that statement is the essence of tapasya. As long as we think we’re doing the austerity—“Look at me! I’m giving this up!”—it’s just another ego trip. Whatever we may think we’re renouncing, we’re just stuffing our egos with both hands.

In the East, there are systems of yoga built around practices of purification and renunciation. One of them is the Hindu tradition called ashtanga yoga—the “eight-limbed” yoga. It was enunciated by Patanjali sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 400, but it emerged from much earlier yogic practices. Ashtanga Yoga is a structured sequence of steps that help us to get the various parts of our game in order. It’s a whole curriculum for going to God, and by looking at it in some depth, we can get a sense of the way practices like renunciation are meant to work within the structure of a total system of yoga.

Ashtanga yoga has an elaborate program for working with purification, and with some related practices called observances.They constitute the first two limbs of ashtanga yoga, and they’re called yama and niyama, respectively.

The five yamas, which are the five purifications or self-restraints, are non-harming, non-lying, non-stealing, non-lustfulness, and non-possessiveness. The five niyamas, or observances, are purity, contentment, discipline, scriptural study, and surrender to God.

After yama and niyama comes the third limb, made up of the postures, or asanas, which is what we most often think of as hatha yoga. Then comes pranayama, or breath control, which is also traditionally seen as part of hatha yoga. That’s the first four.

The last four limbs are all concerned with meditation. First comes pratyahara, the initial stage of meditative work, which starts to withdraw the mind from the senses; it’s a process of drawing back the mind, until we can watch our senses doing their trip and at the same time keep our mind on the breath. Then the last three limbs of ashtanga yoga are increasingly intense levels of deeper and deeper meditation called dharana (or concentration), dhyana (or deep meditation), and samadhi (or Oneness), which takes you right into Brahman.

The ordering of these eight steps is not random. The first things necessarily precede the last things, and you move through the sequence in order. You can’t jump the line. When I was in India, Maharajji said to me one day, “Nobody does hatha yoga anymore.” I was surprised; I said, “No? But it’s very big in America, Maharajji.” He said, “No, nobody does it anymore, because hatha yoga assumes that you’ve already finished with the first two practices of yama and niyama, and nobody does any of that now.”

So there are eight sequential steps in the practice of ashtanga yoga, and we can see that it’s the first step, yama, that has to do with the practice of renunciation. Think about it: We imagine we’re so spiritually advanced because we’re considering becoming renunciates, and we discover that it’s the very first rung on the ladder. We’re just beginners!

Yama, as we’ve said, encompasses five categories: non-killing, non-lying, non-stealing, non-lusting, and non-giving-and-receiving. The five “nons.” In Hindi, they are called ahimsa, satya, asteya, brahmacharya, and aparigraha. They all sound like reasonably good ideas. The question is, what happens if we try to live by them?

Start with the first one: ahimsa, or non-killing—a subject which I’ve been sort of sidestepping, since the Gita is all about war. And yet there it is, an assumption in the game, the first step in the first limb of ashtanga yoga: “non-killing,” it says. What are we to make of that? How does it fit into the situation at Kurukshetra, with Krishna urging Ariuna into battle? To frame it another way, can a nonviolent person ever perform a violent act?

Mahatma Gandhi was one of the chief proponents of nonviolence, and yet he worked with the Gita and lived by the Gita throughout his entire life. One might raise a question as to the paradoxical nature of that. Gandhi said this: “When the Gita was written, although people believed in ahimsa, wars were not only not taboo, but nobody observed the contradiction between war and ahimsa.”¹ I think you have to stretch pretty far to imagine how that could possibly be—how people would not see war and ahimsa as incompatible—but that was Gandhi’s explanation. Then he went on to say, “But after forty years of unremitting endeavor fully to enforce the teachings of the Gita in my own life, I have in all humility felt that perfect renunciation is impossible without perfect observance of ahimsa in every shape and form.”² In other words, Gandhi is taking exception here to the Gita; he’s one of the partisans in a debate over whether you can perform a violent act without breaking your vow of ahimsa, and he says you can’t, Gita or no Gita.

My understanding of the predicament here is that there is a tension between the humanitarian and the mystical perspective on the subject. The compassion of the humanitarian is that of a mortal man. The compassion of the mystic is one with the way the universe is created, survives, and is destroyed. Krishna’s is a compassion that transcends the compassion that a human mind can comprehend.

There are levels of wisdom, and it is not at all inconceivable to me that just as a surgeon can perform an operation and create pain in order ultimately to alleviate suffering, so destruction can have its purpose. Krishna, in order to destroy the illusion of the separate self, might very well create a scenario which we human beings, still identified with our separate selves, would find horrifying—a scenario like war.

It’s complicated. In working with ahimsa, we still have to somehow come to terms with the forces of Shiva in the world, with the aspect of God that is destruction and chaos in the universe. We as humans have to do our best to practice ahimsa, while at the same time we have to be willing to honor a dharma that might sometimes call for violence. All we can do is to listen as carefully as we can for what our next step is supposed to be.

Our whole attempt to honor ahimsa is fraught with complications and contradictions. For example, I was, for a long time, a vegetarian, which seemed like a nice, ahimsa-type thing to be. I did take milk, though. While I was on that diet, I was up visiting Ken Kesey one weekend at his farm in Oregon. Ken knew I was a vegetarian, and Ken, of course, was not. Being the prankster that he was, he said, “Come on, let me show you around.” So he took me to the barn and showed me the dairy cows, and that whole scene. I was saying, “Oh, beautiful.” And he took me to see the gardens: “Oh, aren’t they wonderful.” Then he took me out to a field, and showed me these two huge bulls. I said, “What are you doing with them?” He said, “We’re fattening them up to eat them.” I was trying to act cool, so I just said, “Oh, yeah. Right.” But he could tell he was getting to me. He started patting one of the bulls on the head, saying, “This one’ll be good— there are some really good steaks in this one,” pointing right to where the steaks were. And I was looking into the eyes of the animals, trying to send love messages to them.

Then Ken looked straight at me, and said, “You know, you drink milk. If you want milk, you’ve got to have bulls.” And suddenly I saw the reality of my predicament. I’m not a farm-boy, so none of it had been obvious to me before: That to keep a cow giving milk, she has to have calves from time to time, and every time she does, half of the calves that are born are bulls. What are you going to do with them? You could feed them until they died a natural death, but that’s not a likely outcome. So there I was: a vegetarian, but still complicit in the fate of those two bulls.

I wore sandals for a long time that came from the Gandhi ashram; they had a little stamp on them that said, “These were made at the Gandhi ashram,” which meant that they’d only used cows that had fallen over dead in the street. It’s not like they had killed the cow to get the leather for the sandals; the cow had died a natural death, so yogis could wear those sandals in good conscience. Still, it seems a little bit . . . well, you know . . . And now we have all this new information about what plants go through when you bring a knife near them—so our diet’s getting a little thin, isn’t it?

All I can share, in dealing with the predicament of ahimsa, is to suggest that whatever you do, you do it as consciously as you can. When the Native Americans killed an animal to eat it, they offered it to their gods, and they thanked the animal for giving its life for them. They killed in order to survive in order to do their work, and that was in harmony with their understanding of how nature operates. That’s bringing consciousness to the act.

But even though I don’t think there are any hard-and-fast rules for a “spiritual” diet, as we go through the different stages of our yoga our practices reshape our bodies and our physical needs, and we usually find that our diet changes. When we are still very much caught in worldly thought and worldly heaviness, we will need just what the World Health Organization says we need: a certain amount of protein and a certain amount of carbohydrate, certain vitamins and certain minerals, all that kind of stuff. Later, as we get lighter and quieter, as we get more connected to a different plane in the universe, we find we’re able to work with another kind of energy, and that changes our diet; the diet we’d had before seems too heavy, and so we start to eat, say, only grains and fruits and vegetables and dairy products. And then maybe the dairy products start to get too heavy, and then the grains start to get too heavy, and we’re down to vegetables and fruits and nuts. And finally maybe even the vegetables are too dense and we become fruitarians. The progression is all perfect, we’re healthy, and everything is fine. Now, if you had a hamburger yesterday, and you tried to become a fruitarian today, you’d probably get really sick. But were you ready for it, fruitarianism would be the right and natural thing, and anything else would feel gross.

If you keep growing spiritually, you get so you can live on light alone. Like Teresa Neumann, the Christian saint: for twelve years, she ate nothing but one Eucharist wafer a day—and she was a good, zaftig woman. They asked her, “How can this be? What are you living on?” She said, “I’m living on light.”

Why not? I mean, plants do it: chlorophyll, sun, energy transformations—when you come right down to it, energy is energy. What we can process as energy depends on which receptors are open in us. And that’s one of the things the purification trip is about—so we can start working with all the subtler energies that are available to us. If you’re an energy-transmuting vehicle, you can take any energies and get off on them.

But all we can do is the best we can do with what we know and who we are. And most of us aren’t Saint Teresa yet. I do the best I can, by trying to be as nonviolent as I can be. I try to create as few conditions as possible that would demand that things be raised and killed in order to service my existence. And yet the truth is that in spite of all that, I’m no longer a vegetarian. I stopped eating meat, fish, chicken, and eggs right after I met Maharajji, but after a while I got to wondering if maybe there was a place in me where I was caught in the satvig trap about my vegetarianism, caught in being the “good guy,” and I felt I ought to undercut that. So I decided that what I was going to do was to break my vegetarian trip—just break it. And if I was going to do it, I figured I might as wellreally do it up right, and since I had been raised as a Jew, I decided I would break my vegetarian diet by having spareribs, which would sort of hit it from both angles.

I found a Chinese restaurant. I went in and sat down and ordered the spareribs.The waiter put them in front of me, and I blessed them; I gave a particularly long blessing. I offered the spareribs to Maharajji, and I said, “I know you think this is strange, but . . . it’s the way it is. You know my heart, and you know why I’m doing this, and—well, I’m just going to do it!” And I then proceeded to thoroughly enjoy the spareribs. I mean, they were every bit as good as I had remembered them being!

While I was eating, I noticed that there was a man sitting about two booths away, in a suit and a tie and a gold wristwatch; he was drinking tea all through my whole meal, and he was watching me. Finally, just as I finished, he came over to my booth and he said, “May I sit down for a minute?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “I’m a traveling salesman for an electronics outfit in Boston. I was just about to leave the restaurant when your food was served. And you know, I couldn’t help watching the way you blessed the food. It was . . . well, the blessing was so powerful that I haven’t been able to leave the restaurant without talking to you.” It turned out that he was a fundamentalist Christian, and we got into a beautiful rap about the Bible and Christ, and we talked for around an hour and a half, and drank a lot of tea. Finally he said, “Well, I’m just so delighted to have met you, it’s been wonderful. There’s just one more thing I wanted to ask you. I’ve had a lot of questions about my diet, what I ought to be eating and not eating, so I’m just curious—what’s your diet like? What do you eat?” And I looked down, and right there in front of me was this big pile of bones. I would have done anything to be able to push it away and say, “Well, of course I’m a vegetarian, and . . .” But there it was. I had to face the fact of who I was at that moment.

When I was in India, during my vegetarian days, I stayed at this hotel called the Palace Heights; it was the hippie hangout in Connaught Circus. It turned out that the window in my room overlooked the alley next to a fancy restaurant, and (since the Indians in Delhi were “going Western”) they were serving chicken at that restaurant. Every afternoon around four, out in the alley, they’d wring the necks of the chickens they were going to serve that night for dinner. We would come back from shopping and be lying there peacefully, and suddenly: Cluck, cluck, cluck—awwwwk! I felt all my chicken-karma coming home to roost—it was all those Sunday chicken dinners I was paying for, you know.There was another one, and there was another one . . .

But what’s interesting is that even after all that, I’ve sometimes visited Colonel Sanders. I see the horror of it all—I mean, not only the physical horror of the way the chickens are produced, but the absurdity of the fact that I’m asking somebody to produce a chicken, a living creature, so I can eat it. But nonetheless I do eat it. And I enjoy it. And I sit with that horror.

I can’t be phony holy anymore. I’ve just got to be where I’m at. I don’t really want to eat the chicken, and yet there I am eating the chicken. And who knows whether eating chickens or not eating chickens creates greater violence in the long run? Which is more ahimsa? Maybe in pushing away eating chicken, I would end up being so frustrated, so filled with rich, sadistic fantasies, that I’d psychologically destroy everybody around me, and create incredible suffering, just because I didn’t eat that last chicken. I’m not offering that as an excuse, or as a practical suggestion. I’m just sharing with you the psychological dilemma we face in deciding when we renounce and when we don’t renounce. Now we’re getting to the nitty-gritty of all these practices we’re talking about.

We’ll move a little more quickly through the other yamas, but I think it was worth taking the time to explore a practice like ahimsa deeply enough to get the full flavor of it. We can get a little facile in the way we accept these practices in principle, without confronting the issues we actually wrestle with when we try to implement the practices in our lives.

The second yama is satya: truthfulness, non-lying. Gandhi said, “Truth is God, and God is Truth,” and his life was the statement of someone who was trying to live as close to truth as possible. A woman once came to Gandhi with her young son. She said, “Mahatma-ji, please tell my little boy to stop eating sugar.” Gandhi told the mother, “Come back in three days.” Three days later the woman and the little boy returned, and Mahatma Gandhi said to the little boy, “Stop eating sugar!” The woman was confused, and she asked, “But why was it necessary for us to return only after three days for you to tell my little boy that?” Gandhi replied, “Three days ago, I had not stopped eating sugar.” That sets the bar pretty high; that’s a high level of truthfulness to demand of ourselves, and the practice of satya has to do with shaping our lives to that level of inner truth.

Now, at the point where most of us are, we don’t have a deep enough connection to Truth to be straight at every level, but we start out by being straight wherever we can. We learn to listen for the truth, and to live by the truth, even if there’s some cost to it. Mahatma Gandhi was leading a march once; many people had left their jobs and come long distances to take part in the march, but after the first day Gandhi called his lieutenants together and said, “This is wrong. This march is not a good idea after all. I’m calling it off.” His lieutenants got very upset and said, “But Gandhi-ji, you can’t do that! People have come from all over to take part in this march. We can’t stop it now!” Gandhi replied, “I don’t know absolute truth—only God knows that. I’m human; I know only relative truth, and that changes from day to day. My commitment must be to truth, and not to consistency.” That is, I have to honor my commitment to the truth, even if it means reversing myself to do it.

We often find, as we go merrily on our spiritual way, that we have to reverse ourselves if we want to stay with our truth. Finding our dharma is a little like finding a floating crap game; it doesn’t stay in one place, it’s always changing its location.You think you know what your route is. You’ve just gotten all your new outfits and beads and brownie badges, all the things that go with your new schtick—and then suddenly, the whole thing turns dead and empty and horrible.What are you going to do? “My commitment must be to truth, not to consistency.” Give the outfits to the nearest Salvation Army thrift store, and go on. After a while you get so you just rent the costumes; you don’t buy them, because you see that you’re going to be moving through the trips very, very quickly.You just keep staying as close as you can to your living truth.

Maharajji was always admonishing me to tell the truth. It was one of his regular dialogues with me: “Ram Dass, tell the truth.”

“Yes, Maharajji.”

That alternated with Maharajji’s other dialogue with me. He’d call me up to the tucket and he’d say, “Ram Dass, give up anger.”

“Yes, Maharajji.” Sounds like a nice thing—give up anger.

He went back and forth between those two injunctions: “Ram Dass, tell the truth.” “Ram Dass, give up anger.”

Now there were at the temple all these Westerners who had come to India with me. It was my own fault they’d come—Maharajji had warned me not to tell anybody about him. But I had, and now there they were; they were all hanging out with me, and I was really bugged, because I wanted to be hanging out with the Indians. So I was growing to detest them all.

So I started thinking about Maharajji’s instructions, and I thought, “You know, the truth is that I really don’t like these people.” I wanted to do what Maharajji said, and give up my anger. On the other hand, what I’d always done in the past was to be the nice guy, and pretend I wasn’t angry; I’d been giving up truth in order not to appear angry, but inside I was always this bubbling cauldron. So I decided, “Why don’t I do it the other way around this time? For a change I’ll tell the truth, and the truth is I can’t stand any of these people.”

So I started to be very honest. Somebody would come into my room and I’d look at him and say, “Get the hell out of here.You make me sick!” The guy would say, “What did I do?” I’d say, “I don’t know. You’re too nice.” Well, after about two weeks of my “truth telling,” I wasn’t talking to any of them, and they were all busy plotting to throw me in the lake.

Now, we Westerners were staying at a hotel in town, and every day all of us would go by bus to the temple. It happened that I was at that time performing a tapasya, which was that I wouldn’t touch money. It’s an interesting austerity to experiment with, because you begin to see how powerful the little game is of having some change in your pocket. Without it, suddenly everything is all out front.You can’t sneak off for an ice cream cone if you don’t have any money. Furthermore, you’re dependent; you need a bagman to carry your money if you’re going to buy your lunch or ride a bus. But by that point in my relationships I was so mad at everybody that I wouldn’t even let them pay my bus fare, which meant I had to walk to the temple, which was about eight miles away.

So I walked to the temple. It’s a beautiful walk, actually, through green hills and woods, but I was so angry at everybody that I didn’t enjoy the walk at all. I was busy being furious the whole way there, because they were all at the temple, enjoying Maharajji, while I was having to spend hours walking there—and all because I was so good that I wasn’t touching money. But I certainly wasn’t going to let any of those bastards pay my fare and . . .

By the time I got to the temple, I was seething. I arrived there just after they had taken lunch. One of the fellows—one with whom I was particularly furious—brought over a plate of food, and set it down in front of me. I wasn’t about to take food from his hands, so I picked up the leaf plate, and I threw it in his face.

Across the way, Maharajji was watching. “Ram Dass!”

I went over and sat down in front of him. He said to me, “Something troubling you?”

I said, “Yeah. I can’t stand adharma. I can’t stand that in all of us which takes us deeper into the illusion. I can’t stand it in them— they’re all so impure! I can’t stand it in myself. In fact I hate everybody in the world—except you.” And with that, I started to cry—not just to cry, but to really weep and wail. Maharajji tried to comfort me; he patted me on the head, he sent for milk and fed it to me. He was crying, and I was wailing and wailing. And when I got all finished with my wailing, he said to me, “I thought I told you not to get angry.”

I said, “Yeah—but you also told me to tell the truth, and the truth is that I’m angry.”

Then he leaned toward me, until he was nose to nose and eye to eye, and he said, “Give up anger, and tell the truth.”

I started to say, “But . . .”—and then, right at that moment, I saw my predicament. See, what I was going to say to him was “But that isn’t who I am.” And in that instant, I saw in front of me the image of a coffin, and in the coffin was an image of who I thought myself to be. And what Maharajji was saying to me was “I’m telling you who you’re going to be, after you’re finished being who you think you are.”

Then I looked over at all those people, all of whom I detested, and I saw that one layer down, one tiny flick of the lens, I loved them all incredibly. I suddenly saw that the only reason I was angry with them was because I had a model of how I thought it ought to be, which was other than the way it was. How can you get angry at somebody for being what they are? You’re trying to outguess God.They’re just being what God made them to be—what are you getting angry about? Somebody lies to you? They’re just doing their karmic trip. Why are you upset? “Well, I didn’t think they’d lie to me!” Ah, expectations— there’s your problem. The next time you get angry, look closely at what you’re angry about.You’ll see you’re angry because God didn’t make the world the way you think it should have been made. But God makes the world the way She makes it!

So the practice of satya requires that in all our doings—in our dealings with other people, in steering our spiritual course, whatever— we stay as close to the truth as we possibly can. Maharajji said to me, “Truth is the most difficult tapasya.” It’s the hardest austerity, the toughest one to do. He said, “People will hate you for telling the truth.” And sometimes they do. “People will laugh at you and taunt you, they may even kill you,” he said, “but you’ve got to tell the truth.”

The trouble is, we can only tell the truth when we cease to identify with the part of ourselves we think we have to protect. If we’re afraid of being laughed at or taunted or killed, we can’t tell the truth; we can’t tell the truth if we’re busy guarding some position. It’s only when we realize that we’re not as vulnerable as we fear we are that we can afford to tell the truth. Let’s say I tell you the truth, and you don’t like it, and you get up and walk out. That’s your problem, not mine. But if I need your love, your interpersonal love, then I can’t risk having you walk out on me, and so I can’t tell you the truth. I can never be straight with you if I need something from you. So in order to tell the truth to you, I have to give up whatever that need is in myself.That’s why satya is a practice of renunciation; what we’re required to renounce are the attachments that keep us from speaking the truth.

There is a very far-out thing about Truth:That when you are rooted in Truth, really rooted in Truth, your word takes on power (and this in fact is exactly what “powers” are all about), such that when you say something, it is so. When you give someone a blessing, the blessing is given; it simply happens. When you say, “Be healed!” the person is healed. That’s the power of the word, if the word comes out of the place of total Truth—because then it comes out of the place in you where you are so connected to the deepest core of Truth itself that everything that comes out of you is straight at every level. The purifications of the satya practices prepare us for that kind of Truth.

The third yama practice I want to talk about is the one called aparigraha. It literally means “non-hoarding,” but it’s also variously interpreted as meaning non-coveting, non-possessiveness, or non-giving-and-receiving. “Non-giving-and-receiving” doesn’t mean that nothing is passed back and forth; it has to do with the spirit in which the giving and receiving are done. It recognizes that giver and receiver are the same, so there’s a freedom from any greediness in the transaction. That’s the core of the practice of aparigraha.

I used to go through a little dance with my father all the time around the subject of money. My father was a very loving, wonderful, wealthy guy, and I was a very loving, wonderful, poor guy. He’d say to me, “Rich [which was a funny name, considering], is there anything you need?” And I’d always say, “No.” He’d never say, “Rich, here’s a thousand dollars,” to which I would have said, “Thanks.” Instead, he’d ask, “Is there anything you need?” All I’d have had to say was “Yeah, I need a thousand dollars,” and I’d have had it. But once I had to ask for it, that thousand dollars would come with a whole set of strings, like fine spiderwebs, attached to it—things like: “The kid still needs me,” or “Damned kid, still can’t earn a decent living,” or “Sure, all they want me for is my money.”

With all the paranoia connected with money, most of us can’t afford to be in the giving-and-receiving business. Most of our giving, most of the time, happens because we want something in return. That’s not generosity; that’s greediness. Even if we don’t want something material, we at least want somebody to appreciate our gift; we want them to thank us for it. Or maybe we want the return of having a good image of ourselves, as somebody who gave something. Even if

The Puja Bazaar: A bazaar sprang up outside the hall, where people brought religious photos, craft items, and ritual objects to sell and barter, everyone trying good-naturedly to bargain and at the same time to remain mindful that “everything is God.” It was a creative attempt to stay conscious through the temptations of the marketplace.

we give anonymously, it’s just a subtler hype: “Look at how good I am—I gave anonymously.” See? Just more ego-feeding!

In dealing with money, it’s useful to try adopting the notion that you’re merely the bookkeeper in the firm. It’s not your money; you’re just there to administer it in a responsible way. It wasn’t really my father’s money, he was merely the keeper of that energy at that moment, because it was his karma to play that role. It’s your karma to work with your money, or with whatever other corner on the energy market might have been given to you, but the energy doesn’t belong to you.We’re all just moving God’s energy around from hand to hand.

People often bring me little gifts of one kind or another. Sometimes someone wants to give me something, and I find I can’t take it, because I feel they want something while they’re giving the gift. Other people just have some beautiful thing that they want to share with me; then I’ll take it, and I’ll use it for a while, and I’ll pass it on to somebody else. It’s just a sharing of energy; it’s not yours or mine—whose is it, anyway?

When the United States gives food as foreign aid, like sending wheat to Biafra, we stamp on it, “Gift of the United States of America.” It’s like we’re demanding gratitude—and so everybody ends up hating us, and we can’t understand why. It’s not our gift to give in the first place—it’s God’s wheat! Why are we making such a big deal about it? Because it grew on our land—our land? What’s that about? My mother used to go around “our” property and say, “That’s my tree and that’s my tree and that’s my tree.” Far-out concept, “my tree.” They’re all God’s trees. Nobody owns anything—how absurd! We’re just working with the energy that’s passing through us.

If we have the energy, we’re responsible for it.We can use it to create more heaven or more hell; we can relieve the suffering of sentient beings, or we can take them deeper into illusion. Which way we use it will depend on whether we think the energy belongs to us, and whether we think the other beings are us. We can’t simultaneously be protecting our little stash, hoarding it away, and at the same time opening our hearts to other people. Practicing aparigraha is about renouncing first-chakra stuff like possessiveness and greed, so we can start playing in a more conscious way with whatever energies have been given to us.

Asteya- non-stealing- is obvious: If everybody’s “us,” who are you going to steal from? Are you going to rip yourself off? Are you going to steal out of the cookie jar at home? You’re just taking it from yourself. When there’s no “them” in your universe, you can’t steal— it’s that simple.

So in order to steal, you have to see your victim as “other.” That means stealing takes us deeper into the illusion of me/you, which is the illusion of identity, which is the illusion of separation. That, from a spiritual point of view, is why non-stealing is part of the practice of ashtanga yoga; it’s not because of our usual ideas about morality, it’s because in order to steal we have to turn the other person into “them,” which rules out our seeing them as “us.” That takes us away from the One. It’s just that straightforward.

When you come to a place where you’re absolutely clean in your relations with other people, you start to recognize what fun it is not to be feeling paranoid all the time. There’s such a sense of freedom in it! You see that you really don’t want to create all the stuff that comes from getting into relationships with other people that have elements of dishonesty in them.

It’s like the difference in the feeling you have coming across a border carrying dope, and then coming across the border not carrying dope. Because of my nefarious psychedelic past, I was on “the List” for a long time, and so when the customs agents would punch in my name at the border, lights would flash, and bells would ring, and the agents would make hurried telephone calls—because I was a really bad guy, see? Then they’d proceed to go through everything I was carrying; they’d look inside my sneakers and turn all the pants pockets inside out. And I’d just sit there, doing mantra and enjoying the whole scene. I was watching good public servants doing their work. After a while they’d notice that I wasn’t buying into the whole paranoia that their scene usually creates, and we’d generally end up being really loving buddies. It would take about two hours, but that’s OK—you just learn to move more slowly. After all, it’s always just Maharajji, coming to put us on.

So to avoid separating ourselves from other people, we stop ripping them off. We practice asteya. And while I think that most of us have already renounced stealing in its most literal, obvious form, the practice of asteya, in ashtanga yoga, goes much deeper than that. It’s a much subtler practice. It’s not just the physical stuff, like not stealing somebody’s wallet. Practicing asteya includes things like not accepting undeserved praise and not taking credit for somebody else’s ideas. It means in the very broadest sense possible that you don’t appropriate anything, material or otherwise, that isn’t rightfully yours. That’s asteya.

I’ve saved non-lusting for the last, because I don’t think most of us really want to hear about it. The word that’s used for it, “brahmacharya,” literally means “behaving like a disciple of Brahma,” and it entails abstaining from lust in all its forms. It means renouncing the passionate desire for an object, in thought, word, and deed, in all conditions, places, and times. Now that’s a heavy one! Saint Augustine, as you know, prayed, “Lord, give me chastity and continence—but not yet.” That may be the appropriate motto for us at this moment. Given the fact that we have been born into an incarnation as an animal that reproduces the species through mating, all those desires surrounding it are really strong in us. It’s all second-chakra stuff, and there’s a lot of energy localized there.

Within our own society, everything conspires to make the second chakra a temple of worship, with Playboy as its Bible. Gandhi said, “The only reason one would have sex is to reproduce,” but I’ve found that very few people in a Western audience are ready to hear that. When I read that quote, people just get uptight and say, “Don’t lay that moralistic trip on us. These are the days of sexual freedom.”

(The first time I ever used that Gandhi quote was at a lecture I was giving in Berkeley, at the beginning of the sexual freedom movement. There were about fifty people in the audience, and one couple, up in the first row, was screwing, right there in front of me.They were making a sexual freedom statement, I guess. As I read Gandhi’s quote to the audience and started talking about his philosophy and the reasons behind it, I saw the couple growing more and more uneasy, and after a few minutes the guy lost his erection, and their whole “statement” ended kind of abruptly.)

But brahmacharya isn’t about doing a moralistic trip on ourselves. It’s the same as with fasting—we don’t do it because we’re good, we do it because we’re ready to be finished with the lusting game. It’s interesting to consider that if somebody is falling off a cliff, or if his car is flipping over, it’s probably rare that he would be feeling sexy. When it’s a matter of survival, lust seems to disappear—it just sort of goes out the window. At that moment, you’re completely one-pointed on staying alive.

Now imagine that you could get so preoccupied with coming to God that the same thing would happen—that your lust would simply vanish. Not that you would make it happen, anymore than you make yourself lose your sexual desire when the car is rolling over. It just goes. That’s what real brahmacharya is—when the lust just goes, not when you’re pushing it this way and that, because if you’re pushing it this way and that, you shove it under here and it pops up there.

When you work with powerful drive systems, like sex or fasting or breathing, you’re working with stuff that’s deeply built into us. It’s the primordial stuff of our incarnations, and we can’t treat it lightly. Each of us has to deal with different levels of energy within those systems, and with different levels of attachment, and so what is right for one person is absolutely wrong for another.

We have to approach a purification practice like brahmacharya with all of that in mind. That’s why, for some of us, the absolute necessity in this incarnation is that we marry and have children, and that is right on. And for some of the rest of us, that would be righto f, and we would struggle all the way. If we get a model in our heads that in order to get holy we’ve got to do it this way or we’ve got to do it that way, we’re stuck with our models, and we can’t see the truth about what in fact we need to be doing.

All that said, there are still good reasons for the emphasis on brahmacharya in ashtanga yoga. One reason has to do with the way lust poisons our relationships with other people. Let’s be clear that we’re talking about lust here, and not about a sexuality that is rooted in love. Lust turns the other person into an object; love does just the opposite. When you lust for another person, you are focusing on them as a body, as something to satisfy your second-chakra demands. Whenever you see another person as an object to be manipulated for your own purposes, you have forgotten that what you’re dealing with is another manifestation of God.

A second reason for the focus on brahmacharya rests in the fact that sexual energy is just that—energy. It’s merely one more form of energy, and there are stages in our sadhana when the amount of energy we have available to us is very important. At those points, you will want to conserve the sexual energy to have it available for other uses. And so you adopt a practice of brahmacharya. Hinduism isn’t the only tradition that teaches that, by the way. Many spiritual paths suggest that at certain stages of spiritual development, it’s wise to minimize sexual activity, because it expends so much energy that could be used in a different way.

And it’s true; I can vouch for it. When I was doing very intense hatha yoga and pranayam practices, where the breath would stop for long periods of time and the energy would travel up the spine, I was using all the energy I could get my hands on. But the passions are always lurking! Even though I was eating pure, light, satvig foods, and even though I was living in a very unsexy environment in a temple in India, still, every now and then the sexual juices would flow and there would be either a wet dream or masturbation. For a while after that, my whole pranayam practice would change; it just wouldn’t work very well. The energies weren’t available for it. I could see for myself the rationale for practicing brahmacharya; I had experiential evidence of the way the process worked.

Now, there is, of course, an alternative approach to the spiritual use of sexual energy, one which is at first glance very different from the brahmacharya practice of conserving the energy; it is the practice we call Tantra yoga. Whatever prurient imagery that phrase may call up for us, Tantra is in fact a highly technical form of spiritualized sexual activity. To begin with, it has nothing very much to do with orgasm. It has to do with bringing together polar opposites in order to create a prolonged liberation of energy, and then using that energy to come into clearer and clearer, and emptier and emptier, spaces. Tantra yogic techniques are methods for getting that energy generated, and then for staying with it over long periods of time by not being eager for the rush of orgasm. Sexual Tantra is not a personal gratification trip. It’s not that you won’t enjoy it, of course—and that’s the paradox of it. But anytime you get caught being the enjoyer of it, you’ve lost. Sexual Tantra is based on the assumption that you are using the sexual dance as an upaya, as a method for coming to God. That’s what it’s about. And when it’s really used in that way, it’s a powerful tool for awakening.

Tantra, however, lends itself to a lot of self-deception. A lot of people don’t want to give up sex, but they do want to appear holy, and so they say, “I’m doing Tantra.” It is certainly true that all the energy in the universe, including sexual energy, is yours, anyway. And it is true that when you finally figure out who you really are, you can make it every day and stay right with God, all the way through. But until you get to that place, Tantric sexual practices are a hot fire to play with.You have to be a pretty conscious being to use Tantra as a practice and not as a diversion. Just because there are Tantric masters who can do it doesn’t mean it’s easy. As Kalu Rinpoche liked to say about Trungpa and his students, “When you go to the top of a mountain with a bird, and the bird flies, don’t think you can, too.”

There is one more reason for including brahmacharya in the list of yamas. Besides objectifying the other person and depleting our energy reserves, lust is sticky; it tends to trap us in our desires. Every time we perform an act in response to a desire, we end up strengthening the likelihood of having that desire again in the future.This isn’t metaphysics—this is just straight learning theory from psychology. You satisfy the desire, you reinforce the motivation. Or as the Buddha said, “Defilements are like cats—if you keep feeding them, they keep coming around.”

Every time we get lost into thinking we are the desirer, we feed the desire. If I eat a pizza, and I am busy being the pizza eater and the enjoyer of the pizza, I increase the likelihood that I will desire a pizza in the future. But there is another way to eat a pizza. If all the while I’m eating the pizza I’m right here, eating the pizza, but I’m not busy being The Pizza Eater . . . and if, although the enjoyment of the pizza is there, I’m not busy being The Enjoyer of the Pizza . . . then my quiet spaciousness around the act of eating of that pizza is not ensnaring me. Instead, it is extricating me more and more from my attachment to being the pizza eater, and therefore it’s decreasing the likelihood that my attention is going to be pulled by the smell coming from every pizza parlor as I walk down the street. Same act: eating a pizza. And yet totally different.

Well, it’s the same with sexuality. When you practice brahmacharya, when you renounce your sexuality, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will stop the game, or push sex away. Brahmacharya is less about changing what you do with regard to your sexuality than about developing a different perceptual stance toward your actions, such that those actions are feeding into your awakening rather than putting you back to sleep.True brahmacharya and true Tantra are both acts of renunciation, and what you are renouncing in both cases are your desire systems. “Know that a man of true renunciation is he who craves not,” says the Gita. Craves not—that’s the deeper meaning of brahmacharya. It’s the same principle I talked about in my experience with fasting. On a shallow level, renunciation means renouncing the object itself. But the more profound meaning is renouncing our attachment to the object, our craving for it. Then, whether we engage in the act or not is really irrelevant because there is no attachment, and an act done without attachment does not create more karma. It’s as simple as that. The Gita says, “Satisfied with whatever comes unasked . . . even acting, he is not bound.”

Well, that’s an overview of this one system, ashtanga yoga, and the way it uses the practices of renunciation and purification. By looking at our own lives in relation to that system, we’ve begun to appreciate the delicacy of the practices, and the intensity of our dance with all these desire systems we have. We’ll take a desire and say, “Well, I’m ready to renounce that one.” So we’ll stop doing it for a while. And then maybe it will be just like me with my vegetarianism: I found out I’d done it a little too soon. I’d head-tripped it; it hadn’t come out of my inner being. I wasn’t ready to give up meat, I just wanted to be ready to give it up. But there was still all that stuff in me . . . and I went back to eating meat.

But as we’re drawn to them, we start practicing the purifications that we see will release us from the obvious stuff that we know is keeping us stuck.We start purifying because it feels right to do it. And the more we get into it, the lighter our lives become. And the lighter our lives become, the more our inner work can go ahead. We purify because we see that if the waters are too wild outside, we can’t get on with our inner work. If we’re ripping people off, if we’re hating this person and lusting after that one, if we’re filled with greed and passion and anger, it’s really hard to meditate; it’s hard under those conditions to quiet the mind and open the heart. And so we begin the work of purification.

If you want to play a little bit with a renunciation practice, pick some desire that you encounter every day.You decide which one: the desire to eat something or other, the desire for a cigarette, whatever it is you want to play with. Pick something that you usually give in to every day—like, let’s say, a cup of coffee in the morning—and for one day, don’t do it.Then the next day, do it much more than you usually would—have two cups of coffee. Start to study your reactions. Notice the difference in your feelings toward the desire on the first day and on the second day.

Maybe another time you’ll want to take two desires to work with; one day don’t satisfy one and doubly satisfy the other, and then flip them around. Try to be very attentive to what’s going through your mind about it. If you’re keeping a journal, write about it in your journal. Start to relate to your desires as something you can scrutinize, rather than as things that totally suck you in all the time, things that consume you. Get into a friendly relationship with your desires. Play with them, instead of being driven by them all the time. Desires get to be fun, really, once we’re observing them instead of mechanically reacting to them.

The whole game of renunciation and purification is an experiment —an experiment in how quickly we can extricate ourselves from being attached to our desire systems. Notice that it isn’t a question of getting rid of desires—that’s a misunderstanding. Trust me, the desires will stay around! We’re just loosening their hold on us, getting clear enough of them so we can see them in some sort of context.

Renunciation is like all the rest of our practices. We’re engaged in a kind of hunt-and-peck system.We keep experimenting with various practices and asking ourselves, “Am I ready for this?” We quiet, and we listen. Then maybe we renounce—or maybe we decide to go on with things as they are for a while. We bring as much consciousness to each system as we’re able to muster, without getting all uptight about it.We just keep learning to live with ourselves, as truthfully and as consciously as we can.