THE DREADED GOM-BOO Part II: Renunciation CHAPTER 10 The "Western" Way of Renunciation September 28, 1982 MASTER DA: The habit of living that is typically and constantly reinforced in Westerners is a kind of aggressive, life-clinging, go-out-and-get-it, enjoy-life-while-you-can orientation. The TV commercial epitomizes the habit of attachment that is always being suggested to us. All of life is sold to us that way. Our impulses are always being stimulated to go get it, to be attached to it, cling to it, hold on to it. Personalities that develop habitually along these lines have the greatest difficulty in dealing with frustration, including the ultimate frustration of life-threatening circumstance. Therefore, people are in general very much subject to anxiety and fear and resistance. Another psychology has traditionally been fostered in people in the East. I am not speaking now about spiritual acculturation in the East, or the West, but about the common traditions of East and West, which express two different styles of life that are taught through the ordinary mechanisms of society. In the Orient a different disposition has traditionally been constantly reinforced in people. Perhaps the more Westernized the whole world has become, the less typical is this kind of learning, but even to date it is still generally common that in the East people learn the habit of detachment, rather than attachment. They learn that detachment is simply good practical wisdom, that it is practically better not to be attached. This does not mean that people in Eastern cultures do not live the life associated with pleasures and social conventions, but they are habituated to a more modest association. The Oriental disposition has its roots in ancient religious traditions. Just so, we could say that the traditional or habitual Western psychology has its roots in the cult of Christianity (rather than the more Oriental teachings of Jesus of Nazareth). The Western culture, we could say, is in some basic sense a culture of attachment, and the Eastern culture is a culture of detachment, and both these orientations have their limitations when they are made a style of life. We could say that the habit of detachment in the Orient prevents people from dealing with some of the very real practical problems that society could resolve if it set out to do so. But on the other hand, we could also say about the Western orientation that it creates problems where problems would not arise if it were more free of attachment. At least it multiplies attachments, always invents more and more stimulations to the point that life becomes unbearably full of things, attachments, stuff to do, business, and all the boredom associated with the satiated feeling that comes from self-exploitation. Therefore, both these attitudes have their limitations when they become merely styles of life. But certainly you can see, particularly if you are Westerners, that as a practical matter it would be better if you were free of the psychology of clinging and attachment, which you have not chosen for yourself but which you have learned. And attachment is not just a habit of mind. Your entire body is keyed up for it. Your hormonal system is keyed up for it, your nervous system is keyed up for it, all the programs of your mind, all the programs below consciousness, and your entire being are keyed up for attachment, clinging, getting, having. The trap in this notion of attachment is the fact that everything changes. A lifetime is not eternal. Every lifetime comes to an end, and you must endure profound transformations such as the one contained in death. You cannot, therefore, reasonably build a life on the psychology of attachment. Spiritual views completely aside, it must be obvious, if only from a practical point of view, that you cannot function simply on the basis of attachment. You will encounter separations, frustrations, life-threatening circumstances, and a world that is in general life-threatening or capable of frustrating you. You cannot merely be a consumer of life. As a practical matter, to do so is not workable. If you observe the basic mechanism of this way of clinging or attachment, you will see that it is a function native to mind as you know it. Mind is always associated with objects. Our association with mind is association with desire, body, all kinds of conventional relations. The mind as we know it is basically an object-clinging mechanism. To cling to objects is its function. In the Oriental psychologies, such as those communicated in the Buddhist tradition, mind is analyzed as just that, an object-clinging mechanism. The Buddhist tradition, and the Oriental tradition in general, is an ancient tradition of instruction that calls people to transcend the object-clinging disposition. The Buddhist traditions call for responsibility for mind, watching of mind, guarding of mind against the object-clinging orientation, because whatever you cling to will change. Whatever you hold on to, whatever you may identify with, will change and also disappear. And since things are always changing and always in some sense disappearing and you have nothing to stand on and nothing is permanent, it seems reasonable that your dominant disposition should transcend this object-clinging. You can, on the basis of that transcendence, still play life, but you will play it more freely, more openly, without attachments. The object-clinging disposition, the disposition of attachment, is the basis on which the ego is presumed. It is the source of the ego. The more there is of object-clinging, the more there is of the sense of a separate self that needs to be protected, that you want to make continue forever, that you want to pleasurize and satisfy. The more there is of this object-clinging disposition, the more there is of the self-contraction, the belief in a self or a separate entity. The Way of the transcendence of object-clinging is also and most fundamentally the Way of self-transcendence. The self-transcending Way, then, is associated with freedom from the object-clinging disposition. Therefore, the Way is always a process of renunciation. It is not a way of giving up things or cutting yourself off from things. It is, rather, the Way of standing in the Free Position, before there is the self-contraction, and, therefore, before there is object-clinging. It is, simply, to Stand Free. And if you Stand Free, any number of styles of life become possible, such as those communicated in the traditions-monasticism, wandering, apparently functioning in this world but without object-clinging attachment and without clinging to the false notion of a self, which is simply a psychological pattern or presumption based on the object-clinging mind. A few very fundamental affirmations are proposed in the Buddhist tradition. One is that everything changes and nothing is to be held on to. Life is suffering in that sense. Another is that there is no self, no independent entity. These are two of the primary points of view, and they follow one upon the other. The object-clinging mind develops the psychology of self-attachment, and where there is self-attachment there is object-clinging, fear, and resistance. The spiritual Way is inherently and necessarily self-transcending, not because it is a formula of effort that eventually transcends the self, but because it stands from the beginning in the position of "hearing," in the position of freedom from the principle of the self-contraction. It is always a renunciate Way inherently, because it is inherently self-transcending, and therefore it is inherently free of the habit of object-clinging. If there is no object-clinging, no clinging to phenomena of any kind, subjective or objective, then whatever changes that may occur in the plane of phenomena will be encountered in the disposition of freedom or non-clinging. The experience of death, for instance, or frustration, or life-threatening circumstance, will have a different apparent effect in the psychology of the natural disposition of an individual who lives from the point of view of no-clinging than in the psychology of someone who has always habitually lived from the point of view of attachment. Westerners never receive this kind of Teaching in the framework of ordinary life. The Western tradition is the "go-and-get-em," "gotcha" game. Thus, Westerners do not generally hear even this practical wisdom. There is more to it than practical wisdom-it is the basis of a great spiritual Way-but in the simple plane of ordinary life it can be regarded a practical wisdom, and Westerners do not encounter it. If they do, they hear about it or they read about it, but they do not endure the life-process of abandoning the habit of attachment and developing the habit of non-attachment. There is more to the Way of renunciation than merely hearing some lectures about it or hearing me tell you about it or reading books about it. You must assume the discipline. The reason it is such a difficult discipline for undisciplined people is that they have habitually been undisciplined. They have habitually been living the orientation of attachment, and that style of living has built up habit energy, structures in the mind, the brain, the body, the nervous system, and the hormonal system. As a result, they are not really responsible for non-attachment, but they are only geared up for attachment and reactions to the frustrations of living. Thus, profound and practical learning is involved in the process of "hearing." DEVOTEE: Master, many of the books on the reading list you have recommended consider the "sila" of the Buddhist tradition, which seems basically to be control of the outgoing energies. MASTER DA: Yes, or outgoing exuberance. This is why taboos exist in the monastic circles even against laughter. Any demonstration of energy is a loss of face. The monastic schools of Hinayana Buddhism basically are reducible to applying this one principle of non-attachment to the absolute degree. They carry the psychological principle that characterizes the Oriental way of life to its extreme. When carried to its extreme, it becomes repressive and destructive, although it may be temporarily useful as a way of learning the psychological capacity for detachment. But when that "sila" is the only practice, then the practitioner winds up working to repress and ultimately to destroy the force of Being itself, beyond egoity. The Vajrayana school of the Tibetan tradition regards the Hinayana discipline of pursuing Nirvana to be a sort of kindergarten of the discipline. The Adepts of the Vajrayana regard the compassion or free disposition of the Bodhisattva to be a much higher stage, and a much higher stage still is the Realization of the Siddhas, the Enlightened yogis who see no distinction between Nirvana and samsara, and who function even "Crazily," or without seeming to be at all concerned about the fact that they seem to be doing what you do in your commitment to attachment. Thus, the Crazy Adepts, even in an exaggerated fashion, may tend to live the Western style of life. They live as if completely attached, or they do the things that, you might imagine, if they continued to do them they would become so profoundly attached they would even destroy themselves or work counter to Enlightenment. But they are functioning on the basis of prior Enlightenment. No attachment, no egoic principle, no self-principle is involved in what they are doing. They demonstrate complete freedom through paradox. Thus, the evolution of the Buddhist tradition, from Hinayana to Vajrayana and ultimately to Advaitayana, expresses a return from East to West. In our discussions most recently I have been playing on your disposition of attachment. The essence of our discussion has been the consideration of renunciation or the free disposition of practice of the Way. We have considered your life of attachment, particularly as it is expressed in your intimate choices of marriage and the whole society of attachment you create when you organize your lives along the lines of your sexual choices. For anyone, but particularly for Westerners, the life of choosing and marrying and living and working is based on the psychology of attachment. You all are acting as if you want to be householders, as if you want to make those choices and at the same time practice the Way of renunciation. I want to make it very clear to you that another principle must intervene. The Way that I Teach is not merely the householders life with a little religion thrown in. You must Realize the free disposition and transform the quality of existence altogether, whether you continue to maintain the conventions of married life or not. In any case, you must realize the disposition that is Awakened through hearing and that is then expressed through the natural discipline of one who understands. In this consideration and all this testing of you, I am looking for the evidence that you are people who have heard, that you are renunciates, that you are already practicing, and that you are not just a bunch of ordinary people who have no responsibility for themselves and no insight, who are merely functioning on the basis of automaticities and the habits acquired from the ordinary object-oriented, consumer-oriented society. You have never learned wisdom before, and, therefore, you have never lived it. Now that you are learning that wisdom, you must live it, not just talk it and organize yourselves relative to certain superficial aspects of the way it looks to you. As I have pointed out, one of the most significant areas of life in which you see this bondage is at the level of sexuality. On the one hand, sex is the most intimate dimension of the individuals life functionally. It is also in some sense social because it takes place in the plane of relations, but generally in relations outside general visibility, in the domain of privacy. We have a great deal of mind accumulated around sex. Apart from what you may have observed about yourself sexually and considered through this Teaching, the secular knowledge about sexuality has become quite vast in the last century, beginning with the work of Freud and developing from the work of others since Freud. Sex is not just genital pleasuring with its various social implications. It is profoundly linked with our being, with our unconscious mind, our subconscious mind, the pattern of our living, the pattern of emotion. Even the whole pattern of body is controlled by the disposition of the sex-force. Therefore, all the arrangements built upon sexuality, all the habits built upon it, all the psychology built upon it, even your whole life, which is built upon it-all of that is a great impediment to the spiritual Way. I have described the Western style of marriage as the "cult of pairs." It is a fortress against change. It involves the psychology of eternalizing the partner and all the ideas associated with romance whereby you become not merely human but objects desirable at the level of an archetype. You become surrogate gods for one another at the level of the romance of attachment and the usual games associated with initiating the sexual relationship. Then, once the relationship is established, you are busy trying to keep it from being destroyed, to the point that you are not even enjoying it particularly any more, not nearly so much, at any rate. You are only protecting, creating the fortress, just holding on, becoming more and more aware as time goes on that you are changing, you are getting older, and death and all kinds of possible changes could come to you. Therefore, the possibility inherent in everyones partner that he or she could have sex relations with somebody else becomes another of the great enemies. Jealousy is a terrible force in people, and it is just part of that fortress consciousness. Particularly as Westerners, we build our sexual intimacies upon this fortress mentality that expresses the psychology of clinging, not the psychology of non-attachment, non-clinging, and no-self. Until you realize the self-transcending disposition and begin to relate to everything differently, what you do really makes no difference. I am not saying that nothing will make a difference no matter what you do. You can do all kinds of things and realize all kinds of effects. I mean that you could be married, you could be unmarried and have sexual encounters here and there, you could be a monastic. You could take on any of these styles, in other words, and none of them will change anything ultimately. They will all simply express the same bound disposition, the same self-possessed personality. What you keep on doing is magnified in your life. What you do not do recedes, and what you do increases. The action level, the persistence level, is the karmic level. To stop doing things will cause them eventually to recede. Everybody has basically gone through the consideration and now you have settled into your relations again. But at the same time you are saying "Oh, we have learned so much from this consideration. We will never be the same again. We are really going to use this in our relationships now!" Yet you are all doing the same thing that you were doing before. Whatever you may think you are adding that will make you freer in your intimacies, you are still doing the same thing, and what you are doing will perpetuate and magnify itself. It will have much greater force than whatever you think you may be able to add to the situation through thought alone. If you had come through this time with an idea not to do certain kinds of things, then we might say that something had changed, something might recede in the future. But if the only change for any of you is a change in mind, or a change merely at the subjective level that you think you may add to your active circumstance, then it is not likely that anything great will change. In other words, nothing at the level of action has changed. You will still do what you have been doing. Thus, you cannot expect much to recede, and anything you think you have learned exists only at the present level of mind became you are keeping it there through conversation. As soon as I stop having this conversation with you, after time passes, when I have stopped talking and we have stopped considering it, the consideration will recede, and the actions will continue. Three months from now, six months from now, we could have the same considerations and deal with basically the same things all over again, the same drama essentially as it was played out in recent days. Of course, there are always little variations on what people will do, but essentially the same drama would arise to be played out. You must do more than temporarily put something in your mind that makes you feel that everything will be different from now on. You must change your act altogether, not just your outer act but yourself as an act, the self-contraction, the self-action in all its patterns. Something fundamental at the level of action must change because the karma, the bondage, lies in action. You have added nothing but patterns of thought through these few days together. I would say our consideration has been like a Chinese lunch. It is not going to satisfy you and it is not going to change anything because you have not changed anything. You have only come full circle to the decision to go on with it just as it was! The Dreaded Gom Boo - Table of Contents

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"The perfect among the sages is identical with Me. There is absolutely no difference between us"
Tripura Rahasya, Chap XX, 128-133