99. Don't fight the wrong battle🔗

Vairagya is not choosing poverty, it is not dumping your car, dumping your house, dumping your relationships, dumping your bank balance, dumping your wife. That is not a big thing! It is very easy to dump things. Actually, it is very easy to dump your wife because you know it is so much responsibility! This is the stupid thing that people do. Earlier they were running behind wealth, and now, when the energy shifts, they start chasing poverty! They start practicing extreme renunciation.

Buddha describes this problem beautifully. A king once comes to him and says that he wants to become a monk. Buddha says, ‘I will take one year to initiate you as a monk. Because you have come from this extreme, you will naturally go to the opposite extreme, and then come back to the middle. Only after seeing this, I will initiate you.’ The king says, ‘What do you mean? I want to renounce everything, that is why I have come to you.’ Buddha says, ‘I know but your idea about renunciation is not real renunciation.’ And it exactly happened as Buddha predicted. When he joined the community, the king started moving to the opposite extreme. As a king, he had spent the whole day eating, sleeping, enjoying. The story describes, that even on his staircase there used to be no railing; instead, there were women standing next to him, just to hold him! That is the way he had lived. So now, he was going to the opposite extreme - no food, no water, just torturing his body. He was literally taking revenge on himself.

Understand, if you need jeevanmukti, enlightenment, what needs to be experienced is choicelessness. But the problem is that people either choose wealth or choose poverty - they choose any one extreme; they just cannot be in the middle. They cannot live their life with simple awareness, because living with awareness is too much. That means you have to be alive, be spontaneous, flow with life every moment. That is too much! So they say, ‘Just give us a set of rules; Swamiji, you just tell us what to do and we will follow it.’

It cannot happen in that way. I cannot tell you what you should do. I can only say what space you should be in. Here, when Patanjali says vairagya, he means the space in which he wants you to be, not the actions which he wants you to be doing.

The one word misunderstood creates the whole confusion.

I have seen monks who leave their homes, leave everything, for the sake of enlightenment. They take up the path with so much enthusiasm, intensity and courage, but because of just this one misunderstanding, they not only miss enlightenment, but live such a depressed life, such a depressed life. After some time their own internal struggle has been reduced to nothing but to maintain their detachment, how to be in poverty. They are constantly struggling and training their body to maintain that detachment. Their whole energy is spent in that; their whole internal struggle is redirected towards poverty instead of enlightenment.

Around the age of forty or fifty, they come to the conclusion, ‘Enlightenment is not possible; at least let me live a sasnyas life, with poverty, chastity and purity.’ And when I ask them, ‘What is your main struggle?,’ they say, ‘Maintaining sannyas life.’ This is the worst thing that can happen to a human being. You renounce everything for some purpose, and that idea also is misunderstood. Unimaginable, unimaginable!

In the Upanishads and Puranas, there are some descriptions about different sins. One is, telling a lie to a soldier and asking him to give up his life; sending soldiers to a war by telling a lie. This is almost the same thing! Sanyas life is literally like an internal war, and if you have not understood the truth for which you are waging the war, then it is the worst sin; it is the worst crime committed against you.

Today, consciously practice choicelessness in your actions and thinking.