Why did you renounce worldly life?
This question arises frequently and tends to be rooted in the concept that the material world has so much to offer and I’ve forsaken it, renounced it, sacrificed all the good things in life for the spiritual path. How could I do such a thing, and why? That tends to be the underlying direction of these questions.
For me, renunciation was not a rational decision of my thinking, analytical mind. I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I know what I’m going to do today! I’m going to renounce all these things and people in my life and go on a spiritual quest.’ For me, it was something that just happened. I had come to India while pursuing my PhD. I had no intention of staying. I wasn’t consciously looking for a Guru; I wasn’t even on a spiritual path. But standing on the banks of the Ganga, something so deep and powerful happened to me on every level of my existence and awareness that I knew I was supposed to stay.
Here’s an analogy I use to describe it. Imagine that your feet are a size eight, but you’ve spent your whole life wearing size six shoes. Everybody gives you size six shoes. In the beginning you say, ‘But my feet hurt!’ and they say, ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, that’s what shoes feel like.’ Slowly, you get used to it. It’s not that you are living in pain; you assume and believe that this is what shoes feel like. Then, one day, someone gives you a size eight shoe, you slip your foot in and realize with great joy, ‘Ah, this is what wearing proper shoes feels like!’ Ironically, people ask you, ‘Don’t you ever want to go back, don’t you miss wearing size six shoes? Are you sure that you always want to wear size eight shoes?’ And you just think, ‘Really? Why in the world would I go back to something that didn’t fit?’
It’s not a perfect analogy because my life was actually really good in America. It wasn’t like a pair of shoes that didn’t fit, but it just wasn’t who I truly was, it wasn’t the deepest, highest, fullest expression of who I was. So while my life there was deeply rich and fulfilling in so many ways, when I came to Rishikesh and I had the experience of divinity on the banks of Mother Ganga, it felt as if rather than sacrificing something, I’d received something.
The comments that people make and the questions they ask about my life choices almost always hint at sacrifice, at what a lot I’ve given up to be here. But that has not been my experience at all. For me, it has definitely been an experiencing of gaining much more than what I had to renounce.
Every time you order at a restaurant, you have to make a choice—this dish or that, it can’t be both. When you’re getting dressed every day, you can’t wear two pairs of pants—you pick one. Everything is a package deal. The ‘worldly’ life is one option, and the life of a ‘renunciate’ is a different one. Neither is all good or all bad, neither is all luxury or all hardship, neither is right or wrong, better or worse. They are just different packages.
We only have twenty-four hours in a day, regardless of which package we choose. We only have a certain amount of energy. We have to eat, sleep, bathe. So we’re left with only a certain number of hours in the day that are really in our hands, and the question is: ‘What way of spending those hours is most in harmony with what’s most important to me?’ For me, the choice to be in a place that enables me to dedicate myself to spirituality was worth letting go of all of the soy lattes, cars, comfortable beds, cosy relationships that I had been accustomed to. You can have the most comfortable bed in the world, but if you need to take a pill to go to sleep at night because of your anxiety or depression, the quality of the bed doesn’t really benefit you much.
What I have found here in Rishikesh, in the life of renunciation as a sanyasi, is not perfect, but on the whole, it’s much more fulfilling and meaningful to me than the package deal that was the life I had before, the life I would have if I went back, or any package deal I could envision.
One of the tragedies of New Age spiritual teachings is this concept that ‘life is a buffet’, and that you really get to pick and choose whatever you want. Life is not usually like that. You can’t simultaneously live in Paris and in LA. You can’t simultaneously shoulder the responsibility of raising children and have the freedom of not having children. You have to make choices. It’s not a matter of figuring out how to make life a buffet, because you can’t.
I’ll share a funny, true story. Pujya Swamiji and I were in Switzerland a few years ago, running a spiritual retreat in the Alps. From the Zurich airport, we drove straight to the retreat centre. Along the way, we stopped at a wonderful fresh marketplace, which had a coffee bar. I enjoy coffee, but not instant coffee. When I’m outside India in a place where I can have nice filtered coffee, I usually go for it, particularly if I’ve just got off an overnight flight. So I followed the Swiss woman who was organizing the retreat, who picked us up at the airport, to the coffee bar and I said to her, ‘Please order me a café latte but with soy milk rather than regular milk.’
She gave me a funny look and replied, ‘You please tell them. I cannot.’
Now, this woman is a devotee, an incredibly generous, dedicated, selfless woman, and I could see on the counter that they had a carton of soy milk, so her refusal to order the soy latte was confusing to me. I asked her, ‘What do you mean? I don’t speak German.’
She said, ‘That’s OK, they speak enough English, you tell them.’
So I ordered my own café latte with soy milk, and they gave me a funny look at the counter as well, but made the coffee for me. Later, when we were back in the car, I asked her why she needed me to order the coffee when she was ordering everything else. She explained that in Switzerland, you take things exactly how they are and you do not ask for anything to be changed.
She shared that a month earlier, she had had a group of friends visiting from California. She took them out to a restaurant, and they all did what people from California are used to doing, which is to order like this: ‘Well, I’d like this item but actually instead of that bread, can you put it on this bread, instead of that spread can you use this spread, and instead of this side dish can you give me that side dish instead?’
The waiter replied, ‘I have a wonderful idea. Why don’t you go home and cook you dinner exactly how you’d like to eat it?’
Now, in California, you can go to a restaurant and the waiters can handle that kind of stuff without even noting down your changes. But in California, we’ve been a bit spoilt because the world isn’t like that, and, for that matter, dining in most places isn’t like that. We’ve really been spoilt to think we can walk into any restaurant and ask for everything to be changed. Life isn’t like that. Life resembles dining in Switzerland much more than it resembles dining in California. Life offers us opportunities and options and packages, but it’s not a buffet.
When I chose the life of renunciation, I was aware of that. It isn’t that I think marriage and children are bad, or that I thought orange was the colour that suited me better than any other. Giving up marriage and children, wearing orange, these were the pieces that came with the package of life I wanted to live, the life I knew I was meant to live here. The full package being offered to me here was so much richer and fuller than the life I had been living until then.
It’s not perfect, but none of the package options are perfect. The only thing that makes life perfect—whether we choose worldly life or the life of a renunciate—is how we deal with it. That’s what’s in our hands, and that’s what brings peace and joy. There are a lot of people I know who are married, have children and are miserable, and a lot of renunciates who are miserable too. And, of course, there are many happy married people with children as well as many happy renunciates. You cannot decide which way is right objectively.
For me, I discovered that this path was much simpler and purer in the ability it offered me to live the truth I had experienced and the truth I wanted to live, without having so many encumbrances. It’s not that you can’t live a spiritual life without being a renunciate. Of course you can. The scriptures are full of stories of people who are married and living with families, even rishis and sages. But for me, all of this was so much more beautiful and fulfilling than anything I had known before. I was twenty-five, I grew up in Los Angeles, I had seen that kind of life. When I came to Rishikesh and had this experience, it opened up a world for me that was so much richer than anything I had known before. So it was not a matter of renouncing, it was not a matter of pushing that life away. It was a matter of simply opening myself more and more to this life which filled me up so much that there was no more room for anything else.
Remember that everything on the menu may look really good before you’ve ordered and eaten, while you’re still hungry, but once you’ve eaten and are full, it doesn’t matter how good something looks because you’re no longer hungry. For me, what I have found here is so filling that there is no hunger or thirst or yearning for anything else. For me that has been the path. It has been much more a path of embracing than of renouncing.