Renunciation

Close your eyes and lift your mind above its ordinary concerns. Bring it to the breath. Bring it to how your body feels right now as you breathe in, how it feels as you breathe out. Think of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. Every nerve, every blood vessel takes part in the breathing. Breathe in a way that feels good all the way through the body.

You’re giving rise to a sense of pleasure that comes not from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations, but simply from your experience of the body from within. The Buddha calls this the pleasure of form. It’s a higher pleasure than your ordinary pleasures of sights, sounds, etc. It’s better for the mind.

Think of when the Buddha reflected on his past. He had tried a life of sensuality. That didn’t work. He had tried a life of self-torture. That didn’t work. But he remembered a time when his mind had simply settled down naturally with the breath when he was young. This was the path. This was the middle way: a sense of well-being that had no bad results at all. There was nothing blameworthy about it. It didn’t harm anybody and it didn’t make the mind intoxicated. This is the kind of pleasure the Buddha recommends.

When he talks about renunciation, it usually sounds like we’re going to have to do without. But it means, basically, a trade. Instead of going for our ordinary desires for things that we’d like to look at, things we’d like to listen to, we go for a higher pleasure.

This is an important skill that we’ve got to learn. We’ve got to train the mind because the mind runs after its desires. You see this every day, every day. You sit down to meditate, and you see your desires going here, going there. You’ve got learn how to say No to them, get some control over them, because if you can’t control them now, think what’s going to happen when you get old, when you get sick. As you approach death, they’re going to be all over the place. If you don’t have any control now, it’s going to be a lot harder to do it then. And when you can’t control it then, who knows where those desires are going to take you if you have to leave body?

So here’s a good chance to master this skill of lifting the mind to something higher. You’re making a trade. It’s like trading candy for gold. You have to put aside your ordinary concerns about sensual pleasures and think about something higher, something better for the mind. Get the mind used to having desires in that higher direction, looking for its happiness in that higher direction, and you’ll be able to trust it a lot more.

You know what sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations do to you. They intoxicate the mind, and they lure you on to do things that you later regret. But there’s no regret with this pleasure at all. It’s much more under your control. Those other pleasures, can take you anywhere at all—up, down—but usually they pull you down. You want something that lifts you up to a higher level: a level that’s more secure, a level that’s more harmless.

That’s what renunciation is all about. It’s not deprivation. It’s being more particular about where you’re going to look for your happiness, realizing that you have to train the mind if it’s really going to be happy, if it’s going to find a happiness that lasts.

So learn to master this skill, because it lifts the mind above a lot of things. It lifts it above its other desires that would pull it down. You want some desires that pull you up. This is one of them.