Renunciation

The world doesn’t look like much to want right now. I’ll have to suspend my DirecTV subscription again and pay the balance, if I can. Or maybe I will just do away with it completely. Ah, let that be another day, please, Lord?

So, I have taken steps toward that renunciation before in my life and you know, it is not so easy to do. I remember when we smoked dope and hung out naked and talked about renunciation. Actually, it was attachment but attachment and giving it up is exactly renunciation. We weren’t very serious though many of us had our connections to spirituality. I had met a teacher who was following a living master and visited Divine Light Mission with another. Then there was the eating. Vegetarianism, of course, is a spiritual practice in my mind. In fact one Spiritual Master called it the essence of religion.

But, say you want to just join the Krishna devotees and chant and eat and dance glorifying Krishna for the rest of your days? That’s not easy. There’s no room at the Inn. In Satsvarupa Gosvami’s book called Planting the Seed in which narrates the first 2 years of Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada’s preaching in the United States he speaks of exactly that and I find that it is true that they don’t want to take on the problems of your material condition at these places, they just want you to do the practices, i.e. chanting, dancing and eating in glorification of Krishna. No one is going to pay your rent at Siddha Yoga either. In fact no one will even go to dinner with you or have you to their home. I have been to some Siddhay followers homes but it was as the meditation center, not as my own individual person. Friendship appears to great a burden for any person these days. The whys and wherefores of that may better be left unstudied. I wish I knew. I don’t like it that nobody is my friend anymore. Whether rich or poor no one wants to know me and I have a feeling it’s the same for them.

It’s just that in my mind I have all these pictures of people getting sanctuary through the church, turning to God and being welcomed by Him. But it just doesn’t seem to be so for me. I’m particularly disappointed in that Ramakrishna man who said God is in the ones you love. If he is in MY loved ones I haven’t seen much of Him except in my mom, of course, who let me live with her and paid my tuition when I went back to school. I remember asking her to pay back that Stafford loan. Gee, that was so stupid, a prime example of our needing everything done quick, quick, quick. We could have taken years paying off that Stafford loan. It wasn’t like the bank loans that carry all that interest. I was so stupid about money.

Money is a funny thing. Some people will never accept cash into their hands and I remember when I started to. I felt so criminal. It was a payoff. I didn’t realize it. Some honest people, it seemed to me, accepted cash in the hand but then some did not. I lost my sense of purity accepting money that way and yet I felt so poor sometimes when nothing was given to me. It was like that for many years after the Farm had done with me. Not the Farm in Tennessee devoted to that hippie philosopher, Stephan Gaskin but a Farm right around the great University City of Gainesville, Florida where the boys and girls hung out naked and smoked dope and drank beer and listened to music and tried to live lightly off the land. That became a big money problem. There was a sort of body shop there. What they did was paint those beautiful designs you sometimes see on cars and motorcycles. It was someone my girlfriend knew. My girl got to know some of my college buddies but she never got to know some of the really serious friends I had who had helped me with work and school. In college, it seems we get addicted to the partying and forget about real things. Sometimes marriages come between old friends but that may just be an illusion of the days back then. Maybe I just wasn’t really that close to my girlfriend. Watching Cheers episodes daily has impressed me with the real meaning of non-attachment in the world of love. I see what the rock poets were really after when they didn’t want to make those commitments. They just wanted more sex from more women.

Does anybody read this stuff?