I'd like to talk about renunciation: giving stuff up, removing oneself from one's worldly possessions... that apparently moral high ground in which someone gives up all their worldly possessions and lives a life of austerity/ poverty but is somehow happy about it.
I'd like you to know that it's not what it seems.
And I'd like to demonstrate this... with a sweatshirt.
When I was in college, I dated a guy who had rowed for the U.C. Berkeley crew team. I was rowing for the U.C. Davis crew team at the time and one Saturday, he gave me his old sweatshirt.
I'm sure that for him it was just a sweatshirt but for me it was like getting your boyfriend's varsity letterman's jacket in high school. I slept with that sweatshirt, refused to wash it for as long as I could so that his smell would stay on it, and kept it neatly folded beneath my pillow during the day so that I could be certain it would be there when I returned at night. That sweatshirt was proof that someone cared about me, loved me, that I was cherished.
Then we broke up.
The breakup wasn't exactly harmonious but since I was the one who initiated it I couldn't really complain.
The sweatshirt, however, was banished. I threw it into the darkest corner of my closet, hoping that I would never have to deal with it again. That sweatshirt was proof that I had broken someone's heart, that I was incapable of love, that even when I thought I had found a life partner I had been wrong and it was me who had done it.
I wanted nothing to do with that sweatshirt. The only reason I kept it was because I didn't have the heart to mail it back to him and couldn't bear the thought of contacting him to return it.
Same sweatshirt, same grey cotton fabric, same navy blue letters...
different story.
And for me, this is what renunciation is about: same object, different story.
If you had asked me to give up that sweatshirt when we first started dating I would have refused. I would have clung it to my chest and told you that I couldn't live without it- it was mine and he had given it to me and there was no way I was giving it up.
If you had asked me to give up that sweatshirt after we broke up I would have giddily pointed out its hiding spot in the corner of my closet and skipped along as I walked you to to the door to take it away. Giving up that sweatshirt would have given me pure joy.
Now, I'm not saying that giving up your worldly possessions is going to give you pure joy but I am saying that once you start seeing your stories about things, giving stuff up is a walk in the park.
For this demonstration I will be using cars- a Tesla to be exact.
When I say the word Tesla, many of you will have a story about it. Here are some of mine:
eighty-two thousand dollars
environmentally conscious
Something I will never have
If your story of owning a Tesla is a sign of your financial success, giving it up could be difficult.
If your story of owning a Tesla is proof that you are environmentally conscious, you probably wouldn't want to trade it in for some other vehicle.
If your story of owning a Tesla is that you finally have something you never thought you could and someone asked you to give it up you might not want to do that.
But I think we are all in agreement that a Tesla is, in all truth, steel, rubber, leather (if you paid for it), and chemicals in the form of a battery. That's really all it is.
It's true, it may be the way you get to work, pick up your kids, get around town, but you can do that in other ways and the Tesla is made of the same materials as those other forms of transportation. So when you look at the Tesla for what it really is, you could probably give it up for some other form of transportation. You don't have to but it's definitely easier when you look at it that way.
And now I am going to push you a little more. I am going to ask you to consider a house.
If you are lucky, you live somewhere. Hopefully it is a place that you can come home to, reliably, each night.
Perhaps it is an apartment, a house, a condo, a mansion- more rooms than you need, just enough, or never enough at all.
Imagine I asked you to give that up. That would be crazy- it would be stupid, everyone needs a home. And it's true, everyone does need a home.
But most homes are made of wood, or brick, or some kind of other natural element. These elements are susceptible to things like fire, earthquakes, and floods. They can be ruined in an instant. We don't like to admit this. We want to believe that they are permanent, that they are safe, that they will always be there. But in truth, they are not. Homes offer us the promise of security but we know that this will not always be fulfilled.
You don't want to give up your home but when a disaster occurs and you are forced to give up your home you find that what you really need is a place of shelter, a place of safety, and what it looks like, what amenities it has are not as important as its basic offer of a place to call home.
In my experience, zen practice is about noticing yourself- what stories you bring to situations, how you approach life, how your stories have brought you to see the world in certain ways, and how they continue to shape how you see things. As you notice these stories you begin to see that they are stories, that you made them up, that though they often define how you see things they are actually just stories and you have a choice to see them as just that and, if you want, let them go and see things as they are instead.
I think that when monks start giving up their worldly possessions they're doing this because they've given up their stories about them.
Giving up the cool t-shirt they got at that amazing concert in the middle of the summer with their first love isn't what they're doing. They're giving up a piece of cotton in the shape of the letter T.
They're not giving up the BMW or Porsche or Prius that guaranteed the perception of them as capable members of society. They're walking away from a large object made of steel and rubber that burns gasoline.
In packing up their sunny apartment with their own room and that window they aren't leaving behind a home. They're simply moving from one place of shelter to another.
I say this not to make it look easy because it isn't.
I say this to point out that when people do this, when they "renounce" material possessions they are doing just that: they are RE announcing them for what they are: fabric, metal, wood. They aren't giving anything up at that point, what they had no longer has meaning so walking away from it is a whole different story.
I'm not saying you should start renouncing your material possessions but it you find that you really need something, that you are clinging to its meaning the way I was clinging to that sweatshirt and you find that this is causing you sorrow or pain, maybe look at the stories you have around it, maybe see it for what it is- it might actually free you from it (or him or her), enough to begin to walk away.
