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Sel Nyteshade

Why is renunciation important?

From Issue 73, Summer 2023


In our daily lives we are buried beneath mountains of obligations, desires, ambitions. We are buried beneath other people’s ideas, emotions, beliefs. Who we are is lost in the vortex of forces; we are unable to take control of our lives, we are drowned in stress and anxiety, we are unable to know ourselves.


We are covered in the layers of the external world and become so habituated to these layers that they become indistinguishable from us. We believe them to be part of reality, a necessary facet of our lives. This is not to say that these layers are ‘false’ or ‘deceitful’ or ‘wrong’. They are just part of the experiential world. Nor is it to say there is some ‘true self’ which can only be discovered by renunciation – this is just a cliche. I do not see renunciation as some black and white path to ‘truth over falsehood’. Instead I see it as yin to yang; an opposite of participation, which makes up part of our totality. In other words, it is precisely over-participation that makes renunciation so relevant.


Renunciation is a state of cleansing, a stripping away of external layers to reveal to what is left when those layers are not dominant. That part of us that is buried can once more be revealed.


Once you have renunciated the experiential world you can remain in that state or follow the instinct to rebuild your life. But this time you can choose what layers you add with more care. Once you return to nothing, it is much easier to mindfully build back up to something.


Once you recognize that the layers are just layers, they lose their dominance over you; they become contingent, changeable. When you stop identifying so strongly with all of the things you are carrying, you are able to drop them and then only pick up what is actually good for you.


Renunciation can be a daunting process – shaving off the hair which gave you identity, leaving the job that gave you security, cutting off the friendships that you thought were forever, turning away from the promise of romance and love, reducing your power to consume goods, focusing less on pleasures of the world, abandoning the causes that you held to heart, giving up the path to ‘progress’. But is it more daunting than being devoured by externalities, without ever experiencing what you are at your most basic foundation?


Not everyone will follow the instinct to renunciate – not even for a short period of time. These people will find unhealthy ways to resume their destructive course, harming themselves and others. They might try to use therapy or medication to keep themselves ‘stable’ – this is like building a house in a swamp and spending your energy trying to keep it standing. Sometimes the house has to be left to collapse to the ground.


We only need to look at the sick capitalist society we are living in to see how far we have taken this fear of change. The ‘developed world’ drowns in its own meaninglessness, grows ever more unequal and corporate, pits everyone against everyone else, poisons and destroys the living world, burns people out in the workplace, turns spirituality into another commodity.


The path of renunciation is needed now more than ever. Not in the form of some corporate yoga session or ‘guaranteed-results, lifecoaching’ marketed at white professionals, but a real rebellion against that unsustainable life in the first place. This renunciation is a revolutionary act, but only as a side-effect. Striving for political change is, after all, nothing more than an external layer.


The aim of renunciation is to find yourself, in the domain of yourself. It is a place necessarily beyond the good and evil of common morality, beyond ‘progress’, beyond obligation, beyond everything but you. How could it be anything else?

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