9.28.26

A book that was very popular during the 1970s was Be Here Now, by Baba Ram Dass. Ram Dass had been a well-known Harvard professor of psychology known as Dr. Richard Alpert. When he went to India to study in the Sixties, Ram Dass left behind a career as well as many possessions including a Mercedes, a motorcycle, an MG sportscar, and a Cessna airplane. I feel he knows something about what renunciation really means. 

He wrote: "You may think of renunciation in terms of some external act like a New Year's resolution, or leaving family and friends to go off to a cave. But renunciation is much more subtle than that- and much harder- and much more continuing. On the spiritual journey, renunciation means nonattachment.

To become free of attachment means to break the link identifying you with your desires. The desires continue: They are part of the dance of nature. But a renunciate no longer thinks that he is his desires."

― Lama Surya Das, Awakening to the Sacred