Gnostic Awakening

Even your attitude towards renunciation itself, will be transformed. Instead of viewing it as a harsh and burdensome discipline, you will be eager to intensify its practice, so that you can uncover even subtler desires, more hidden fears, and deeper attachments. And, indeed, the more you practice, the more you will be stripped of these egoic veils, like a snake shedding its skin, until at last you will have only one desire left – to attain that Gnostic Awakening which abolishes suffering once and for all.

But then, at some point along the way, it will occur to you that, if all selfish desires are to be renounced and abandoned, this must also include the desire for Gnosis. As the Tibetan master, Lama Lodo, observes: “If anyone says ‘I’ am going to achieve enlightenment, this [very] grasping prevents him from reaching a non-dual state.”

This insight brings you face-to-face with the final act of renunciation required by a spiritual path-sometimes called the Great Renunciation – which is to surrender, not only all hope for worldly happiness, but also the desire for Gnosis and the hope for ultimate spiritual happiness which it holds. But because the desire for Gnosis will have by now become entrenched in the very center of your soul, the demand to surrender it will be tantamount to a demand to annihilate yourself completely. And yet, as you soon discover, self-annihilation can never be accomplished by any effort on your part, for as long as you are making an effort, ‘you’ will still be there. So what can you do?

The answer is: literally nothing.

But if, in the meantime you have really renounced and abandoned every other desire and attachment-whether for worldly pleasures or spiritual consolations – then, by the time you reach this stage all your bridges will be burned. Thus, although there will be no way to move forward, neither will there be any way to turn back. You will have no choice but to remain right where you are. This is Kenosis (emptiness), the last stage of the path, the gateway to Gnosis. Here, is how Ramana Maharshi describes it:

Sadhanas are needed so long as one has not realized it. They are for putting an end to obstacles. Finally there comes a stage when a person feels helpless notwithstanding the sadhanas. He is unable to pursue the much-cherished sadhana also. It is then that God’s power is realized. The Self reveals itself.

In other words, when there is nothing more for the ego to do, it disappears, like the circle of light which disappears when you stop whirling your sparkler on the night of the Fourth of July, and you realize there never was any real circle there to begin with. It was simply an illusion, created by your own activity. And when this activity ceases, the illusion vanishes of itself and the reality is seen. And so it is with the ego. When it vanishes, Gnosis dawns: all things are “wiped away” and “this world is laid flat,” along with the ‘self’ which seemed to inhabit it.

In one sense, then, we can see that the whole effort at spiritual renunciation is, from the beginning, doomed to failure; and we can also see why. Ultimately, it is impossible to renounce yourself and the world because no such ‘self’ or ‘world’ really exists – which, of course, is precisely what must be Realized. And yet, in another sense, renunciation in all its forms – starting with the simple refusal to scratch an itch, and ending in the quandary posed by the Great Renunciation – is indispensable to the spiritual path. It is the thread upon which all the practices are strung. And it is by pushing these practices to the limit that all desires, all effort, and all will – that is, everything we imagine constitutes our separate selves – are finally exhausted. Thus, by engaging in a total effort to renounce self and world, the seeker fails totally; and yet, paradoxically, it is only by failing totally that the seeker can succeed.

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