year my insurance salesman visits me to assess my various insurance policies. Of course, his unspoken agenda is to persuade me to purchase more insurance cover. With a smile on his face he begins a long discourse on the unspeakable terrors and tragedies that may befall me. What if you had no work? What if you or your partner contracted a terminal illness? What if your children were in an accident? The list of possible disasters seems endless. Listening to him my eyes grow wider and wider, yet I also glimpse the bottomless chasm of fear I could inhabit if I lived by the rules of “what if?” The choice seems simple: do I choose to make fear my companion in life or do I choose to live with trust and skillful means?
We tend to believe that there will always be a better moment for us to find simplicity and happiness than the moment we are in. We cling tightly to all that we have and want, not seeing that this desperate holding and wanting only generates greater depths of fear. We look upon the world as an enemy or thief, intent upon depriving us of all we have accumulated. There is a story of an elderly, cantankerous man, miserly with everything including his love and trust, who awoke one night to find his house on fire. Climbing to the roof for safety, he looked down to see his sons holding a blanket for him to jump into. “Jump, father, jump, we’ll save you,” they called. He answered, “Why should I believe you? What do you want in return?” “Father, this is no time for arguments. Either jump or you’ll lose your life.” “I know you boys,” he shouted, “lay the blanket on the ground and then I’ll jump.”
We believe that it is difficult to let go but, in truth, it is much more difficult and painful to hold and protect. Reflect upon anything in your lives that you grasp hold of—an opinion, a historical resentment, an ambition, or an unfulfilled fantasy. Sense the tightness, fear, and defensiveness that surrounds the grasping. It is a painful, anxious experience of unhappiness. We do not let go in order to make ourselves impoverished or bereft. We let go in order to discover happiness and peace. As Krishnamurti once said, “There is a great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.”
In the search for simplicity we are drawn to ask ourselves: “What is truly lacking in this moment?” Would even more thoughts, possessions, experiences, sights, or sounds have the power to liberate us from complexity and unhappiness, or would they add more clutter to an over-cluttered life and heart? When we are lost in these states of want and need, contentment, simplicity, and peace feel far away. We become fixated upon the next moment, the moment we arrive at the rainbow’s end, fulfilling our desires and gratifying our needs. The promise of happiness and peace is projected into the perfect moment, the ideal relationship, the next attainment or exciting experience. Although experience tells us how easily we become dissatisfied, bored, and disinterested with what we gain, we continue to invest our happiness and well-being in this projected promise.
Pursuing our obsessions, we forget that this acute sense of deprivation is not rooted in the world but in our own minds. Simplicity is not concerned with resignation or passivity, nor with surrendering vision and direction in our lives. It is about surrendering our obsessions and addictions, and all the anxiety and unhappiness they generate. Over and over we learn to ask ourselves, “What is truly lacking in this moment?”
In my early years of meditation practice I had a great longing for stillness, believing that my progress depended on finding the perfectly quiet mind. I found myself pursuing the perfectly quiet world, believing it to be a precondition for the quiet mind. First I had a room in a tiny village, but soon became dissatisfied. The sound of an occasional truck or a market peddler disturbed whatever quiet I managed to find. So I moved further up the mountain to a small house, convinced that it would be perfect. Before long I was irritated by the sounds of passing herdsmen and the occasional barking of a dog, so once more I moved further up the mountain to an isolated hut, far removed from any human contact. I covered the windows with blankets so even the sun wouldn’t distract me and I breathed a sigh of relief—perfect quiet. In that part of India lived tribes of large, silver-haired monkeys and they discovered the delight of my tin roof. One day, finding myself outside shouting and pouring abuse upon the monkeys, it finally occurred to me that perfect calm was perhaps more a state of mind than a state of environment.
Fixated upon getting, possessing, and arriving at the “perfect moment,” we overlook the fact that the perfect moment comes to depend upon the fulfillment of our goals, desires, and fantasies. We believe we will be happy when we have ordered the world to suit our wants, expectations, and ambitions. Strangely, this perfect moment and promise of fulfillment never arrives; it is ceaselessly pushed over into the future as yet another need or desire arises within us. One of the richest men in America, after finally reaching his goal of possessing three billion dollars, remarked to a friend, “You know, I really don’t feel all that secure. Maybe if I had four billion.” Peace and simplicity are not so complicated; they are born of being, not of having. Each time we become lost in our obsessions and cravings we deprive ourselves of the simplicity, contentment, and freedom that is to be found in a single moment embraced with attention and the willingness to be touched by its richness. An ancient Sufi saying tells us, “Within your own house swells the treasure of joy, so why do you go begging from door to door?”
Renunciation is Compassion
One of my first teachers once told me, “Letting go is an act of compassion for yourself.” We drive ourselves into deep states of sorrow and anxiety in our quest for gratification and happiness. Driven by what the Buddha described as the two deepest fears of a human being: the fear of having nothing and the fear of being no-one, we try to grasp the ungraspable, preserve the changing, secure the unpredictable, and guarantee the unknowable. It is an act of great kindness to learn how to let go in this life, to be with what is, to harmonize ourselves with life’s inevitable changes, and open up to the mystery of the unknown. When we no longer live in fear of losing what we have, we can begin to learn how to love and appreciate what is already with us. We learn to reclaim our inner authority, to discover happiness within ourselves and within each moment. In a path of renunciation, all that we are truly letting go of is a world of unease and discontent. Coco Chanel once remarked, “How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.”
In his first discourse, the Buddha stated that craving is the cause of sorrow and pain. The craving to gain what we do not have, the craving to get rid of what we do not want, and the craving for experience and identity, are all manifestations of an energy that leads us to depart from the truth of what is in each moment. The Buddha went on to say that the cause of sorrow lies in our own hearts and minds; the cause of happiness lies in our own hearts and minds. Our immediate response may be to say that this is too simplistic. There appear to be so many things that cause us sorrow—the job we dislike, the relatives we struggle with, the aches in our body; the list is endless. As we look more deeply we should ask: do any of these hold the power to cause us to be lost in sorrow, pain, or confusion? Or is it the movements of our minds that dismiss, judge, reject, and avoid, which cause the greatest pain and sorrow?
We can go through life with the mantra, “This shouldn’t be happening. I want something else to happen. This should be different than it is.” Pursuing what we want and do not have, trying to get rid of what we have and don’t want, losing interest in what previously fascinated us, are all the tentacles of a single energy of craving. It is a powerful energy that leads us to flee from the moment and ourselves. As our appetites become jaded, we find ourselves needing ever more intense excitement and experience. The Buddha compared this energy of craving to a forest fire which consumes the very ground that sustains it. Our energy, time, well-being, and peace are consumed in the fires of craving. Renunciation, learning to let go gently and clearly in our lives, extinguishes the fire; it is the antidote to craving.
In the last century an affluent tourist went to visit a Polish rabbi, renowned for the depth of his learning and compassion. Arriving at the impoverished village where the rabbi made his home, he was astonished to discover the rabbi living in a simple room with only a few books and the most basic furniture. “Rabbi, where is all your furniture, your
