To be free, be willing to be a renunciate to some degree, writes ANDREW COHEN
TO GIVE UP ATTACHMENT MEANS RECOGNISING FOR OURSELVES THAT THE PROMISE OF PERFECT HAPPINESS AND BLISSFUL FULFILMENT INHERENT IN SEXUAL DESIRE IS OVERWHELMINGLY DECEPTIVE
The big question is: If enlightened freedom is freedom from attachment, then what are we all going to do about the relentless nature of sexual attraction?
Well, there have been widely differing answers to this perennial question that have been offered to men and women throughout the ages. On one extreme, we have been encouraged to use the sexual experience itself as a vehicle for self-transcendence and, on the other, we have been told that if we want to be liberated men and women, we have to renounce the sexual experience altogether.
I believe that if we want to be free, we must think very deeply about these matters for ourselves. We can’t naively assume that there is a simple, readymade answer to such a complex and loaded question. And if we are sincere, we have to be willing to bear the burden of that complexity on our own shoulders and figure it out for ourselves. If even enlightened masters have come to such contradictory conclusions about this fundamental issue, then it just points us back to ourselves and our own honest inquiry into one of life’s most challenging questions.
If you want to be free, then all you need to know is that free means free from attachment. That simple fact transcends the relative matter of whether you’re in a relationship or not in a relationship. If you face that spiritual truth unflinchingly, then you will be looking into the heart of the matter for yourself. And that takes a lot more courage than blindly accepting someone else’s conclusions.
To give up attachment means recognising for ourselves that the promise of perfect happiness and blissful fulfilment inherent in sexual desire is overwhelmingly deceptive. It means that we are very clear about the difference between the personal bliss of the romantic interlude and the impersonal ecstasy of spiritual freedom. It means that we choose to renounce personal affirmation for the ecstatic contentment that emerges spontaneously when we finally stop looking outside our own self for the experience of completion. But realistically, in a world like ours that is incessantly propagating this powerful promise, if we want to be free, we all, to some degree at least, have to be willing to be renunciates!
In this context, renunciation means resisting the temptation to be seduced by the most powerful illusion that there is. It’s what I call “the promise of perfection.”It says: “If I follow this impulse to its ultimate conclusion, I’m going to find perfect happiness and total contentment — I will experience a deep sense of wholeness; I will finally be complete.”
We do this over and over again and continue to miss the simple truth that the bliss we experience in the romantic interlude never lasts and ultimately creates painful attachment. And also, it is only when we let go of the promise of perfection that it will become clear to us how, more often than not, the experience of romantic intoxication is fuelled by the ego’s need for personal affirmation.
Would there be any reason left to be in a relationship? Does this mean we have to give up everything? Well, yes and no. Yes, if it means creating more suffocating attachment that only serves to perpetuate the illusory personal world of the separate ego. But no, if the context for personal intimacy and sexual communion is authentic spiritual freedom.
■Follow Andrew Cohen at speakingtree.in
COMMENT