Course I - Teaching 8: Renunciation

If a being renounced, not to eventual harmful things to his wellbeing, but for the sake of freedom, he would reach, while living, untold happiness, total serenity and a state of indescribable natural ecstasy.
To break ties and go out of cages in order to get rid of some thing, is to remain subtly tied, and trapped in bigger cages; but to renounce in order to be free is to live.
A person that leaves his own things for the pleasure of leaving these things becomes the owner of them. A person that by love of liberation renounces to the lot of land that society granted to him becomes the owner of the Earth. A person that, tired of seeing the sky from his window, throws his house down sees the entire horizon. But true renunciation starts when the individual sets himself free from his ordinary personality.
In texts of Spiritual Development, there are seven grades of Renunciation.
Here is the first grade: To break the ordinary personality.
An ordinary personality is a set of ideas closing man in a circle of certain laws, creeds, habits, customs and particular trends. To break this circle, to discard this mental layer and stop believing one cannot be happy without all these “pre-established” concepts, is to take the first step to liberation.
He who slaves himself for what he believes that is his happiness and wellbeing, continuously undergoes and fears to lose his chains, those thin silky plaits that are tying him, making him smaller and reducing to a minimum point his inner vision of consciousness.
Since this enslaved being lives in such reduced spiritual space, he has no other force to control than to believe that he is safe.
A frog in a ditch said to a frog in a river that visited her: there is not any wider extension of water than this water I enjoy.
A soul wants to lose its personality and to acquire its individuality. This individuality is already here, the fruit of the future race that by its own forces will contact the soul of the world. A caterpillar wants to become a butterfly. Satan’s image disappears with the lights of the dawn in the new day to make room for God.
Since a being is not happy any more in the cell of personality, continuously lies himself, and constantly deceives and says to himself he is happy; so, the second grade of Renunciation is courage to confess honestly our own inferiority.
To renounce is to know oneself. To renounce is to make light in the soul and, in the most secret corners of our consciousness, to see those shadows too much feared and too much carefully hidden.
Moral greed in man is an action by which we accumulate inner desires, aims, trends and vices ignored by all; it is moral avarice in man.
Truly we need extraordinary courage not only to confess our inner faults, as Rousseau did, but also the soul needs courage to confess to itself its own faults.
It is like a second nature, like a second being that lives in the consciousness; it is a demonic shadow on the left of man; this shadow constantly causes him to dissimulate and continuously apologizes for his inner miseries and hidden sins.
But a soul wishing liberation, this soul alone, by Renouncing to its lower nature and past personality, destroys this enemy and is not ashamed any more of seeing itself such as it is, good and evil, great and miserable, with a good and evil inner self.
Only a being that does not know himself can be miserly, envious and stingy, and can live thinking that he is the center and all others around him his satellites. So, in the third step of Renunciation, the concept of separatism is broken.
You and me, this one and the other, today and tomorrow, everything disappears at the happy eyes of a person who renounced to all. He is not any more a mean center, around which everything must turn: now he is the center itself.
He cannot boast of what he is because he was or will be a sinner; he cannot desire what he has not, because to possess or not exists only for a man living in the relativity of outer life.
He is all. In him, good and evil formed only one basis, the sacred pillar upon which the only flame of the Spirit is kindled.
For a soul like that, which renounced so much, which liberated itself so much, actions of life and the way to express them completely change form.
Just in the fourth grade of Renunciation, one understands these words: “to work for the sake of work”.
One works as a bee, not knowing for whom or why. One knows that work is a means to liberate more and more the soul, and one asks nothing as reward, but lets do.
One gives and none sees him. Truly our left hand does not know what the right hand does, because the lust of personal satisfaction has been defeated.
Charity practiced for vainglory is a morbid lust of mind; but charity done for the sake of doing it is liberation, not only of senses but also of mind.
Great beings, those that achieved great humanitarian works, always have answered the same to those who flatter them for the work achieved, “I did not make it, it was God who did”.
These are great beings who when someone orders them the most ordinary action or the most banal work, they perform it and do not ask how or why.
Just then one lives life knows life and enters the fifth grade of Renunciation.
Poor men are those who believe that there are both unpleasant and pleasant things and that the ugly things are non-existent, and only seek what they feel to be pleasant! They never shall be happy because there are not ugly or beautiful things; all of them are worth being known and having effects of plenitude, when disclose the seed of the spirit that promotes them to the attentive eye of the investigator.
A rainy, windy and cold night, two humble friars badly dressed and barefooted were going to Assisi. The most thin and small, who went behind, suddenly broke the silence and said to his companion, a tall and strong young man: “Brother Leon, lamb of God, closely listen to me (it was Saint Francis of Assisi who spoke): If you knew the secret of the Universe, of all the worlds, of everything, would you have perfect happiness?”. And so he was enumerating all those great and beautiful things for man, always asking the same question. As the humble friar Leon would not answered, Francis said: “If we arrive at our Convent, and the brother doorman does not know us and leaves us in the open, with hunger, as two tramps, I say to you, perfect happiness is in this".
This Saint said those words because happiness is beyond knowledge of all good and bad things.
The sixth grade of Renunciation is already beyond liberation of senses and mind; it is spiritual liberation.
He who renounces to all is so much assimilated to Divine Will that overcomes time and sorrow. A man that works as those women that weave large curtains and only see the other side of the weft cannot realize its beauty until it is finished. But a person that renounced and is spiritually liberated has placed himself at such point of amplitude that sees the work at the same time in its essence and potency.
So a Pilgrim of Eternity reaches the seventh stage of Renunciation and lives there the eternal hour because he learnt that to lose is to win, that to give is to take, and to leave what is small is to live what is big.
To disdain hours and time is to stand at the end on the threshold of eternity.