Renouncing the Garment of the Body

Sacrifice of Body Consciousness


 

The fourth kind of sacrifice is the sacrifice of body consciousness. When a person renounces worldly life and leaves the household, they become permanently separated from it. After stepping away from domestic life, there is no longer any give-and-take, contact, or relationship with family members. Relatives and family gradually disappear from sight and from daily experience.

Yet the body remains with a person until death. Through this body, we perform all actions; through it we see, hear, speak, and interact with the world every moment. To live in this body, use it for every task, and still remain detached from it – this is an intense and elevated form of sacrifice.

Human beings have deeply ingrained sanskars of identifying with the body. Thoughts like, “I am a man, a woman, a young person, an old person, someone’s child,” and so on, are all expressions of body-consciousness. We repeat such body-based ideas thousands of times. To forget this body identity and remember, “I am a soul” – a point of spiritual light – and to consciously withdraw the senses and remain stable in soul-consciousness, this is the renunciation of Rajyoga.

 


All souls leave their bodies at the time of death, but to renounce body-consciousness while still alive is to become “dead while alive.” This is a very subtle, rare, and extraordinary sacrifice. Contained within it is the renunciation of the entire impure world, because when a person forgets the body and remains in soul-consciousness, they automatically renounce attachment to the world as well.

 


Truly, the sacrifice of body-consciousness means to become separate from the very body we have been holding on to and identifying with – to free ourselves from addiction and attachment to it, as if reaching the highest stage in a relationship where there is only pure awareness and no dependence. 

Many renunciates give up their clothes, and some live completely “sky-clad” or naked. Ordinary people may regard this as the highest form of sacrifice. In reality, however, the body itself is like a garment for the soul. To keep the soul detached from its bodily garment is a far greater sacrifice than merely renouncing clothes made of cotton or any other material.

The true and most elevated renunciation is to let go of the habits, impressions, and attachments connected with the physical identity and family – such as age, social role, caste, or status – and to remain firmly established in spiritual awareness. To see every human being as a brother soul, a child of the one Supreme, is the most remarkable and powerful form of renunciation.


 

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