Riffin' On the Passionate Spilling Forth

“But action performed with great effort by one seeking to gratify his desires, and enacted from a sense of false ego, is called action in the mode of passion.” 18.24 Bhagavad Gita Conclusion- The Perfection of Renunciation

The “perfection of renunciation”… it’s the title of the chapter from which today’s passage was taken. Conceptually, in its densest form, “renunciation” is the discipline of refuting all modalities of ignorance. It’s a sort of shadowy phrasing of the notion of being rooted in universal truth…or simply truth. It was developed into a disciplinary institution within Eastern practice because of the nature of sense perceptions…things look like things…separate and individuated, with their shared, common nature/heritage sometimes being apparent in the surface image, and sometimes being very much perverted by the surface image.

Which is duality amidst the singularity…it’s an appearance that when directly analyzed, ultimately finds itself labeled as illusory or fallacious. The appearance, in the context at hand, challenges what we know (if we’re lucky), or should know, about the nature of reality/the heart of life, and if we accept the sort of wisdom it is ushering in beneath it’s wings with placidity, we come to accept things about life as true that simply are not.

I’ve never seen the show Degrassi, but knowing it’s premise, I’d imagine they did these sorts of loopy-t-loops brazenly to the chagrin of the audience…this is the stuff of the tenacity of high school. Learning that your experiential takeaways sometimes are enough for you to get by, but sometimes they don’t seem to inform you at all, and instead sabotage you. Hence the popular kids…the tribal leaders in the social shism… it’s not super often they actually are universally enlightened/savvy, or compassionate at all even…which really does say something about the types of lessons experiential data will catch you up on (see: Mean Girls)… but they exist simply because the name of the game is figuring out what effective living truly is at that age. Often times we end up exchanging our regional heroes for people of celebrity, and from there, across time, everything works itself out…

So you master practices of renunciation…so that when you are faced with circumstances in life you keep your moral placidity… so you have a sense of serenity in both times of peace as well as in the midst of the storm. Whether it’s the sunny day, or the wind-driven deluge, the setting is a tool on behalf of a Sentient Universe to convey the same fundamental truth it expresses at all moments throughout time. This is what time amounts to…when it intersects the living.

That at its fundamental core the world is perfect at all moments no matter what it expresses is simply a truth. Renunciation is about holding onto the perspective in a world of dualistic appearances.

This being so, one has to wonder where our desires truly ever come from. Are they ours? Are they the universe’s? We need the two to be utterly one in the same, lest a man be made into a fiddle, or self-will run riot. You see, not all desires are to be acted upon, but all desires, even those desires we fervently don’t want ourselves to have….are potent pathological clues arising from the Source of Life itself/our unconscious. Desire is shaped on your karma, the choices you’ve made in your life, and the object of desire is some sort of tool in the mission of “linking back” with Source in a meaningful way. All desires are to be put under the microscope in good faith.

The mode of passion, as it’s presented in the Gita, is a kind of striving that is ultimately decimated by the utter integration of the curriculum of enlightenment. If you ever heard the notion that after their vows/service, there are transcendental blessings obviously adorning the lives of priests and monks in any of the traditions of the world, this chapter of the Gita provides some lovely frameworks to understand, a bit, just how such is so. Action performed “with great effort” from a place of “false ego” amounts to the “mode of passion”. We’ve all been there, and furthermore, these sorts of things are like fine liqueurs to young men…there is a culture of masculinity which chases these sorts of situations with some sort of automatic understanding that this is how young men magically grow potently selfless…how they start to glimpse the workings of the larger world…how they decide to really buy in deeply enough to this miraculous thing we call life in times of opulence in which its pretty easy to simply complain about the heat outside.

The mode of “passion” flows naturally to the mode of Enlightenment. The “false ego” alluded to in today’s passage is the unspoken notion that it’s you against the world…that given any given situation, it’s just you pitching in. What changes particularly with the Yogis and Priests, lifting them out of the mode of passion and into the mode of Enlightenment, is that they ritualistically kill themselves in the figurative sense…their vows and the such are a small death of their small personality so that they can claim essentially that they are purely a vesicle of God. This is what Buddha said is true of every life form, that this is all we are, and when people consciously integrate as much into the ground of their Being… you stop acting from the place of “false ego”, and things start to come without “great effort”.

Now let’s get a bit more extreme with the scope of this…I notice that they called the death of Christ the passion. It was not at all an easy thing on him…it was as brutal as any scene has ever been. In that instance, they literally killed him off. He was already ego-less (essentially)…and yet he still had an ego, was a dude with friends and family who did dude stuff, yet nonetheless…

His crime was claiming he was God entirely. The punishment undid his human form, as if to make that true, but the tragedy was that it was clearly true while Christ was embodied and was providing spiritual services charitably. It set a sociological precedent in its own weird way…you better have some room for the transcendent in your social schisms/blueprints or else you aren’t actually capturing what’s really out there and what’s really happening.

Also too, if we study the figurative takeaways…you better recognize that people can embody God, or else the only true reprieve/redemption in this world is violence…the killing of others. We can release them from this trap they were born into…

It’s the philosophy of psychopaths.

This...seems like a joke, maybe at first, until you realize it was the platform most liberals touted during the pandemic. It seems maybe contradictory at a glance, but it opens up a wonderful discussion on the "heart" of Fascism and the responsibilities authority structures of any nation state have regarding a public health crises (they probably are forced to make evidence based decisions). That it's signed "t. crimes man", I'd like to believe that the times themselves as they played out were a crime against the heart of every good man in this country. It's looking like Trump will be the top contender again. He's gonna get lit up.

But how quickly we moved from the democratic response to Covid was fascist to January 6th... wait the timeline doesn't add up... Maybe it was the anti-masking stuff...maybe that was the beginning vehicle for fascism...