All desires, possessions, and emotions are moving and changing. Everything is changing and moving. Nothing is permanent. If you analyze your own desires before one is fulfilled, it looks like a mountain, a huge goal. After being fulfilled, the same desire looks like a molehill. Before being fulfilled, it will seem like your very life. After fulfilling one desire, you simply move to the next desire! Understand that the process itself shows that desires are neither solid nor permanent. They are just changing fantasies of the mind.

Sannyas helps you see the temporary nature of desires. Slowly, desires stop getting created. Then, all the energy that was locked up in desires is freely available to you. Automatically, your potential will take a jump. You are ready to do anything. Although you live in it, nothing in the material world really pulls you. Even if you see something beautiful, you don’t wish to possess it. You just enjoy it and move on. That’s all. That is sannyas.

Sannyas works like the log of wood that is used to burn the dead body and finally gets thrown into the same pyre. It burns out all the fantasies in you and finally gives itself to the same fire. It is a tool.

Adi Shankara beautifully says in his famous song, Bhaja Govindam:

Even when days and nights,

winters and springs have gone,

and life almost comes to an end,

the grip of desire is still there!

Desire has such a pull at the unconscious level that liberating oneself from it is the greatest liberation.

The grass on the other side is always greener. But when we go to the other side, what happens? We feel the grass on the opposite side is greener! We jump from one thing to the other, from one desire to the next, from one point of view to the next, but we are seldom happy.

The truth is, we are already enough unto ourselves. We just need to awaken to it. That’s all. If we awaken to that truth, our beauty will be enhanced. Otherwise, we only waste time moving and searching.

source: Living Enlightenment