Vairagya: "strict no-no" or "fulcrum of life"

"Vairagya" is considered to be a strict no-no by the society. Probably, society does not understand the true meaning of vairagya. When we go as a tourist to visit any place, we roam around and visit different places, fave food, and meet different people. At the back of our minds, there is absolute clarity that we have just come to visit the place and have fun. We stay in the hotel room as a tourist. We do not assign any mental value to it. We do not spend time decorating the hotel room or making changes to its interior. It has the functional value of providing us shelter for certain nights and has no role beyond that. We just try to find a hotel room that serves the functional purpose of providing a comfortable stay. Similarly, we have food and fun and know that we have to leave the place on a particular date and time. We connect to different people we meet and yet know that they will not come with us to our home.

We come to this world as a tourist. Everybody knows that we are in this world for a limited period. In most likelihood, we know that none of us is going to survive in this body for more than 100 years. Yet we create mental illusions and start assigning a sense of permanence to this body, mind, and world. This illusion of permanence is the root cause of all the problems in this world. If we remember this reality, why would we accumulate wealth or run after power? We need some resources to live life and the use of these resources is limited to that. If we accumulate more than what we need that becomes a burden. Off-course, if we are not aware, we create perverted and distorted meanings of need, as I have discussed in the post "Why to waste time in mental stories". 

Vairagya is the constant remembrance of the temporariness of this world. If we have "Vairagya", all our decisions are taken like a tourist's. We focus on the experience and process rather than the outcome. At the end of the day, we are not going to take the money, wealth, networks, power, or knowledge back home. What matters is the experience we gained during life like the experience as a tourist. 

This understanding and awareness change the way we take each and every decision in our life. Generally, while taking a decision about career and education, we analyze the pay packages and perks different careers offer us. With "Vairagya", we just focus on the experience. Which career offers us opportunities to explore. Which career has the diversity and opportunities to play with different possibilities? With "vairagya", we make relations to explore together rather than to possess. Good relationships make our life experience richer. Generally, worldly relations suffer due to clinging, possession, and expectations. That turns them into liabilities. With "vairagya", we exercise influence and not power. With "vairagya", we don't bother much about the accumulation of information and rather live with wisdom. We realize the limitations of this mind which gives us intuitions and we discover new truths.

So, "vairagya" makes the quality of our life far richer. We connect to consciousness and explore all its unexplored facets to have a meaningful life rather than wasting it in routine.