By Chaitanya Charan das
Doesn’t renunciation indicate an absence of the will to keep fighting amidst frustration? Not necessarily. Renunciation can also be a sign of realization; it can indicate the presence of the insight that there is more to life than fighting futilely for perishable material pleasures. Firstly, we need to recognize that the material eye and the spiritual eye don’t see alike, as the Bhagavad-gita (2.69) confirms. For materialists, the journey of life has only one track: the track to material enjoyment. Life has no purpose higher than the enjoyment of material pleasures. So, for them, renunciation or the abandonment of the pursuit of material enjoyment implies a cessation of progress on the journey of life, a stagnation that reduces life to a purposeless emptiness.