Whether you follow the way of the sorcerer, the mystic, or the devout, it seems renunciation is a common stop along the road. It was only natural that I should at some point find my own way to this impasse.
I took everything I loved, everything I cared about. I took a hard look at why I was keeping sentimental and historical stuff from my life, and one thing I felt above all, was that I was holding onto proof of my life story.
At the time I believed I had to clear my mind and heart of such things as a life story, and that started with the evidence to support it. I had to become no one, to find my way into the void, for a long time this was my primary focus - which is, in my opinion at the time of writing at least, a missed-step. We live in this physical world for a reason, and I don't believe the reason is to spend the entire time trying to escape it...it's to face it and do the best you can basically. To experience life in its vast entirety.
...anyway, in my pursuit of nothingness, I gave to friends all things of utility and personal sentimental value. Guns, night vision goggles, a sword I half-made - all kinds of cool shit. I burned all things of sentimental value and no utility, like pictures, my childhood blanket, memories, plaques and honors from the army, etc. Things of other varying shades of...whatever, were discarded in other ways.
Some of my medals and coins from the army I embedded inside an aquarium decoration I found in the shed when we moved in, within a retaining wall I made from rocks I pulled out of the ground making the fire room (see Fire Room for an index of all posts showing this build, with links). I'll update with a picture at some point :)
Anyway, I got rid of everything. Once I was pretty sure it was all cleared out, I removed the rocks that made the fire ring, dug up and spread around the charred earth, and even the fire that burned the memories was gone.
A-ny-thin-G (IMAGE SOURCE)
Months later, I was still riding high on life with my toes barely dipped in the physical when my mom called me and asked if I could find some time in the next few weeks to come sort through a bunch of stuff of mine that was in their attic. I said if it's already all been moved to the garage, might as well just move it to the curb and let it go! I hadn't considered that some of these things she had probably saved since I was born. Through all the moves around the country and even overseas, woo woo woo. I could tell my not caring about these things made her sad, and I saw something in my spiritual whatever that I had missed before. Not being bothered by the problems of the world, or tethered to your history is fine - in fact, healthy to a degree - but, in throwing away sympathy for myself, I had gone full boar and thrown away my sympathy for others at the same time.
I still don't feel sad for myself about things, my emotions are typically very level and mild. I'm aware of them, but I don't belong to them (most of the time). It took a while to see the need for the balance honestly, but I decided it was crucial that I still retain my ability to take consideration for the feelings of others, though I didn't care to have any of my own. I don't know, it's hard to articulate for me and this isn't spot-on, but it points in the right direction.
Anyway I told her, and this was true, I thought she was referring to my old decorations and junk from high school, and that I'd love to come by and go through these things. And when I did, I came home with twice as much sentimental stuff as I'd burned over the several months that it took. (I burned things en masse, and then in littler batches as I'd find things that were special to me)
So I was all set to burn this stuff. My wife actually stopped me; not in the act, but I told her I was gonna just burn it and get rid of it and she thought it would be nice for the kids to have some kind of history they can look at. Again that same lesson I'd learned on the phone came back, but this one I only saw after the fact. So a lot of stuff was gone, but I figured out, it's ok to keep stuff that's special to you. You just can't let it own you. I think you should be capable of throwing it in the fire at any time (some time I'll have to post about my idea of "the book of the thing that I loved and how I lost it"), knowing in advance that everything you have you will at some point lose makes you enjoy things more while you have them. Coveting and clutching to your things, you never really get to enjoy them:)
But there was something else that came from all this. I realized what I had been burning, throwing out and giving away, was the me that I wanted dead. the ego me, the intellectually (as opposed to intuitively) controlled me. If you know Alan Watts, you would say it can't be done, the destruction of the ego. I wouldn't know as I never did accomplish that. But you know who I did kill in those fires?
In the army they would say, once a soldier always a soldier. I believed that whole heartedly. In fact it sank in without any resistance and was internalized as fact. They also say that combat kills the garrison soldier. While this double entendre says on the surface that combat is unkind to the ones who are remarkably good at following regulations and shining boots, the real implication is that, once a soldier has seen combat, he loses interest in AR670-1 and Kiwi, the dog and pony show for him is over. And I can't remember now if it was Sun Tzu or Machiavelli, or if I just heard it somewhere, but regardless it is true that a soldier without a war to fight, is miserable.
It was that perma-soldier that had been embedded in my psyche. He was the one I sought to kill. I mowed down a much larger target because the enemy was unclear at the time, but once he was dead I saw how he had plagued me. All that army stuff; the plaques and medals, etc., they just kept alive in me this "veteran," always somehow miserable under the weight of the past and the apparent weightlessness of the present. Burning the artifacts of my military history was hard at first, but it got easier as I went.
Once it all was gone and I had cleared out as much "me" as I could, I stood back and witnessed, and this much was clear.
Renunciation doesn't require that we torch all our possessions, but doing so can certain lighten our load. The less stuff I had tying me to this earth, the more light and free I felt, and it enabled me to identify parts of myself that were hurting, parts that needed pruned, and parts that needed to be reinforced. These days, I am ok with owning stuff. I don't want to live as a forever soldier, but I was able to drop that from my internalized beliefs. These days, I was a soldier, but I can work with that.
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