The Outer is the Inner - 03.18.10

Student Question: I’m still struggling with being able to discern what is my jouissance, or what I need to give up or not give up, and tonight you said something along the lines of: it’s not about giving up the activity, it’s about giving up the signifier of identity. Could you maybe expand on that or give an example?

“Shankara’s great teaching that revolutionized the Indian spiritual approach was that ‘All we have to renounce is the ego.’ You don’t have to have any external renunciation,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And ever since then, theologians have been arguing about the difference between outer renunciation and inner renunciation. But it turns out they’re the same because the ego, although it’s inner, takes its signifiers of identity from the outer world. So the truth is the outer is the inner. And until you recognize that—that it is the outer activities and jouissances—which are forms of suffering that we like to interpret as pleasure but they create more pain than pleasure—as our markers, and that keeps the entire tissue of thoughts and actions and feeling states in a relatively homeostatic ‘stuckness.’ And by letting go of the outer, we are able to let go of the inner, and the more we let go of the inner, the more we let go of the outer.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 18, 2010.