Some of you have heard this one. In one retreat here, we had a brand new student, and in an interview with Rosemary, she got talking about the Ten Paramis with them. They thought, "Oh, that's neat". Later after the interview they wrote us a note, "Could you please write down the Ten Paramis, I'd like to look at them, I'd like to see how they will work in my life, I'd like to really practice on them, they sounded really good." I wrote back the ten Paramis, and I made a mistake. Instead of Resolution, I put Renunciation a second time.
They came into the interview the next day and they were very bubbly. They wanted to tell me how excited they were to have this list of the Ten Paramis, how they were going to work on them, and how they reacted when they got the list. I had no idea what had happened, but they were very excited, they wanted to tell me how they had felt when they read the list. They had grabbed the list, and they had thought, "Generosity, oh yeah, I can do more there, that's a good one. Morality, yes, I know I've got more improvement there. Renunciation, uh, well, I really like my material comforts. Maybe the others are easier. Wisdom, yep, good one. Energy, good. Patience, yes I need more there. Truthfulness... well, Truthfulness is not as hard as Renunciation. I mean, they are all kind of OK, except for Renunciation. What's the next one? Renunciation!! Again!! Boy, does Steve know what I need!"
Renunciation has different levels, though and this person was only thinking about the material level. Renunciation has two levels, material and mental. The most important is Renunciation on the mental level. Can you renounce anger? There are a lot of people in the world who will not renounce anger. A lot of people feel they need to have anger. Go and ask some of those suicide bombers. They need to have anger, they will not renounce it. Can you renounce it? Can you renounce jealousy? Most of the world circles around jealousy. People are always upset because someone else gets the job, someone else has a better house, someone else has a better car. Can you renounce jealousy? Can you renounce anger, can you renounce all of these mental defilements, these unbeneficial mental qualities. This is most important. That's our big practice.
Now it does help, to a certain extent, to renounce some of those material comforts as we were talking about before. How many people in the West get a newspaper delivered to their house every single day? Do they really need a newspaper every single day? The answer quite frankly, is for most people, no. But they still get it. So we have a lot of wasted newspapers that end up in the trash or recycled paper later. We have a lot of trees being cut down that don't have to get cut down. We have a lot of animals which live in the trees. We have a lot of trees being wasted, we have a lot of animals in those trees when they come down that are killed, because people will not renounce having a newspaper every day.
So in some areas of your life, on the material level, there is probably some where maybe you can renounce something. Or maybe you have renounced so far that maybe there isn't that much left? That'd be great. How many pairs of shoes do you need? How many shirts do you need? How much of this do you need? Every different level, every different material thing that you own or think that you need to have, do you actually need that many of it? Those are questions for you. So on that level, your life can become more simple, it can become more peaceful if you are not always grabbing, grabbing, wanting, wanting. There are people who are addicted to shopping. I don't know if you know about that disease, I don't know what the name of it is, but they are addicted to shopping, they've got to go to the store as often as they can just to buy something more. We don't ever want to end up like that. We might end up back like the hungry ghost. We don't want to get into that, because Buddhism says that with too much greed, you may get reborn a hungry ghost.
So if you can renounce a bit more of the material stuff, yeah that's fine, do whatever you can, but it is the mental area that is most important.