It’s very easy for us to tell the movers and packers to put all our physical possessions in cardboard cartons and take them to some far off place, because we aren’t actually letting it all go forever. We are simply moving house and we rest assured that those cartons, and our possessions, will reach the next house safely, knowing that we still have all our stuff.
But, is it possible for us to keep living in our present house and discard all our possessions, one by one? How long will it take for us to become free of all our material baggage? Walk through each room in the place you live. Look at everything that is there in that room. Ask yourself, can you let it go forever right now? How many days will it take for you to empty your house if you knew that you were going to continue living there?
You will notice that there is a story you have about each of the things that you possess. It could be your clothes; it could be your books; it could be a gift item, some curio or an artwork that you picked up on a holiday. Everything is tied to you with an invisible thread that you cannot seem to break.
We feel connected to material things that we own. We have immense attachment to much of our stuff and we cannot easily let go of it. We are anchored to a place because we love the things we have nurtured there.
We are often sentimentally tied to stuff which is of no use to us anymore. But, it is difficult to let go of possessions. Minimalism has a lot of unseen advantages. Clearing clutter from our lives improves the flow of energy in our lives. The orientals called this ‘chi’ or ‘ki’. Hindus call it ‘prana’, the vital life force.
When we are moving houses, we open all the cartons that we have carried with us and place them thoughtfully, once we have reached our new abode. Isn’t it so? Hindus believe that reincarnation is just like that. Just like the cartons full of stuff that we have carried from one house to another, we will also carry invisible ‘stuff’- the baggage of all our unresolved issues, with us into our next life.
Unless we learn to discard it all right here, in this very lifetime, we will remain inexorably tied to our karmic baggage through lifetimes.
How, then, do we begin to gain freedom from this cycle of karmas? We will have to train our minds to become free of desires and attachments. To do this, we need to understand and practise true detachment. This begins with an intense examination of our relationship with all material stuff that we are holding on to, which can only occur once we consciously begin discarding our material possessions.
As we begin letting go of the things that we are strongly attached to, we realise that many of our mental blocks start getting cleared simultaneously. It’s not really the possessions, but our possessiveness that begins to break down.
When we can walk away from our old ‘house’ with just a small suitcase full of material possessions, we will begin to have a taste of real freedom- from possessions and possessiveness. Someday, even that suitcase would become an unnecessary encumbrance.
In The Millennial Yogi, the mystic singer Vini has hardly any possessions. When returning from a long trip abroad, a young man on a motorcycle offers the older man a lift home and asks where Vini’s luggage is, since he is carrying just a small bag. Vini counters, “where’s your luggage?”
The boy laughs, “Mine? I’m just travelling on the road!” Vini nods and says, “So am I.”
The Sufi mystic Rumi has said, “Inside the Great Mystery that is, we don’t really own anything. What is this competition we
feel then, before we go, one at a time, through the same gate?”
The Sanskrit word for non-possessiveness is ‘Aparigraha’. Regular decluttering and practising a minimalistic way of life can
make us free of karmic baggage.