Consumption, Contentment, and Climate Crisis || IIT Bhubaneswar (2021)

Questioner (Q): Spiritual wisdom has traditionally talked of sacrificing material desires and living a life of an ascetic, but most people are habituated towards excessive consumption, which is almost like a pandemic these days. Most people do not connect with concepts like sacrifice and renunciation, and hence avoid spirituality altogether. So, what is the solution?

Acharya Prashant (AP): You have talked of these words here: ‘renunciation’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘asceticism’. But what do they mean? They do not mean that you have to give up on what is really useful to you for your wellness and upliftment. Obviously, if you have something that is doing you good, it makes no sense to drop it.

Renunciation, therefore, is about not clinging to that which is doing you no good. And I don’t suppose anybody would argue with that. If something is not helping you, why would you continue to be with it? That is renunciation. What is sacrifice? Sacrifice is to give up the lower for the higher. You are sacrificing the lower in service of the higher or, you could even say, for the attainment of the higher. Again, I don’t suppose anybody can quarrel with this. So, when you say most people are habituated towards consumption, it is not consumption per se that is the problem; it is mad and blind consumption of stuff that is anyway not going to do you any good. That’s the problem.

So, wisdom or spiritual wisdom is not about the renunciation of consumption altogether. As long as your material body is there, you will continue to consume, you will have to consume. The question is, what to consume, and how much? That is a burning question of this day as well; it is a spiritual question as well as a most contemporary question. In fact, currently there is hardly any other question that is really more important in our material lives as well than this one.