A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections On The Art Of Living (Collected Works Of Joseph Campbell) - Plot & Excerpts
Suppose you have shed the serpent’s skin but want to leave some tagged on the end. This is a major problem. It is an anxiety that has to do with what’s back there. You have to know enough to cut it off. You have to know what it is that’s hanging on: the old skin that is being peeled away gradually, bit by bit, like taking off a bandage without pulling all the hair. Sri Ramakrishna, talking about this fundamental stage of renunciation—“going into the forest,” in the Indian system—speaks of three kinds of renunciation. The first is gradual renunciation. That’s where you know the time is coming, you take advice from your guru or chaplain or whatever, you think it out, make arrangements for the place you’re going, and so on. If you are a man, you transfer your dharma to your son. He is the one that now has to carry on the dharma of the family, and you are released from that. Then you are nobody, no longer in caste. It’s a real, real quittance.
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