There is a general feeling that Godmen and saints come to take people to the state of salvation, enabling humanity to attain Moksha, liberation from the turmoils of earthly life and instructing them in the art of the renunciation of the world. There is also a tradition which has entered the very blood of all religious thinkers and participants that the apex of human achievement is the entry into the order of Sanyas, all which has an insinuatingly associated aspect, namely, that this world is not so very meaningful, valuable, significant and requiring consideration as one is often made to feel in regard to it. There is a consequent conclusion that the world is not so real as God, or perhaps it is not real at all in any sense of the term, because we cannot abandon even that which has some reality. Even ten paise we cannot throw, though its value is less than a million dollars.

But why should it be necessary for one to be taught that the world has to be renounced unless it has no significance at all, out-and-out. Even one pie has some value; no one would like to throw it away. The world is not worth even one penny. Is it so? But for which peculiar attitude of the mind, the tendency to the renunciation of the world is inexplicable. The world has no substance, no value, nothing we can call real. If this is not established there would be difficulty in accounting for the deification of what people consider as the total renunciation of everything in the world. It will be found that the answer to this question will not easily come forth because under conditions which engender feelings of a religious renunciation, a feeling for a life of a hermit and the like, one may be cornered to accept that the aim of all life is the renunciation of all life, but one does live with the world. This is something that cannot be gainsaid. We are not living elsewhere.

The renunciate is not outside the world, the renunciate has to plant his feet on the earth and in the world in order that it may be possible to renounce the world. Segregation, isolation, renunciation, abandonment, tyaga is a byword in religious circles everywhere. Very rarely does it occur to anybody's mind that there is a mix up in this attitude. A kind of hotchpotch conclusion arrived at by hasty analysis of the conditions of life. Not being clear as to what it is that one is aiming at. The child's philosophical outlook is also many a times a mature religious devotee's outlook as far as final issues of life are concerned. We may be grown up intellectuals, educated geniuses in one way, but when crucial situations arrive and confront us, there is a face to face difficulty in meeting realities of life. We will find that we are not far better than little children.

When a monkey screams and tries to attack, rarely do you feel a difference in the attitudes of people mature or immature, grown up or otherwise. Confronted by a tiger in a jungle, the educated and the uneducated may react in the same way, the learned as well as the unlearned. These are the realities. The structure of the human mind is partly responsible for difficulties of this kind. There were metaphysical philosophers, as we are prone to call them sometimes, who went into the very depths of these psychological backgrounds of the very art and the system of human thinking. It is impossible for the human mind, made as it is, not to imagine the goal of life as something above the earth. Whatever that above be, in that concept of the above so-called, we are little babies only. We may look up without actually knowing the significance of this looking up, what are we gazing at in looking up to when we fold our hands and turn our gaze in that direction.

The idea of God being above is a crude notion of the basic conditions of human thinking and what are these fundamentals of the psyche specialisation of everything, temporalisation of everything, localisation of everything and externally connecting one thing with another thing. This is social life. This is also a philosophical way of thinking because even when we are philosophers we cannot actually jump out of our own skins. We stick to our skins of the psyche and then philosophise sociological ideas, personal feelings, instinctive promptings and conditions to which the whole humanity is subject. We cannot jump out of our conclusions which we draw from conditions which are basic to the very anatomy of our minds. Hence we are willy-nilly compelled by a force of habit of thinking to feel that the creator of this world is outside the world, because we have never seen the manufacturer of something being anywhere but outside the manufactured goods. The cause is always outside the effect from which it has come. You can never see the carpenter inside the furniture that he has made. He is outside.

Anything that is made is made by someone or something which is not in that which is made. This is the common knowledge, simple common sense, and the philosophy cannot be wiser than this and you have never seen two things becoming one. You cannot see a collusion of A. and B. This is called the law of contradiction in logic. A cannot be B; A is A and B is B. I cannot be you and you cannot be me under any condition, whatever be your friendship and family relationship. We may be utterly both bosom friends, nevertheless I am I and you are you. You have seen that one thing is one thing, one thing cannot be another thing. The exclusiveness of the items of the world, human or otherwise, conditions everything and everyone in this fashion and we cannot but place ourselves outside the purview of God's jurisdiction.

We can never feel that we are involved in God somehow or other. Such an involution is not possible even by intense exercise of thought. Though God is the creator, we are the created and we are the thinkers of God. We conceive God. We pray to God and we practise meditation on God, so that the God is an exclusive object in the same way as a tree is different from a stone. These are psychological conditionings of human mind and if one object cannot be another object man cannot be God-so much so that there is an excluded remoteness required to place God as far as possible from the horizon of the earth partly because of the extent of the visible creation which appears to cover entire space, and therefore God should be above space. Are we not told that God is above space and above time? One thousand times we have been told this. Do you know how wide is space and how long is time? If that is the case, how far is God? Far. far, as far as the reach of the sky is or the end of time is. As time's end is inconceivable and the horizon of sky also cannot be thought by our mind, we do not know how far God is. Far, unthinkably far, difficult to reach Him.

The difficulty of reaching God arises out of the extensive distance that obtains between us and God. This is a frightening feature in the conception of God: the immense distance. And there are other difficulties in wholly devoting oneself to God, namely, the impossibility to exclude attention being paid on things which are also existent. The world is not non-existent before our eyes. It is as real as our own self. To the extent that I am real, what I see also is real. There is a compressence of the subjective side and the objective side: the world is as much real as you are and it is as much unreal as you are unreal. Now here, incidentally, we may say to consider the world as less real than our own self would be a false attitude because we are involved in the world as part of the world. At least that much you have to concede. The renunciation of the world as an unreal phantom by a person who is not so unreal is an irreligious mix up of emotions, sentiments and unrelieved problems. Many times we make this mistake of not requiring to concede as much reality to the things of the world as we give to our own self. The food that we eat is as much real as the reality of our hunger. You cannot have a real hunger and an unreal food. That is to say, that the things which are seers and the seen are on a par. This is one issue of the matter.

Hence it is to be accepted that the renunciation of the world by any particular person is not so easy an affair because in the renunciation of the world oneself is also renounced simultaneously. It is beyond one's capacity to imagine how oneself also can be renounced. Who has done that work? It is not possible to throw oneself out of oneself in the manner we try to throw the world and relations of things outside in a fit of renunciation. So it must be logically accepted here also that the world cannot be renounced as long as we do not renounce ourselves in equal proportion, and to what extent it is possible for renunciation of one's own self is for anyone to imagine and to that extent you can renounce the world. But this is beyond ordinary possibility because it is not easy even to think what it all means, let alone the practicability of it. What on earth do you mean that I should, in percentage, renounce myself with that with which I am connected and which I renounce in the spirit of religious renunciation. The things of the world insist on being recognised as some sort of reality. Their insistence is so vehement that no person with a little sense can deny that. The body is intensely real to us. If that is the case anything that is connected with the body also becomes equally real.

The world is therefore an interconnected arrangement of relationships which are partly physical, partly social and partly psychological. The psychological aspect of human relation is not less real than the physical or social family relations. We cannot say that what we are related to in our minds is comparatively less in the cadre of reality than physical, economic and social relations because we had an occasion to observe that our minds are stronger and more real, and what the mind affirms should be regarded as a higher reality and of greater consequence than the so-called physical contacts. Physical contacts will amount to nothing if the mind revolts against associating any meaning to them. All this is to say that the world is not so simple a thing as it appears or it is made to appear before us.