If we say vairagya, immediately people imagine grim scenes in which a cloth is torn into pieces and the person goes a pauper voluntarily. But actually vairagya is what should happen in the mind and perspective. Basically vairagya is giving something futile to get something full and lasting. It is not a bad bargain. It is an exchange where you get one hundred percent value giving something of no value in exchange. But the deal is rigged in such a way that we feel quite the opposite.
Of course the Upanishad clearly says the contract. But we are bound to short vision. We shudder at the thought to lose our makeshift personality. The real I is something we feel alien. 'All this should be seen from the perspective of the All-pervading Isa. Give up your blind vision, your personality. Merge in your own real inner being. Don't covet any alien ownings'. But who knows? How can one be sure? If any person has adventured into the deal then we can become more assured.
Manickavasagar says he has tried and found it literally true that you get one hundred percent value in return for no real value given. And he addresses the other party to the trade, Sankara :
"I have given myself
Gained You in return.
Sankara! who is shrewd after all?
I have got endless Ananda;
Can You say
what any single thing of value
You got from me in exchange?"
One spiritual master makes a poetic court case of the Divine's anxiety about the soul. Another spiritual master makes a poetry of a shrewd trade with the Divine. What all these great men are trying to tell us? Just this one thing ; this thick worldliness that we believe so passionately is not all that there is to it. We can well transcend our little self-images and gain our true being in the whole truth.
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