Householder grief > renunciate grief > renunciate joy and equanimity

“We suffer [householder] grief and so we look for [householder] joy in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. When we don’t get what we want, that brings more grief, but we turn around to look for joy in the same places.

What the Buddha wants us to do is to turn our attention to what he calls renunciate grief, renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity. Renunciate grief is when you reflect on how you haven’t attained what you want in terms of freeing the mind from suffering. You haven’t reached the goal of the path. Renunciate joy is the joy that comes when you have reached the goal. And then renunciate equanimity is the peace and equanimity that come when you know the path is completed.

One of the Buddha’s most interesting tactics is that when we suffer from householder grief, the way to get ourselves above and beyond that is to try to transform it, not into householder joy, but into renunciate grief. Householder grief and joy, he says, don’t provide us with much hope, whereas renunciate grief at least gives us some hope. It points to the way out.

One way to foster renunciate grief is to reflect on the limitations of human life. That chant we had just now, “I am subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation from all that I love,” followed by the reflection on kamma: In the full text of the sutta, the Buddha doesn’t stop there, with just the fact that you are subject to these things. He says to reflect on the fact that all people, all beings — man, woman, child, ordained or not, whatever level of being you’re on — are subject to these things.

This is one of the ways the Buddha repeatedly has us approach all our grief and dissatisfaction. He says, “Open your eyes. Are you the only person suffering these things?” This is his solution for the question, “Why me?” The answer, of course, is that it’s not just you. It happens to everybody with no exceptions. It’s amazing what opening your eyes like this will do for you. And it’s ironic, how realizing the huge amount of suffering in every life can make your suffering seem less. But it works. It changes your whole perspective. You start seeing the futility of looking for your happiness in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas.

In other words, the Buddha basically wants you to transform your grief into samvega, an overwhelming sense of dismay, not at your own personal problems, but at the nature of human existence as a whole. And the reason for this is that samvega motivates you to look for a way out. Of course, samvega on its own is not a very comfortable emotion to have. But it provides the impetus to pasada, the sense of confidence that there must be a way out.

The way to work with renunciate grief is not to go looking for sights, sounds, and so forth. You work with it by focusing your efforts on following the path. This is why this kind of grief is a useful grief. It keeps you on the path of practice. Often you hear people saying, “Don’t try to push too hard in the practice; don’t have any sense of goal, because you’ll get frustrated over the fact that you haven’t reached your goal.” But that closes all the doors. What you want is the attitude that “I’m not where I want to be, but there is a way to get where I want to be.” That gives you the right sense of direction. You’re not going back to householder joy, with all its uncertainties. You’re aiming at renunciate joy.”

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu “The Human Condition” (Meditations4)