Ashtavakra Gita

You have discarded the world; discard now the very idea of a world to be discarded, and rest in pure awareness

The verse applies the text's own suspicion of effort to renunciation itself, warning that "having renounced" can quietly become a new identity to defend.

This verse performs a maneuver familiar from other contemplative traditions, a teaching that turns on itself and discards even its own method once that method has done its work. Having spent much of the dialogue urging Janaka to relinquish attachment to the world, Ashtavakra now points out that "having discarded the world" can itself become a subtle new possession, an identity as the one who has renounced, which is just as much a fragment of imagined selfhood as anything renounced. The instruction is therefore not to acquire a purer form of renunciation but to let go of renunciation as an accomplishment altogether, resting in awareness that was never actually improved or completed by the discarding in the first place. This closely parallels the earlier warning against seeking stillness as if stillness were something currently lacking: in both cases, the spiritual effort itself, once mistaken for the goal, becomes the last obstacle to be seen through.

Ashtavakra Gita

Written about in

• Does the Ashtavakra Gita reject spiritual practice?

  Having renounced the world, you are told to renounce the idea of a world to be renounced. The warning is that having given things up quietly becomes a new identity to defend.