Our word “sacrifice” comes from the same root as sacred, and sacrifice has to do with making something holy. The worldly and the spiritual are interconnected. And what is the connection across those domains? It is the act of sacrifice. Through sacrifice we acknowledge the connection. Sacrifice starts to give credence to the reality of the living spirit. It starts to give recognition in our daily lives to an awareness of Brahman.
If we accept all that, and decide that sacrifice sounds like a useful idea, what do we do next? What does it mean? What do we sacrifice? “There are yogis whose sacrifice is an offering to the gods; but others offer, as a sacrifice, their own soul in the fire of God,” says the Gita. “Yogis whose sacrifice is an offering to the Gods” – that’s the ritualistic way we’ve usually thought about sacrifice: that you slaughter a lamb in sacrifice, or that you throw ghee into the fire as a sacrifice. But the Gita goes on – it says, “others offer, as a sacrifice, their own soul in the fire of God.” Now we’re exploring a new possibility – the possibility that the sacrifice is not of some object, but of ourselves.
So what of ourselves do we sacrifice? Krishna runs through a whole catalog of yogic sacrificial practices. He says, “In the fire of an inner harmony, some surrender their senses in darkness, and in the fire of the senses some surrender their outer light.” He’s saying that some yogis go into dark rooms or caves; they cut out the images that the world bombards us with. Some even go so far as to put out their eyes, to blind themselves so they’ll no longer be distracted by the sight of worldly things. Still others use meditative practices to extract their awareness from their eyes, so that even if there were light out there they wouldn’t see it, because they have surrendered “seeing.” “Others,” he says, “sacrifice their breath of life…and still others, faithful to austere vows, offer their wealth as a sacrifice, or their penance, or their practice of yoga, or their sacred studies, or their knowledge. Others through practice of abstinence offer their life into Life. All those who know what is, sacrifice, and through sacrifice purify their sins.”
If we’re going to give up desires, what desire do we use to give up desires? Here comes the answer: We use the desire to offer it all in sacrifice. All of it, even the desire to make the sacrifice, becomes the sacrificial offering. That’s the return to the roots, spiritualizing life through offering up all our acts as the sacrifice for our own transformation. We sacrifice the ego’s goals, and the ego’s individual point of view. We throw every part of ourselves into the fire. Swaha! Take it, God – just let me be free.
– Ram Dass, excerpt from Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita
Photo by Charles Knowles via Flickr. Used under the creative commons license.
