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people, particularly in the East, who teach renunciation. They say, 'Don't accumulate anything in this world because it will be taken away from you when death comes.' These people seem to be basically more greedy than the ordinary worldly people. Their logic is: don't accumulate in this world because death will take it away, so accumulate something that death cannot take away from you -- accumulate virtue, PUNYA; accumulate character, morality, knowledge; accumulate experiences, spiritual experiences, experiences of kundalini, meditation, this and that; accumulate something that death cannot take away from you.
But if you accumulate, with that accumulation comes fear. Each accumulation brings fear in the same proportion...then you are afraid. Don't accumulate and fear disappears. I don't teach you renunciation in the old sense; my sannyas is an absolutely new concept. It teaches you to be in the world and yet to be not of it. Then you are always ready.
I have heard about a great Sufi mystic, Abraham Adam. Once he was the Emperor of Bokhara, then he left everything and became a Sufi beggar. When he was staying with another Sufi mystic he was puzzled because every day the man was continuously complaining of his poverty.
Abraham Adam said to him, 'The way you abuse it, it may be that you have bought your poverty cheaply.' 'How stupid you must be!' the man retorted, not knowing to whom he was talking, not knowing that Abraham was once the emperor. He said, 'How stupid you must be to think that one buys poverty.'
Abraham replied, 'In my case, I paid my kingdom for it. I would even give away a hundred worlds for a single moment of it, for every day its value becomes more and more to me. No wonder then that I give thanks for it while you lament it.'
The purity of the spirit is the real poverty. The word 'sufi' comes from an Arabic word 'safa'. Safa means purity. Sufi means one who is pure in the heart.
And what is purity? Don't misunderstand me, purity has nothing to do with morality. Don't interpret it in a moralistic way. Purity has nothing to do with puritans. Purity simply means an uncontaminated state of mind, where only
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