Q.: I cannot so easily let go of everything as suggested by Bhagavan, because my family will raise objections if I try to renounce the world.
B.: There is no need to leave home. Discard the contents of the mind and thus throw the faculty of mind away. That is real renunciation. Physical renunciation will make you think, ‘I have renounced everything.’ Nothing could be more dangerous. Here we practise only mental renunciation.

Q.: How did Bhagavan finally persuade that boy, Vishwanatha Aiyyer, to return home?
B.: I did not. On that night when he was sleeping outside the ashram, I was sitting some distance away from the boy when I noticed that Shabarigirisan was sitting blissfully alone on the roof of the ashram, staring at the full moon in great contentment. When I looked at him, the languor [monkey] leaped down, pressed some ginger shoots into my hands and took them back; then he climbed back and was for sometime ingesting them. Then he did something nobody will believe. He came near us, poised himself on the floor in the Bakāsanam, and softly began whistling [or screeching], perfectly, the tune corresponding to ‘Endaro Mahanubhavulu…’.

Oh! Master of the Formidable Mountain! I was earlier like a filthy pig, consuming with eager relish the turds excreted by the sensory – organs. I came with a restless mind to impudently scrutinise your authenticity, but the moment your eyes fell on me, I became motionless like you, for you graciously annihilated my maleficent faculty of assertion – manufacture which arrogantly asseverated “I”, and immersed me in my own intrinsic inner state of Absolute Being, which in truth is only You.
I kiss the dust of your sacred feet everyday, for by drowning me once and for all in the unfathomable ocean of exultation which is verily You, you have devoured my traitorous mind forever.